Twilight Sparkle ✨

Absolutely. Discovery of new music and new artists is absolutely going to be a focus of the "final" Pony.fm. I really appreciate your ideas on how to make that happen. A lot of features are still missing from the site, but that's just the nature of alpha software.
 
Currently, I have areas of the site planned for displaying tracks by:
genre remixed show songs "type" of song (remixes, original songs, and remixes of fan songs - you choose one of these when publishing your track) tags (referring to an open-ended tagging system, which does not exist yet) Each artist's uploads are displayed on their profile, and there is a list of artists separate from the full user list. The artist list tells you how many uploads an artist has.
 
 
 
The upcoming Playlist feature should address that, if I understand your needs correctly. Anyone can add anyone's tracks to a playlist, and your playlists will be displayed on your profile (think YouTube). Does that sound like it'll cover your bases?
 
 
 
Have you checked out the new homepage? It has a "top tracks" list, which is based on track views in the past 24 hours. Please leave your feedback on it in its thread.
 
As for featured artists, we have a separate discussion running about how to do that. If you have any specific ideas on how to accomplish that, please state your thoughts there.
 
 
 
There's a separate discussion for visualizers. Please post your thoughts there.
 
 
 
Glad your first impressions are positive so far! The current theme is indeed based on Windows 8 - I hope that's a good thing. 

I don't think Pony.fm really needs a volume control. Playing songs on-site is intended as a way to preview them; in my opinion, if you are doing something more than just listening to the music to see what it's like, you should be downloading it and setting up a custom playlist or what-have-you offline.
 
The reason Bandcamp doesn't have a volume control is outlined here: http://bandcamp.com/faq#volume
 
Right at this point in time, I'm a little more focused on the music distribution aspects of Pony.fm. But... taking into account that some of the upcoming features like playlists will simply involve using your web browser as your "media player", a volume control may make sense to introduce at that point. In Pony.fm's current state, it's just unnecessary if you ask me.

I can't help but agree with @Apple-Jack here:
 
 
Is a specialized kind of "collab" message really necessary, considering how easy it is to state your intents in a generic message? If features for collaborative projects were implemented, I see them taking shape in a form more akin to deviantART's groups or GitHub's organizations than an extension of the private messaging system.
 
Accommodating collabs is definitely a worthwhile endeavour, but I don't think "tagged" private messages are the way it's going to happen.
 
 
 
, your idea sounds more complex than my email account - and we're talking about an on-site private messaging feature. If it is too complex to use, no one will use it, not to mention it will take away my development time that could be focused on features with wider appeal.

What kinds of batches are we talking about here?
all the tracks comprising an album? all the tracks in a playlist? all the tracks an artist has uploaded? something else? Albums will definitely have a batch download option, that's for sure.
 
I'm not so sure about playlists or artists, however. The argument could be made that a playlist is like a compilation album, but a playlist isn't really a "release" in the same way as an album. On the other hand, the ability to put a playlist of your favourite songs together and tell people where to download it - completely legally and everything - could prove to be a big winner in the social space.

I'd agree with you that metal seems to have enough of a following of its own to justify being recognized as a separate genre. I've added it to Pony.fm, so please feel free to retag any of your uploads so far as metal.
 
 
 
Is "Drum and Bass" that widespread as a genre of its own? I don't consider myself to be a pop culture nut, but CloudFyre bringing his SoundCloud profile up in the last week or two was the first time I've ever heard the name.
 
As Wolfy pointed out, a balance needs to be struck with the available genres:
 
 
 
I took the initial list from iTunes. The list encompasses most of the big "umbrella" terms but isn't particularly specific about any of them, so I fully expected (and am completely open) to requests for more specific genre options.

People still use "basic" uploaders?
 
This would be a pretty easy feature to add, actually. From personal experience, I've had "fancy" uploaders derp out on me for no apparent reason before myself. I've generally had good luck with them, though.
 
It should be kept in mind that a "basic" uploader requires a lot of patience to use, as there is no way with some browsers to see how much of the upload is complete. No support for multi-file uploads also makes them a bit of a tough sell. However, it's difficult to deny that they are generally more reliable, if a bit clumsy. I'll add this in.  As long as it's made clear that it's an "advanced" alternative, it should be fine.
 
I would like to take a moment to note, however, that this uploading issue that everyone is experiencing right now is a server-side configuration problem that has nothing to do with the upload method used in the browser.



 
Have a basic uploader: https://pony.fm/upload/old-skool

Pony.fm does not provide only MP3's; it also provides OGG's and lossless FLAC's. Uploading a lossless file puts a "perfect" copy of your track in Pony.fm's file store, which can be offered up for download on its own for audiophiles who like CD or better-than-CD sound quality, but starting from a lossless original also allows Pony.fm to transcode a song to other lossy formats with only one degree of loss.
 
To illustrate this, if you uploaded an MP3:
Some quality was lost from the original merely to create the MP3 in the first place. Pony.fm stores the MP3 in whatever quality it began with (it may not necessarily be the minimum compression of 320 Kbps; lower bitrates are very common and can sound significantly worse). Pony.fm uses the MP3, which is already of a lower quality, to create an OGG Vorbis file. OGG Vorbis is not a lossless format, either, so the OGG Vorbis file will be inferior to the MP3 it was created from. On the other hand, a lossless upload contains no compression artifacts whatsoever. It's the audio equivalent of a zip file - the data inside does not get damaged when it is encapsulated in a zip file, and one can use the zip file to reproduce the original data bit-for-bit. Likewise, a WAV, FLAC, or AIFF will produce a bit-for-bit replica of the song's original waveform.
 
This means:
Pony.fm accepts a lossless upload, which is converted to FLAC (if it isn't already FLAC) for storage. This leaves a "perfect," unblemished copy of the track in Pony.fm's file store. An MP3 file can be created from the FLAC. Minimal quality is lost because creating an MP3 from the FLAC is as good as creating an MP3 directly from your DAW. An OGG Vorbis file can be created from the FLAC. Minimal quality is lost because Pony.fm has a lossless copy of the track on file; thus, we don't have the "recompressing a compressed MP3" issue that is present if Pony.fm's "master file" was an MP3. Essentially, requiring that Pony.fm has a lossless copy of each track on file gives me a lot more flexibility to provide a consistent experience for users (for example, every single MP3 from Pony.fm is encoded at 320 Kbps CBR, which sounds pretty nice) and maximizes the aural quality of every download by never requiring more than one degree of lossy compression to create any of them.
 
(if this confused you, please let me know; it's going to end up in an FAQ entry at one point or another, so I need to know if it makes sense or needs to be in plainer English)

 
Is anyone (other than Supernova) in a particular circumstance where uploading a lossless version of their music is actually an issue, or is the main issue that you only have MP3 copies handy and don't really want to re-render/re-export your music in WAV or something?

Hey, what's there to be sorry about? This is part of what you signed up for as an alpha tester - an opportunity to ask questions about anything and everything to do with Pony.fm! Please don't feel shy about it; if there's anything on your mind about Pony.fm, whether it's a compliment, a complaint, or just a question, I want to hear it.

Technical restrictions make streaming anything other than MP3 or AAC unfeasible. While a computer browser may be able to handle a WAV stream, most devices cannot - and I don't think the library I'm using as Pony.fm's audio player supports WAV, either. As for FLAC... support for that is non-existent in every browser, to the best of my knowledge, so that rules it out for streams completely.
 
Server bandwidth is a non-issue, but the client-side bandwidth needs to be considered. WAV, as an uncompressed format, will consume a huge amount of it, and may not provide a particularly smooth playback experience for many people (especially those on non-PC devices). FLAC is a lot smaller than WAV, but still pretty huge. Couple it with the aforementioned browser support issues, and any lossless streaming format becomes a no-go.
 
The on-site streams are only intended to be a preview of a song in the first place; FLAC, OGG, and MP3 downloads are all available to listen to locally. If you don't mind my asking, why exactly do you want (or need?) WAV or FLAC streams on the Pony.fm website?

I've moved this issue to the Pony.fm tracker: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/2-upload-error/
 
Please follow the bug report for further updates, @CloudFyre and .
 
Also, Arcium, thanks for doing your part to troubleshoot and reproduce the issue.

Moved to the Pony.fm tracker: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/1-bio-saving-issue/
 
Please follow the bug report for further updates, @CloudFyre.

Mobile support is definitely something I don't want to neglect, considering how ubiquitous our beloved battery-powered touchscreens are. I've thrown some thought at the idea of building a native mobile app; however, that would be a hugely time-consuming task that I don't have the time for right now.
 
As much as I would love to work on mobile support in general, my main priority remains getting the desktop version of the site into a fully functional state. Some mobile devices may work just fine with the desktop site; for audio playback, they just need to support either Flash Player or the MP3 codec in HTML5. For the Wii U's sake, I'm considering adding AAC support.
 
As for uploads... frankly, that is a very much browser-dependent feature. I'm not sure if implementing uploads from the iOS version of Garageband is even possible with iOS's security model. I'll need to investigate that further, but mobile devices were never really designed for full-featured content creation as far as I see.

Looks like there are some possible corner cases with differing variations on the WAV format. The specific issue that was preventing your WAV from uploading, Arkane, should now be fixed; however, I can't guarantee that the fix will work for all possible WAV's. If anyone else runs into problems with any of the upload formats, please speak up!
 
@Arkane, please try uploading that track again and see if it works this time.



Confirmed over Skype that this is now fixed. The result: https://pony.fm/tracks/6-the-crystal-empire-saga-introduction

I had a look through the logs, and it turns out that the password updating mechanism was broken.  Which I've now repaired.
 
Good thing you brought this to light and I was able to fix it before going live with a more public launch! Even you guys, the alpha testing team, don't have access to Pony.fm beyond its homepage yet and a critical bug has already been uncovered.

Of those three, it'll be closest to YouTube's style. The comment system is modeled mostly off of deviantART's, but is a bit more basic at this time - features like images, emoticons, and threading are not priorities for the alpha version of the site.
 
Each track and album has a paginated comment section, currently set to separate comments in blocks of up to 100 at a time. Only site staff have the ability to moderate comments (ie. hide and unhide them) at this time, and they disappear from view completely when they are hidden.
 
I've weighed the possibility of allowing artists to moderate their own comments, but a balance needs to be struck between letting artists have their own space and allowing a much larger community to flourish. FanFiction.net, for example, has grown pretty large without giving authors much control over reviews of their stories, and this makes some reviewers feel safe knowing that their comments won't be removed by a spiteful author (of course, this in no way grants anyone a license to be rude and abusive in comments).
 
I'd welcome any feedback on this matter. It's not a particularly difficult permission to change either way.