This first upgrade for 2019 comes with some awesome features that revolve around making the site a better tool to help one find great music. This required some changes in both usability and extending relationships between labels and tracks and bands and tracks to the UI.As the site as continues to grow, we've realized that the real estate is starting to shrink. In this release we've implemented changes to the UI to maximize the space by packing track detail vertically away from the usual table row format. This continues to give you the essential information about a track but in a more consolidated fashion. We've also continued to show icons where possible to signify important attributes of the track. The other aspect that became noticeable in the use of the site is that, as labels have continued to be added, they're starting to provide some value in being able to chase down great tracks. Previous to this release one could only see what albums were related to a label. In this upgrade, we've added tabs to be able to see both a label's related albums and tracks. The same cool feature has been added for bands where you can now see related albums and related tracks.
A massive functional update we've provided with this release is the concept of 'ratings'. This is a completely new feature and was permissible once the real estate issues were addressed to make space for the rating information. We've also added a tab on the landing page called 'Top DJ Tracks' which allows to look at all the tracks that have been rated as top music for a particular genre. For now, ability to rate is restricted to authorized users but will be opened up when we have the site opened up for contribution by the general public. In this first quarter of 2019, we've also added three new genres. These genres are intended to break apart the house genre in order to classify it better. The soulful aspects of house tracks have now been categorized so that they can have their own home in the music genres. We've also taken the 'soulful' and 'sexy' sub-genres of deep house and applied them with the same idea in mind. On the genre page we've added a banner to describe the genre and listed both popular bands and labels as part of the description.
This release did not contain any major fixes with the exception of some of the pagination on the genres page that wasn't working correctly and the search bar that was not returning results on the labels page. Those have now been fixed.
