Improved Song Listing

[djpretzel]

To help highlight the work Larry's done in associating mixes with specific songs from games, and to make this information easier to navigate, we've recently improved our song listing. You can view it at:

http://www.ocremix.org/songs/

With the power of muenchian grouping, I managed to get songs aggregated per-game. It results in some funny groupings when sorting by song title or mix count, but for the more useful view of sorting by game name, it's rather helpful.

Thanks,

-djp

[Liontamer]

I approve this message.

[Dafydd]

There used to be a project way back where all the songs in all remixes were identified... I've noticed that there's still a number of games and remixes on the site that have nothing in the "songs" field. Is it time to reinstate the project, perhaps?

[Liontamer]

There used to be a project way back where all the songs in all remixes were identified... I've noticed that there's still a number of games and remixes on the site that have nothing in the "songs" field. Is it time to reinstate the project, perhaps?

I've done the best I can with some games, extrapolating quasi-official titles based on stage names, thanks to game manuals and speedruns.

Almost anything that's not filled in is because the game had no official soundtrack release, and thus no official names for the songs in the soundtrack. We'll do something with unofficial titles in the future to fill in the gaps, and also designate between official and unofficial titles, even if it's only something I can see.

[Dhsu]

With the power of muenchian grouping

Interesting...does this mean you pull the data using a single universal query, and then perform ordering operations on the XML? Does this apply to the rest of the site as well? And this might be a silly question since I have no knowledge of how the site operates on the backend (though I would love to gain some) and still have minimal site design/administration experience, but what were the motivations behind using this method as opposed to separate queries for separate orderings?

[djpretzel]

Interesting...does this mean you pull the data using a single universal query, and then perform ordering operations on the XML? Does this apply to the rest of the site as well? And this might be a silly question since I have no knowledge of how the site operates on the backend (though I would love to gain some) and still have minimal site design/administration experience, but what were the motivations behind using this method as opposed to separate queries for separate orderings?

In this instance the songs come back as 50 separate nodes (per page) in a big XML document, and XSLT is used to group them by game using the muenchian method, which generates a unique key based on an attribute, in this case the id of the game. There are of course a hundred different ways to skin a cat, but one of my design goals for OCR is to avoid using anything I feel is too language-specific. I prefer XSLT to smarty templates for this reason; though many are unfamiliar with XSLT, it overpowers most templating solutions by a significant margin and allows for modularity, language agnosticism, etc., and is also a W3C recommendation, for whatever that's worth.

It'd be the same basic SQL query either way, to answer your question, it'd just be rather uglier, imo, to have to handle grouping of that nature in smarty or with custom PHP. This is one of the few instances where I do any grouping or sorting in XSLT, however, because MySQL (and RDBMSs in general) is considerably faster at that sort of thing, especially on larger result sets.

[Dhsu]

This is one of the few instances where I do any grouping or sorting in XSLT, however, because MySQL (and RDBMSs in general) is considerably faster at that sort of thing, especially on larger result sets.

That's another thing I was wondering about...previously you seemed to be averse to offering a grouped presentation for the ReMix list. However, it seems to work well here, in a fairly similar context. Any reason(s) the same method couldn't be applied to the ReMix list?

[José the Bronx Rican]

We'll do something with unofficial titles in the future to fill in the gaps, and also designate between official and unofficial titles, even if it's only something I can see.

I've been working on the same kind of solutions as I build my music library. I'll have a lot to talk about soon.

[djpretzel]

That's another thing I was wondering about...previously you seemed to be averse to offering a grouped presentation for the ReMix list. However, it seems to work well here, in a fairly similar context. Any reason(s) the same method couldn't be applied to the ReMix list?

Sure:

1. The alternate sort methods are less important for the song listing; sorting by post date, composer, and ReMixer would all lose the grouping on the ReMix list.
   
2. The grouping has issues - it only groups within each page of 50, creating some potentially confusing situations where things reoccur or break between pages of 50 results. This is less of an issue on the song list, where again the dominant sort order is alphabetical, which doesn't cause too much beef.
   
3. For each song, all we provide is mixcount, making the sublist nice and manageable, whereas for each mix, we need to provide post date, remixers, songs remixed, and also length at the moment, making it take up far more space, almost making by-game grouping LESS friendly because you'd scroll to a point where you could no longer see what game was being mixed.

Pretty much. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's far from straightforward, and might end up with negative effects that outweigh any benefit.

I do think these things through, btw

[big giant circles]

nice. very sharp!

[anosou]

Schweeet.

[Dhsu]

I do think these things through, btw

Of course; I never said otherwise. These questions are purely for my own edification, and I appreciate your spending the time in answering them. Think of it as an interview. Although, I feel I can say with some degree of confidence that most people wouldn't miss sorting by song length.

Back to the topic, I noticed that sorting the Song list by system has no effect. Intentional as well?

[JamPaladin]

On a similar subject, I spotted what I think might be a mistake - for the Breath of Fire 2 song "You Must Dance", song listed is "Crazy Dance". Now, I'm only a huge Breath of Fire 2 fan, but I'm pretty sure the song is called "You Must Live" or at least was in the games sound test. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Sweet addition, though.

[djpretzel]

Of course; I never said otherwise. These questions are purely for my own edification, and I appreciate your spending the time in answering them. Think of it as an interview. Although, I feel I can say with some degree of confidence that most people wouldn't miss sorting by song length.

Back to the topic, I noticed that sorting the Song list by system has no effect. Intentional as well?

Nah, that just needs to go... no real point in sorting songs by system.

Unsticking this for now... the more things we have like this, however, the most I think a dedicated forum for site feedback, comments, & suggestions might be useful...