Newsletter #6 - August, 2015
Whazzup ProCollabers!
Six months and we haven’t been shut down yet. No complaints from the neighbors. And the cops didn’t knock on the door - woohoo! Seriously, we’re very happy to report that our numbers are up and there’s been a rise in the level of activity on the site. We sure hope the momentum continues!
Smile for the camera
We’ve redesigned the Dashboard page, making it more manageable and easier to navigate and find information about members. In conjunction with this change, your public profile link has now been activated, so non-members will be able to access certain information on your profile as well as allowing Google and others to index it.
A quick reminder then, to make sure that you have set your ‘privacy settings’ appropriately for your needs. A key difference with privacy turned on is that you can upload a second ‘Public’ profile picture. This will be visible to the outside world, while your regular profile picture will only be visible to your collaborators. With privacy set on, your real name is also hidden from the outside world. If in doubt, just log out from your account and check yourself out.
Accompanying the Dashboard update, we’ve also made changes to the Find Artist’s page in the Community section. From here, you can search by name, talent, and preferred genre/style when you’re looking for that perfect match for a project you’re working on.
And with that all said, for those of you who still have not uploaded a profile pic, we urge you to please do so. Your profile pic represents you on ProCollabs and will make you stand out as an artist and a potential collaborator before anyone will even get to hear how good you are. Without a profile pic, you are not visible in the member listings and will show at the bottom of any search.
For those who did already upload their profile pics, you might just want to recheck how it’s looking as the design updates have caused some images to look too small. If this is the case, just re-uploading the pic should resolve the problem.
Zippity Doo-da
A popular request from members has been the ability to upload multiple files in one go to a project. This month, we’re pleased to be able to announce that we’ve implemented the new archive file upload feature.
You can use either zip or rar file formats to compress your tracks into a single file and just upload it in the same way that you do a single file.
Options that are selected will apply to all files that are uploaded. I.e. all files will have the same tag description (e.g. mix, idea, etc.), and will use the file’s name as the track name - so once uploaded you will have to go back to the project to make any necessary changes to these details.
Note that since you will likely be uploading bigger files, the processing time will be much longer. So please do be patient after submitting the uploaded files.
We’ve successfully tested upload sizes up to 300MB, but we have not currently set a size limit. In theory, you should be able to upload up to 1 GB or so in one go. But feel free to let us know what you find to be a practical limit.
Note that, to use this feature, you’ll need to be either the Project Director, or a collaborator on the project with permission to contribute more than one track. You cannot upload multiple files for an audition.
A future improvement and one to look out for will be the ability to upload multiple files when replacing existing tracks with new versions.
Contest ideas
Do you have any?? We’d like to start running regular member contests as a way to inspire your creativity through a little friendly competition and would love to hear your ideas.
Big thanks to Vuya, who already gave us a great suggestion. We’re planning to get the ball rolling on this in a few weeks. If you have any ideas, please feel free to either start a forum post or contact us directly.
Completing projects
One of our long term goals on ProCollabs is to have an active and comprehensive Music Library – a source for music supervisors, studios, and other music users to be able to search and find music that they will be able to purchase or license for TV, movies, backing tracks, corporate projects, YouTube videos, and personal use, etc, etc, etc.
In order to do that, we need to have a substantial amount of completed projects in the library, and that’s where you all come in. We want to encourage all of our members to close and complete projects once they are done.
Another noteworthy benefit of completing your project is in getting more exposure for your music. Once you complete your project, it will show up and play on the site Landing Page and may also be used for site promotional activities.
Browser issues
Yes, we are always updating stuff. So sometimes, when you log in, you might just find that things are looking a bit off or out of place. This is typically caused by your web browser’s caching feature, which basically stores files from the site on your hard disk so that it doesn’t have to re-download the same files every time, making loading times quicker.
However, when we make changes, this can cause problems as your browser might be using both old and new files from the site. The simple resolution is to hit the ‘refresh’ button. And in most cases, the issues will be resolved.
That said, some browsers are more resilient to change than others! Firefox is one that we’ve been told has caused some problems. To refresh the cache in Firefox, you can try pushing the CONTROL+F5 keys, or otherwise refer to Mozilla’s directions here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-clear-firefox-cache. Other browsers will similarly have specific methods for clearing the cache.
If in doubt, refresh, refresh, refresh! If that’s not solving it and you think there could be an issue with the site, please do contact us with details so that we can help to resolve the issue.
Social Media
Please stop by our social media pages and show us some lurve. We're happy that our numbers are growing, and they can triple if you guys pimp us on your social media pages. Below are the links to our SM pages.
https://twitter.com/procollabs
https://www.facebook.com/procollabs
https://plus.google.com/+ProcollabsMusic
New Members
Warm welcome to the new members who recently joined: madvmusic, Bryan, voxmanct, onurates2703, LSSongs, tpistilli, NealeBK, Javastorm, CCDrummer.
We encourage all newbies to introduce themselves in the forum introduction thread and get collaborating asap. There's no shortage of talented and creative individuals in ProCollabs Projectland, so jump on it! Talents in need include guitars, vocals, keyboards, drums, strings, brass and others – all in various genres!
We'll be sending out more updates soon. In the meantime, get yourself on over to procollabs.com and let's make some new and exciting music together!
~ The ProCollabs Team
