Upgrades & improvements coming to Shockwave-Sound.com3 min read

Dear Shockwave-Sound.com users / customers,

When we first started Shockwave-Sound.com back in April of 2000 (now more than 11 years ago), the site contained basically only a few music tracks by founder/creator Bjorn Lynne, himself a musician with a nose for the emerging royalty-free music market. Everything was run pretty much manually, with Bjorn himself, or his wife, emailing with each customer individually and manually sending them the files they had purchased

In the spring of 2005 the site contained almost 1,000 different tracks, by about 30 different composers with whom Bjorn had made a deal to sell their music through this site. At this time, the software that runs the site “behind the scenes” was totally overhauled and basically created again from scratch. Now the site was given the technology needed to deliver files automatically to customers and to automatically create License Documents for each customer.

It’s now the spring of 2011 and apart from a few minor tweaks and fixes, Shockwave-Sound.com has basically, pretty much run on all the same technology for all these years since 2005. We’ve added a few things to help us along, such as the [My Orders] page where customers go any time to recover old orders and re-download them any time they want. But by now, the site has a catalog of approx. 10,000 tracks, with some 100-200 new tracks being added each new month. We’ve realized that the old search / browse structure is no longer enough, on its own, for customers to make a good and precise music search.

We we’ve gathered a whole team of talented people and we are now working on several upgrades & improvements to the site. These will include:

• Ability to browse for music not only by Music Genre, but also by Moods/Emotions, Suggested Production Types, Tempo-feel, BMP-tempo and Prominent Instruments of each track.
• For those who have ordered many files in one order, they will be able to “re-pack” all their downloadable files into one big .zip file, from their download page – enabling customers to download many files in one big download .zip file.
• We’re going to go back over all older tracks on the site and re-code the preview files so that the “preview… shockwave-sound…” voice becomes quieter, less obtrusive, and also with a higher fidelity on the preview files. We used to do them in 56-kbps MP3 format, we’re now doing them in 128-kbps MP3, and this is what we’re going to re-encode all preview files to.
• Finally, the visual presentation of tracks on the site will be simplified somewhat and we’ll try our best to make it quicker and easier to listen to the next track, the next track, the next track…

These are all things that we will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months here at Shockwave-Sound.com, and we hope to have most of our new stuff active on the live website by the end of the summer 2011.

Right now, we have 7 guys working on listening to all 10,000 tracks in detail, one by one, and inputting additional data about each track, including Moods/Emotions, BPM tempo, Tempo-feel, Suggested Production Types, and Major Instruments. In fact, as I write this, it’s almost completed.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our users, visitors, partners and friends up through the years for their interest in our music and for making Shockwave-Sound.com such a successful business. We’re 11 years old, and quite literally, we can’t wait for the next 11!