New ways of browsing for music at Shockwave-Sound.com2 min read

We’re very happy and excited to announce the new music browsing tool here at Shockwave-Sound.com.

Our site and music catalog has come a long way since the first beginnings back in April 2000 and it was no longer enough to simply be able to look at a music genre and see hundreds or even a thousand tracks listed in that genre. We needed to give you better ways to browse and find music by other criteria than just the genre itself, and to be able to more precisely define exactly what you’re looking for.

So we gathered a team of some 7-8 people who spent a few weeks going back over all our 10,000 tracks, listened carefully to each track and ticked various Moods/Emotions (e.g. Sad, Happy, Excited etc), Suggested Production Types (e.g. Crime TV, Underwater video, Wedding video, etc.), Prominent Instruments (e.g. Acoustic piano), Tempo-feel (e.g. “slow”), and BPM tempo (e.g. 132) for every track. It was a big job, but we had a good team of people and we finished it in about 2 weeks.

We then developed the tool you can see on the left. The 5 blue buttons represent “simple browsing”; you just click that button, select a Mood or Instrument etc., and the track listing comes up immediately. Depending on which criteria you click, the resulting track list can be just a few, or several hundred, a couple of thousand, tracks.

“Advanced Browse” is where you can really harvest the power and flexibility of our new tool. Here you can combine various criteria from all of the other “simple” options to create very accurate track listings reflecting exactly what you want. It can be something relatively simple, like “I want children’s music, it should be happy, and it should feature a xylophone”, or it can be very complex and precise, like “I want acoustic piano and violin, I want it to be sorrowful, I want it to have very slow tempo, I want it not to be classical music, and I want it to be suitable for use in drama”. The tool really gives you a lot of power, as you can combine many different types of criteria and every criteria can be negated to create a “not” out of it too. So you can look for “Smooth jazz, slow tempo, not containing saxophone”.

At the bottom of the tool, you can make a quick search, or you can get to the Advanced Search page where you can search for keywords, titles, sound effects, CD collections and more by using various search criteria to find your music.

If you encounter any problems with the browsing tool, any crashes or unexpected results, please let us know about it by using our contact form. Thanks!