The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I have imported a snapshot of the old www.somesongs.com data from August 31st, 2009. I am going to switch over to that data set. I only preserved the accounts of people who used the site (created an artist, rated a song, commented, etc.). The passwords have all been scrambled, though, so returning users will have to click "Post Song" on the top nav bar then "Login Help" on the right side of the resulting page to get their usernames and/or new passwords.

The new data entered by the handful of test users who have logged in will be saved but not available on the site at the moment. I may eventually try to preserve the small bit of that data that wasn't in the old data.

So, the site is effectively back... now what? Is anybody really going to use it again?

Lunkhead wrote:The new data entered by the handful of test users who have logged in will be saved but not available on the site at the moment. I may eventually try to preserve the small bit of that data that wasn't in the old data.

There's no problem if the data I posted is lost; I viewed it as test data anyways.

Lunkhead wrote:So, the site is effectively back... now what? Is anybody really going to use it again?

That's to be seen... but I for one am ready to give it a try! Thanks for all your effort, good job.

That's awesome. I'm about to repost the song that I had already posted.

Is it okay "friend flood" this thing? I mean, like, talk about it in our twitter feeds and stuff?

Please do!

It's been a while, and no one has been using the site much, but I have just made a novel update to somesongs.org that I wanted to mention. I've added some basic Bandcamp integration. If you have songs posted to Bandcamp, you can use those files and the data you've entered about those songs on Bandcamp, on somesongs.org. Just copy the URL for an individual song, for example:

http://berkeleysocialscene.bandcamp.com ... e-old-days

Then log in to somesongs.org (if you haven't logged in since the change to .org you'll have to reset your password or sign up, contact me if you need help with that) and click "Post Song" in the top nav.

There is now a place on the "Post Song" form labeled "Bandcamp URL". If you paste in the Bandcamp track URL there, you can then click the "Copy Song Info From Bandcamp" button and in a moment the artist, title, mp3 url, about, and credits for the song will be loaded from Bandcamp into the form for you. Nifty!

Here's an example I made from the one BSS song that's on Bandcamp:

http://somesongs.org/song?id=5027

For those of you who don't know, by the way, somesongs.org is a place where you can share links to your songs and people can rate and discuss them. It started out as somesongs.com, by Jefff, and a little bit ago transformed into somesongs.org, by me, with a copy of the old data but completely new code.

Oh very cool! I will definitely make use of this! Thanks.

I just tried to register an artist name, but "Caravan Ray" was met with:

could not insert: [com.ssj.model.artist.Artist]; SQL [insert into ssj_Artist (changeDate, createDate, name, synchFromBandcamp, userId) values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)]; constraint [null]; nested exception is org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: could not insert: [com.ssj.model.artist.Artist]

"CaravanRay" (no space) seemed to be OK though

Sorry for the unintelligible error message. What it means is that there was already an artist named "Caravan Ray". The old "Caravan Ray" probably wasn't showing up in searches because all the links for that artist's songs are probably broken and its songs have been hidden. That artist was created by a user named "Caravan Ray". If you'd like I can reset the password for your old account so you can use it and resurrect your old artist. It's probably got an old email address associated with it that doesn't work anymore: "cavanreagh@big****.com. I can update that, too.

Personally I'd prefer if people resumed using their old accounts and i'm happy to help make that possible. I realize a lot of folks have old email addresses associated with their accounts and so they can't reset their password, so I don't mind updating the database manually to get things sorted out.

There should be a nicer error message in this case now. I also added the "Login Help" link next to the login form, though it just emails people new passwords, which isn't helpful if the email address for the account is defunct. In that case, PM me or send a message to the admin on somesongs.org and I'll try to help you out.

I can't login my old account. I got it send a password but the password it send me doesn't work
This one http://somesongs.org/profile?id=1226

Hm, it worked for me. Did you make sure to login with username "Denyer" with a capital "D"? The username is case sensitive I think. Anyway, I'll set it to something and PM you what it is.

I had the capital D. When I got it to send the password it came up with an error, but the email came through so I ignored it. Maybe the password was not reset?

So... does the file still need to be hosted somewhere, or will somesongs draw the music from Bandcamp as well as the lyrics and other info?

Denyer wrote:I had the capital D. When I got it to send the password it came up with an error, but the email came through so I ignored it. Maybe the password was not reset?

Could be that it sent the email before it updated the database and the database update failed, I'm not sure. Thanks for the heads up about it, I will try to figure it out and fix it. Were you able to log in with the password I PM'd you?

nyjm wrote:So... does the file still need to be hosted somewhere, or will somesongs draw the music from Bandcamp as well as the lyrics and other info?

I haven't tested this very thoroughly, but it should be able to use the file from Bandcamp. It worked in the two cases that I tried (Berkeley Social Scene and Jonathan Mann). If you see a URL show up from bandcamp.com in the "URL" field then it'll probably work.

Lunkhead wrote:Sorry for the unintelligible error message. What it means is that there was already an artist named "Caravan Ray". The old "Caravan Ray" probably wasn't showing up in searches because all the links for that artist's songs are probably broken and its songs have been hidden. That artist was created by a user named "Caravan Ray". If you'd like I can reset the password for your old account so you can use it and resurrect your old artist. It's probably got an old email address associated with it that doesn't work anymore: "cavanreagh@big****.com. I can update that, too.

Personally I'd prefer if people resumed using their old accounts and i'm happy to help make that possible. I realize a lot of folks have old email addresses associated with their accounts and so they can't reset their password, so I don't mind updating the database manually to get things sorted out.

OK - it seemed my old account was gone. I recall always having problems at SS - mainly due to originally signing up with what became a defunct email address (the one you quoted).

If you can sort me out it would be appreciated.

Can you send me a new password for my old "Caravan Ray" account and kill that old email address? Change it to my gmail.com address - caravanray(at)gmail dot com. And delete the new account I made last night. Thanks.

EDIT: I updated your old account's email and password to the ones you used for your new account. The username of that account is "Caravan Ray" (with the upper case letters) by the way.

EDIT: Old account deleted, along with the artist for it, the song, and the two ratings and one comment on the song.

Deleting accounts can take me a bit because I have to first find everything done with the account that got stored in other tables (like adding an artist, adding a song, rating songs, commenting) and delete all that stuff. For now I have to do that by hand with manual updates to the database unfortunately. That's primarily why I'd prefer people not set up duplicate new accounts and do a bunch of stuff with them. If it happens enough though it will be good motivation for me to get around to writing the code and UI I'd need to make it easy to remove accounts.

Oh fudge, I forgot to add the Bandcamp integration to the form for editing a song too. FYI it's only there when you add a song at the moment. Should be fixed in the next 24 hours.

Fixed.

Thanks Sam - I seem to be all back up and running again now.

You can now also provide an album name for a song if you want to. It's optional. It only shows up on the song info page for now. If you copy info from Bandcamp the album name will get copied over if the track is part of an album. I'm probably going to make it optionally visible in the song lists, and I will definitely make it something you can search on.

Also the track duration and number (that is, what number track it is on its album) will get copied over from Bandcamp and shown too.

So Somesongs is just your personal songs you have made? Im pretty new here

Yes, it's for sharing songs you have made. You have to find somewhere to host the mp3 that will let you link people directly to it. Then you sign up to somesongs, create an artist,and post the link to the song. People can then listen to your song, rate it either okay, good, or bad, and discuss it. It's been almost totally inactive for a couple years, unfortunately. It's heyday was back in the early days of Song Fight!, and many old school SF! folks used to be active there. It was originally a PHP site written by Jefff of ADD Music. It started to languish, so as a hobby project to teach myself some stuff I wrote a clone from scratch in another programming language (Java) and added a few enhancements, like being able to play the songs right on the pages on the site, making some other things like rating and commenting while listening easier, being able to create playlists of songs from the site, integration with bandcamp.com, etc.

I'd love for it to become active again. My attempt to bring it back to life seems to have just turned it into a zombie so far (back, but still dead).