Musical Nexus - News & Announcements

Hey Everyone,

Website Maintenance

Edit: Website Maintenance is now complete, no hiccups have been found during my testing.

If you find anything wrong with certain website sections please let me know right away.

Hello Japan

I just wanted to throw in a quick shout out to all of our new Japan visitors, I am not sure where our website got shared at but for the first time ever Japan has taken the spot for #1 visitors to our website for this month. Japan is at 2.6 million visits this month and rising while the USA is at 1.9 million.

If you are a native Japanese speaker, that can also speak/type English well then please send me a private message on here or in Discord if you would like to contribute translations for the website so that system text can be in Japanese if the Japanese language option is selected.

@ADirtyCouch Retirement

Couch has now retired from the website after years of service. Couch started as an SSR (Song Submission Review) team member and worked his way up to being a website administrator. He has helped me through many situations and issues with the website as well as provided answers and training to volunteer staff and users.

He has a busy real life currently and has not been able to contribute to the website for some time. He asked to be moved to the retired role, and as of this post he is now in the retired staff group.

If you also have appreciated Couch's service to our website send him a note and let him know!

Hi All,

Since the update came out that added Cymbals, Snare Drum, and a Bass Drum I have updated 3MLE to add these instruments plus the Celesta and Recorder.

The drums in-game only play 1 note sound, no matter which note you play. To try to mimic this function I have locked the drums in 3MLE to their corresponding notes in-game. Normally with drums you can have a little bit of variance in the sounds, or since this is digital use pitch bending to achieve the same function.

Nexon has opted out of this method so the drums have been locked to their 1 sound. Unlike in-game where you can play any note to hear the sound, you must keep your notes on the right note in 3MLE to hear the drum sound. The drums have been locked to the following notes:

Snare Drum: D2
Bass Drum: C2
Cymbals: C3

When viewing the drum in the instrument list, it is also included in it's name what the notes need to be.

These sounds are originally in the drum kit. I extracted them from the drumkit dls and spliced them manually back as individual instruments so they can be selected correctly in 3MLE.

We can see here how it sounds, as long as they are on the right note as in the video:

You can download the new version of 3MLE Maple Beats Edition on its usual download page here.

Hi all,

A new feature has been added to the site allowing you to bookmark forum posts and submissions in the music databases. This will allow you to categorize and bookmark your favorite music on the site and keep it all in one handy place. 

Features

• You can set a bookmark as Private or Public, if the bookmark is public it will appear on your profile.
  • Private bookmarks will not show up in your profile, or on the activity feed.
  • You can "Sticky" a bookmark to the top of your list, and if it is public to the top of your profile.
• You can create categories for your bookmarks, break them up between solos and ensembles, your favorites, or maybe a playlist for Halloween, Christmas, Touhou, Undertale, Meme, Etc
• You can export your bookmarks to XML or HTML format for external sharing.

Where To Access

You can access Your Bookmarks anytime by clicking on your username in the top right, and then clicking on "My Bookmarks"

Once in that area, you will be able to see your bookmark categories and view them all at once or filtered by categories only.

Profile Bookmarks

If a user has their bookmarks as public you will see a new tab on their profile simply named "My Bookmarks", you will be able to see a list of their bookmarks.

As an example you can see my public bookmarks here: Yasuno Bookmarks

How to Bookmark

When you are viewing a submission, the "Bookmark" button will now appear next to where the Report Submission button it at the bottom of the post.

If you have any questions please feel free to respond to this announcement post, or ask in our Discord.

Hi all,

Me and Couch are looking for some SSR's (Song Submission Review Team) to help us keep up with the approval queue. Now that full release for MapleStory 2 is coming we expect it to pick up even more. The queue is already usually at 60+ so if you are not able to give to much time to this role please do not apply at this time.

There is not a "quota" but you should be able to spend a few hours a week total on helping us approve music submissions. The SSR role is split between Mabinogi Only, and MapleStory 2 only.

This is all volunteer work obviously, but you will get a pretty color / rank in Discord and on the site.

You can apply here if you are interested in helping us out: Apply Here

*Note: The applications are private, only me and couch will be able to see your application submission.

Hi all,

We have done some website updates over yesterday and I just wanted to touch on them here. These are mainly back end, and underlying software updates so if this kind of talk makes your eyes glaze over I will understand if you skip the announcement. ?
 

The Elephant in the room - Advertisements
As the expression is told, lets go ahead and get the elephant in the room out of the way. Yes, we have enabled ads however we have tried to make sure that they are non-intrusive. No pop up, or pop under ads will happen, and we tried to make sure all of the ad placement was in a way to prevent accidental clicking and also not ruin the flow of content.

The ads help us do things like: Renew our licensing for the website software, pay our server and bandwidth bills (Our bandwidth increased by 300% during the MapleStory 2 closed beta test), as well as work with developers for custom additions to the site or to buy existing add-ons. We may consider an optional donation option for those of you would rather donate than see ads. We know a lot of people use an ad blocker of some kind. But if you are feeling nice every once in a while and want to turn off your ad blocker for a few page visits we would really appreciate it.
 

Backend Changes

Redis Caching (Not Reddit)
Improved caching on the site has been enabled with a Redis server. Before we were not actually using any server-side caching and instead relying on Cloudflare to do as much heavy lifting as possible and it definitely did a lot of heavy lifting for us. It served over 2.5 million requests from its edge servers, and saved us about 100 GB of bandwidth on 1 TB of bandwidth spent which is good considering a chunk of our bandwidth is actually .mp3 previews with Cloudflare does not cache natively. The Redis cache engine will help take some of the load off of the MySQL database and the over-all web server by caching page output, searches and tags for guest users.

Improved Search with Elastic Search
Some of you might have noticed while using the site yesterday that for a brief period of time search didn't work, and all of the activity feed disappeared. This was me fumbling through an Elastic Search server set-up and then re-indexing all of the content to the new Elastic Search cluster and shards. Before, search was using the MySQL database directly this can put a huge strain on the database as it is having to support normal website use plus searching through thousands of rows of data for multiple users. By offloading the search system to the Elastic Search cluster it will speed up performance in general for searching but also provide better search results.

It will now weight search results based on keywords and other factors. You should see improved search results going forward, and they should improve over time as well. It will search the entire index based on your keywords and then pull out 10,000 rows of data and compare them to your keywords and other factors to try to provide better results. It does all of this within a second or so basically.

Search has been made more clear in general as well, before it was kind of a "Am I searching the entire website? Just this submission? Just this category?" Now when you begin a search a pop up window specifically says if you are searching every where, or just in a specific section.

Improved Login & Account Security Options
We have added support for faster login and improved account security options. Now when logging in, or registering you can choose to use one of the external providers instead of just filling out all of the information manually on the login or registration form. You can choose to login or register with the following providers:

• Facebook
• Google
• Microsoft
• Twitter

2-Factor Authentication - We have also added the ability to enable 2-Factor Authentication in your account settings. You can use the following options to add extra login security to your account:

• Security Questions & Answers
• Google Authenticator
• Authy

Multiple System Languages now Supported
We have added language packs back to the site! You can find the drop down selector on the left hand side of where the menu is at the top, Or at the very bottom. We already have 10 languages supported, with Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) on the way. In the future we hope to support Korean and Japanese as well since we get a decent amount of traffic from those countries already. Please note, this only translates system text, if the post is written in English that will still be in English.

Phone Style Emoticons now supported
When clicking on the emote button in the editor now, it will have options to choose a skin tone, search and look through categories just like on a phone or tablet.

Coming Soon
We have the following releases / changes coming up which will be available in a separate news post as this one is already very long.

• A "Light" version of our theme for users who do not like the constant dark mode.
• Adding the 3 - 8 person ensembles to the Maple Beats section
• News on how we are currently using the source from Mabilcco to modify it to support code editing, 10 tracks per part, and more.