A new year, a new website design.

Feb 09th, 2018 - 23:02 • Announcements

For years Musopen's website has been focused on serving many different use cases simultaneously. This meant that looking for sheet music took you to one set of pages, while looking for recordings to another. In Google (and on Musopen) this also meant when you searched for a piece of music you would see several search results at once (say 1 for sheet music and 3 for each recording).


We spent a good part of 2017 designing and implementing a new design to simplify finding content, and to allow the website to evolve to support future investments in new types of content, music education materials, and mobile applications (more to come on those soon!).

As of a week ago, our new design is now live to all visitors. Now, we have a single canonical catalog for all our repertoire. If you want to find Chopin Ballade no. 4, Op. 52, you can search and see a single result instead of 5. One page for all sheet music files and music recordings. 

Benefits

* More accurate and consolidated search results. Find what you want more quickly.

* More meta-data displayed (search, browse, and see more about the files on our site, length of a piece, rating, publisher, performer, and soon much more).

* Larger PDF previews to sample sheet music before downloading (you can also click to preview any file shown in the table lower in the page).

* Simpler, faster, more responsive design for web and mobile.

There is one downside to this change, and that is for those looking primarily for royalty free music, you may now browse and be taken to a page that only has sheet music. To address this we've added a filter option at the top of our music catalog page (click filter by recordings to see only music). We will also be rolling-out a music-focused tool which will enable rapid sampling and downloading of files, much more quickly than even the previous site design allowed.

We've set up a feedback form as we roll-out the design changes. Please let us know how we can make the site easier for more useful for you: link to survey

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