guys, Ive been following this discussion, and I believe we all agree on some points, such as:
- having some riff, scale or chord info is very nice and helpfull, so we all will take the minute to give a little info on what we played.
- the idea to have "must"-tabbing for guitarrist seems to turn some off, I do understand its easyier to just type some info than to select the chords from the chord picker. I will change this again, so you can choose wich route to take... I know the chord picker is a bit beta, theres many chords missing, and to some chords there should be diffrent tabs available ... didnt want to make it too complicated, but as we see now, the simplified version aint really good either. Coding the tab-thing was an immense effort, but one of the first features I'd take down, for it just dont work too good it seems.
- some users just dont have the knowledge to give riff info, we will have to live with that I am affraid, no reason to collect wrong info that wont help at all.
I'd like to add one more aspect:
I think we have users with all kind of playing skills using wikiloops, from the beginner glad to have tabs, to the medium player fond of some chord info from wich to start looking by oneself, to the pro who'll enjoy the challenge of jumping into a jam without any prior info...
I do believe it will do all learners good to try to figure out whats happening by ear some times, but for some (and with some rather complicated tracks with many changes), that might be asked too muc from a beginner.
Wikiloops is about ear-training quite a lot, so theres one of the reasons the riffs where never intended to be visible at first listen.
I had a filter in the loopsearch where you could choose from the available riff info, thinking to enable searching for "blues" in "A" or something, but since there is no standard way to note down chords in the free-text entry field, the search engine gets lost when trying to analize data like "A m", "Am" "Aminor" "1st turnaround in A" and such, all saying "hey, this is in A minor", but expressed so diffrently, the search engine wont understand...
the rather standardized result of the tab-picker would be much easier to analyze and use for search optimizing, but that thas other flaws as said above.
So what do we learn?
proper declarations, tagging, titling and giving chord info adds a whole lot of value to a jam by raising its usability and its chance to get found either by wikiloops on site search or by google or others search engines.
Please take the time to enter as much valuable info to your tracks, and choose good titles instead of "remix to 1234", that will really add value to your tracks.
Please stay friendly if users dont feel like following this suggestion, keep asking for chords, but start training your ears before you get frustrated about lack of info - they dont tell you chords on the radio or wherever else you get your music either...
sorry if this conclusion is not satisfying for some, I'll do my best to make entering info more inviting, the rest is up to every single user.