Audio Network's New Music Website

By: Simon Marett

Date:: 12 Oct 2011

The new and improved music website from Audio Network
It’s been over 12 months in the making but today, Wednesday 12th October, we’re delighted to unveil our new music website at beta.audionetwork.com.

We’ve listened to our customers’ feedback from around the world and we hope we’ve created a website that provides a better music and customer experience right across the site. ‘Easier, Quicker, Simpler’ is what you asked for so that is where’s we’ve invested our time and energy – helping you access the high-quality music you want for your video production in a number of ways, in less time, with minimal frustration.

A fresh look and feel – finding music is now quicker and easier
So, ‘what have we done?’ you may ask. Well, firstly, you’ll notice we’ve given the site a fresh, new clean design that now gives you a faster page load with multiple ways of accessing the 43,000+ music tracks on the site. You can continue to search by Keyword or use our Category buttons but you now have the option to find music via our Top 40, Playlists or our Team’s Favourite Tracks of the week. And with 1,000 tracks added every month, we hope you’ll find the Latest Albums listing on the home page a useful addition.

You’ll also notice the Keyword search tool has increased in size and we’ve introduced a series of example searches e.g. Fast Guitar Indie Rock Energy Driving that are designed to help you with your keyword searches. Our music team always tell us to use the MISS acronym when searching - Mood, Instrument, Style and Speed – so give that a go when you’re next on the site.

The new iPad friendly Audio Player and Waveform
One of the improvements we’re really happy with is the new iPad and iPhone friendly Audio Player that we’ve anchored to the top of the page so that it’s always visible. We’ve simplified the control panel and accompanied it with a brand new uber-responsive Waveform that’s 3 times the size of the original, allowing you jump in and out of the track at precise points. We know our Editors out there love the original Waveform so we’re hoping this goes down a storm, especially as the sound’s improved too.

Music track results – cleaner, clearer and more intuitive
When we ran our Web Focus Groups earlier this year, one message came through loud and clear: we want our music and we want it now! So, with that in mind, we’ve revamped the Track Results pages so you’re now in control of how the results are displayed. Choose how many tracks you’d like to view per page (up to 75) and decide how you’d like to sort them – by A-Z, Randomly or by Latest Release. Also, from the main Track Results page, in one click, you can instantly see Mixes, Related Tracks, Album listings and Composer tracks – pretty nifty eh?

Favourites, Recent Searches and Advanced Search
If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also added a couple of new bells and whistles to the site including Favourites, Recent Searches and a simplified Advanced Search. Favourites does what it says on the tin: it allows you to save and store your favourite tracks for a later stage while Recent Searches enables you to revert back to your previous searches from that session. We understand this is very helpful if you’re spending hours on the site and you’d like to revisit your first search of the day and see the tracks returned in that same order.

Testing, testing, testing…
The new website will be in Beta mode for the next month or so and we’d like all of our customers to start using it and test it thoroughly over this period. You can access the Beta site from anywhere on the existing site at www.audionetwork.com by clicking on the link in the top left hand corner. You can switch back to the old site as and when you wish to but you can tell us what you think of the new site and/or report a bug by clicking the Feedback button on the left hand side. This will instantly deliver feedback to our web development team and our plan is to then collate this feedback, make the necessary amends and improvements and launch the Beta site as our main site in the month of November - but only when we’re good and ready.

I hope you agree that the new site is a huge step forward in improving our customers’ website and music experience with Audio Network. Please feel free to contact the team at support@audionetwork.com if you'd like discuss any of these changes in detail.

Happy searching!