What did COVER.INFO do in 2018?

The programming work for the new COVER.INFO began in 2017. In 2018 we continued the intensive revision of the database content that had already begun in the 2017 Christmas season. The main thing is to adapt the data to the new structure (see our article of June 19, 2018 for details).

The beta phase of the new COVER.INFO began on May 6, 2018. We give a brief overview of the major changes we have made since then.

General terms

We introduced the term initial songs as general term for originals and sources of medleys, of samples and of quotations. Follow-up songs is the general term designating cover versions, medleys, samples and musical quotations.

Indication of the number of initial and follow-up songs

Beside songs we show you the number of initial songs (green up arrow) and follow-up songs (orange down arrow). Thus you can see immediately on how many others a song is based and if and how often it is used for later songs.

Help reworked

The Help has been written anew to make it shorter and more comprehensive.

Optimization of the labels

Labels indicate the type of relation between two songs. To enhance comprehensibility, we optimized the texts and colors of the labels. Pairs of terms belonging together ( Cover  –  Original ,  Sample  –  Sample Source  and so on) have the same color now. For initial songs the labels don't have partly the same text as for follow-up songs anymore. We added the word "Source" to those initial songs. For example instead of quote the initial song is called now quote source.

Table view

As wished by many of you, all songs performed by an artist can be seen in a table view now. You find it top right of artist pages (as long as your display is wide enough).

Sorting functions

At many places we added sorting functions to change the order of search results and to faster find what you are looking for. We think this should meet most requirements. This way, development of an extended search seems to be less important. Due to a lack of resources we will not pursue this plan for now and wait and see if the sorting functions will succeed.

Folksongs

We created the technical requirements to handle folksongs in a better way (see this example). Until now, we had dummy artist names such as "Folksong". Now we have to rework existing entries.

What's next?

COVER.INFO will still be developed in the future. We will make our home page more informative and introduce forms which allow to easily report corrections and additions for our database.

The editorial staff wants to rework in the next years as many entries as possible to enhance the data quality on COVER.INFO. Nowadays sources in the Internet are a lot better than they were when the older database entries have been created.

If you like to support us financially, please donate to our non-profit association.

/TWA