Text Filtering for Ambiences, and Graphics Update (Patreon)

 Frequent visitors to the site may notice that I’ve done a bit of a spruce-up with the graphics. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for the longest time but as there’s an endless list of things to be done, graphics and tedious CSS tweaking always seem to take a back seat. The new updates are nothing fancy, I just think the new logo and dragon image look a little bit cleaner. 

More importantly I’m experimenting with a new text filtering system for the main page. As you can see above, there’s a new text input element on the genre filter bar:

 I should  point out straight away that this is not search, it’s a live text filter. The idea is that while the genre filters might get you most of the way to finding the sound you want, there are better descriptive means of finding it. For instance, the title!

When text is entered into the input field it will attempt a match after every keystroke. This means you most likely won’t have to ever type in the full word. For instance, let’s say I want to see all the ‘tavern‘ sounds. I’ll type in ‘t-a-v..’ and by this point, it’s already returned anything with a t-a-v in it.

Obviously, this has some downsides. It will also return words like: (I’m making these up) ‘tavelon’, ‘ratavistic’ and ‘scultavious’. But you get the point. Have I mentioned it’s not search? It’s live text filtering.

So, now if you’re willing, I could use your help. I’m not trying to make this a definative index of terms, but I would like to know what words you might add that would aid you in finding sounds you need.  If you type something in, and expected to get a sound or sounds back, let me know what that word was.

I’ve added some game suggestions from Bart Quicho’s excellent Game Enhancing Music Geeklist over on Board Game Geek. E.g. You can type ‘Le Havre‘ and it will return ‘Docks District‘. Entering ‘Ticket to Ride‘ (actually just ‘Ticket‘) will return “The Age of Steam” and “Strangers on a Train“. I think you get the picture

We’ll have to see how overcrowded things get of course. I really don’t want to add “Dungeons & Dragons“, for instance, as arguably the entire site could be used for this. It also shouldn’t replace the already helpful genre buttons – although these are mirrored in the text filter, so e.g. typing ‘scifi‘ will return the same items that the ‘scifi‘ genre button does.

Hopefully this feature will evolve over time and become more useful as the site grows and the  dictionary improves.

Thank you as always for your continuing support,

Tim