You may notice there have been some changes on the homepage of BeatsBase.com. The search box has gone (don’t worry, it’s still here). There is now a list of the recent activity in BeatsBase (mixes, tracks and playlists) and a mix player showing the very latest mixes to be uploaded.

So, if you want to know exactly what’s been going on, and you want the freshest mixes, you know where to look.

We’ve also got some other changes up our sleeves which we’ll let you know about very shortly.

A few people have had trouble uploading mix files. We’re really sorry about this, and we hope it hasn’t put anyone off using the BeatsBase service. The good news it we’ve figured out one of the reasons why uploads have been failing.

There’s a strange quirk with the technology we use for uploads (Adobe Flash for you geeks) which means it throws a warning which looks a lot like this (click for the full version):

The answer is pretty simple. If this happens to you click “No”, and the upload should continue fine.

We’d love to hear of your experiences both good and bad, and Robbie has started a special thread in the forums especially for this reason.

As you know you have the opportunity to vote on tracks, playlists and mixes to show the world just how hot they are. You get just one vote per item, so use it wisely.

While other voting systems like this might offer you the classic star rating system, we do things a little differently. Firstly you choose whether to give an item a thumbs up or thumbs down. There’s also a thumbs-to-the-side which is pretty average, really. But it’s when the votes are shown that things get interesting. For example, here’s one of my favourite tracks - “Two Princes” by the Spin Doctors.

You see where the votes are? There is a coloured bar showing you the ratio of good, average and negative votes. So rather than see just an average of the votes cast for every item, you get to see exactly what weighting of votes the item got.

Want to know that just as many people hated it as loved it? No problem. How about seeing items that most people thought average, but a few loved. Easy peasy.

They use a similar system over on a new website called Summize, and their about page does a good job of explaining their voting system. Happy voting!

Hey everyone, welcome to BeatsBase. I’m the BeatsBase Geek, so a lot of what you see has been written by me. However I’ve had a lot of help from the wonderful Open Source gurus around the world in the form of Wordpress. It’s been a lot of hard work, but very enjoyable all the same.

Anyway, if you have any problems just contact us using the link at the top of the page. Thanks for coming!