Streamlined SongBox Creation

We had feedback from multiple users who were all asking for the same thing:

Let us send the link to our music however we choose!!

What does that mean? Well, now when you create a songbox we just give you the link to it, and you can send it out to whoever you want, by any channel you want. This gives you the ability to personalise the message completely to your tastes. Obviously all the reporting works exactly the same!

New pricing plans

Tonight we rolled out our new pricing plans. There will always be a completely free plan called “Lite”. The new paid plans are

  • Enthusiast
  • Pro
  • All Access

We hope that these plans suit everyone but if not then contact us by using the contact link or the live chat box over at https://songbox.rocks

At SongBox we are all about privacy, so we don’t and won’t ever run ads and we also don’t ever claim any rights to your music, unlike some other major platforms, so in order for SongBox to operate we need to have paid plans.

It is our hope that users who share our values of privacy and a relentless focus on user experience and clean design will also understand the need for SongBox to offer paid plans.

Changes to SMS notifications

In light of a recent customer survey, SongBox is changing the way we distribute real time SMS notifications. There are a couple of things to take note about this:

  • Sending SMS notifications was a big expense to SongBox, so removing them as a default mechanism will allow us to have much more affordable pricing plans (watch this space for news on plans).
  • A recentuser survey showed an overwhelming preference to email as the primary notification method, and a similarly significant chunk of our users would just prefer to log in and check dashboards as and when they see fit.
  • SongBox is planning on allowing users who cherish real time SMS notifications to “opt in” on a case by case basis, for example if they have a marketing campaign coming up and for a brief spell they want to know about every bit of activity, instantly.

If you have any thoughts on this then please do contact us on the contact page at Songbox.Rocks. We need your input to keep us on the right path!

Embeds are here

As of today you can embed your songbox tracks in your own site and still get the play and listen metrics clocking up on your dashboard as usual.

We also changed the play button so that it switches to be a pause button when playing.

Database Enhancements

Nothing you’ll notice but today we upgraded our database infrastructure to utilise separate read and write databases. We also migrated to Google Cloud for better availability and robustness.

Added pagination

Some SongBox users were loading 20 to 30 audio files into a single page load and this was killing our servers. We now paginate your SongBoxes which means you can have as many audio files as you like, but we only display 4 at a time.

New Image Upload Experience

We’ve now switched over 100% of our asset storage (images and audio files) to our new workflow. This means that the experience is a whole lot nicer and you now get a lovely image cropper to make sure your profile pictures are just perfect.

If you already had a profile picture uploaded we’re afraid you’ll need to re-upload… sorry :-)

New player widget

In response to customer feedback, we’ve built a new player widget that visualises the waveform of your audio. This is definitely a pretty cool addition and we really hope you like it!

New upload process

We’ve invested in a new user journey for uploading your tracks. We’re confident the new process is much more robust and user friendly. Please let us know what you think.