A lot of remixers and OST composers are selling their albums with a "Pay what you want" price these days. Could it be possible to add this as an option when adding a new album? I don't think marking them as "free" is ... well, right.

I've seen the term NYOP (Name Your Own Price) as a standard in other videogame-related sales, could it be used in this case?

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Listing them as "Free" doesn't sit well with me either. This is a totally new mechanic for the digital age, and we didn't originally visualize the possibility of a concept when we started. I wonder if there is a way to handle it that doesn't involve adding another field to the current price fields (there are 3 right now.)

Another checkbox "Name Your Own Price" like the one for unknown price would be OK I guess...

I agree with Efendija. A checkbox would work fine.

Barring that, could a price of $0 and a new option in the currency (PWYW) work? $0 automagically sets the price to "free", so maybe "If price is 0 and currency is PWYW..." I dunno how this site works.

Any comments on this? Sorry.

I've just implemented this by replacing the "unknown" checkbox with a selection box that has three options, one of which is the "name your price" model.

http://vgmdb.net/album/33872

We'll have to watch for any unintended consequences or other complications. Meanwhile, there are probably quite a few bandcamp albums to re-price.

Changed here for starters, looks nice, thank you.

How about making lyricist field visible (nextday and myself mentioned it quite some time ago) - will it happen soon (relatively speaking)?
Again, I don't know anything about programming, so I can't imagine how difficult it really is to make it... I'm only asking though...

I am not sure what to do about display of the other roles including lyricists. The album page design looks nice as it is right now, but I think adding an extra row or rows for other roles will make the top panel look odd with the extra whitespace around the front scan. It would also push the tracklist down further.

So we need a clever way to display that information without sacrificing the current usability. Maybe it needs to be a separate tab that you click on (like how we switch tracklists). Otherwise, I'm hesitant to go into deep redesign of the album page style because these were designed carefully by Blah, and I don't have an intuition about good page design.

However, my current philosophy for feature implementation is to concentrate on things that are most important to those who are working hard on new submissions or fixing other people's submissions, so its possible to push for some things.

Hoo-ah, thank you for adding this new price point!

Well I'm only asking for lyricists, almost entirely because it's pretty much expected to have that role visible, it is one of the more notable roles definitely. Number of other places have it, as you, of course, know perfectly well and to be honest I haven't really figured out why VGMdb still doesn't have it...

And as for should it be for all or just vocal albums, I would like to see it enabled for everything (but that's just me, there are many albums with composers/arrangers and no credited performers and blank 'performed by' field is still visible, same if there are no arrangers etc. so yes I understand that is the case because it isn't coded like that so that the field would not be visible if it's blank, but down the road maybe that isn't a bad idea - if one of fields is blank /for artists roles/ it could be turned automatically invisible. Of course if that thing is doable at all.... at any time)
.....But to get back to the lyricists... would be nice to have them 'in sights' lol except in the notes of course.

In the end, whatever you & Blah think fits the site better, it goes without saying that I'll have no objection heh because you do know best about it.

Lyricists shouldn't be grouped with less prominent roles like engineers and programmers. I'm in favor of having lyricists included with composers, arrangers, and performers - not hidden away on some other tab. Other websites include lyricists, so why not VGMdb?

It should be for all albums because a lot of albums with one or two vocal tracks don't have the vocal classification. This is most common with soundtracks.

Edit: Would changing spacing and cover resolution be an option so that an extra row could be added without the general appearance being noticeably different?

Like this, for example: Original vs Mockup

why not a "Written by" ?
I know that it's a bit tricky (jap vs eng) but basically it's not incorrect and it'll be consistent with the actual artist scheme using "verb+ed by: "

personally, I've already asked why there was being no lyrics field (and also bar code, but this one is particular)
don't remember if I got an answer tho

^ Definitely not 'written by' because that's mostly US based terminology which is never meant to tell you exactly who is a composer and who is a lyricyst - you can have written by followed by 5-6 names and some of them are composers, some are lyricists, some even could be arrangers, but you don't have any means to actually discover this (unless you do some more research, doesn't always help though).
'Written by' means both composers and lyricists (most of the time) and it's not really supposed to differentiate the roles which isn't helpful for serious databases (like VGMdb).

mostly US on a mostly JAP release site, fun fact
sorry, find another thing

Well at least you can mention this info in the notes...

This already happens with extensive credits, i.e. whenever a lot of performers, composer and/or arrangers are listed. I'd like to repeat my old previous easy solution:

With this in place additional optional lines would be a non-issue. (But it would be definitely preferable to hide empty lines instead showing labels with no entries for them, as is done right now.)

Edit: I prefer no additional tabs as that's making navigation really inconvenient at times (e.g. with the tracklist tabs one can't do a browser text search in all of them but needs to manually twitch between them, also bad for comparing later tracks in longer tracklists as the tabs are on the top).

pages could have something like amazon, when an album has several images you have some icons you can mouseover
of course, it'll be only for some images like front, box/package/digipak (maybe back too)

on another note, speaking of comp arr and perf, I'd like to see a valign=top for those because it's not very readable when there are several artists
don't know where it starts or ends

So, I think the main idea being proposed is to change the infobit div to a fixed height with the overflow:auto attribute so that we get a scrollbar when we have a large number of artists. This would allow us to add some spacing to improve the readability between the roles.

I could experiment with this. From a design perspective, does anyone have a good feel for how this might affect usability? Will the scrolling div be inconvenient for some, or will the reader sometimes miss info that is hidden?

So I think you mean something like this. Note that I didn't mess with the any of the data fields, which are all rows in a table. Note that if we space everything sensibly, we will have scrolling on many albums. (Also, I need to insert a child div so that the top and bottom curved corners are always present.)

Right. That's the easiest fix while keeping the current design and won't change the look at all for albums with less extensive credits that actually fit in.

So, I've made the following changes:

1. Lyricists now show up in the main infobit on the album pages.
2. The Lyricist and Performer fields no longer display if they are empty. (I considered doing this with the others, but then it makes it look too empty.)
3. 1 px of space has been added in between the table rows, which makes the differentiation between roles more readable for large lists.
4. The infobit has been placed into a new div with auto-overflow and a max height of 300 pixels. This will trigger scrolling when the artist lists are large.

These changes had minimal impact on most albums that have normal-sized credits, but large credits now look like this:

http://vgmdb.net/album/33508

We can tweak the appearance based on your feedback, in particular, the size that triggers the scrollbar (300 pixels, note that images are 250) and the amount of cell spacing (currently 1 pixel).

I find that scrollbar super ugly, in the middle of the page :/

I agree. Is there a way you can style it maybe?

It should only show up for albums that have long credit lists. How often are you guys seeing the scrollbar now? I run at 2560x1600, but at lower resolutions it would show up more often. On smartphones, i imagine it would be there all the time, but we are definitely not optimized for those.

The scrollbar was just a way to tackle the problem of large artists credits pushing the tracklist so far down the page, particularly now that we show lyricists, and may show other roles in the future. There are multiple ways to address this, but I don't have a good feel for what is the best.

Quick question: Are there any albums with more performers than Kid Icarus? I can't think of any. There's this one, but it isn't complete yet.

I ask because I don't think the scrollbar is being used on many pages at all if it's only hiding a single row on an album with as many rows of performers as Kid Icarus.

albums like this one
there were albums with huge lists of artists, adding lyrics will just add some lines
it's not bothersome to me

if you make that for artists, what's next? tracklist? scans?
let's rename vgmdb.net into vgmsb.net (scrollbar) =)

Thank you for that lyricist field, Secret Squirrel!
And the scrollbar is just fine. It's better than the old way where certain members complained & complained & complained about the wall of text.

and if, instead of a scrollbar, there could be a sort of... how to say (damn, me too headache to think)
I'm gonna give an example

composed by: artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist [...] or [more details] (could appear if 10+ artists or such)
->
composed by: artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, artist, etc.

note that the [...] link could work one by one (if you click on compo's and then on arranger's so compo's returns to [...])
or manually where you click a second time to retract the complete listing

It depends on your monitor resolution, font size, whether the browser window is fully maximized or not. So it will be different depending on user preferences.

And more performers? Maybe this... Here you go.