We've changed how we process audio files

After a year or two of us complaining (internally) about our transcoder (the “thing” that turns your uploaded wav files into mp3s, and then whatever other format fans request on download) we finally replaced them. The new one is a complete rewrite on different infrastructure and hopefully this makes absolutely no difference to you.

The old setup was put together in about a 4 days, I think? But Chris and I commonly look back at it and say “boy that was a really shitty two weeks!”. It actually worked really well, transcode failures were extremely rare, but patching them was stressful for the team. Similarly, adding new features into the tool was not fun, and generally avoided at all costs. So now things we've wanted to ship for a while are going to be way easier. Highlights include common community requests: letting you upload FLAC instead of just WAV and including all album artwork into every download zip. Not shipping those today, but soon!

We want you to test it as much as you can. If you have something you want to upload, now is the time! Otherwise, here are some free albums from the community that you can use to test the download process: