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Music Stack Exchange has a steady flow of high quality questions and answers, and a growing number of users contributing to site health and maintenance. You're on a consistent upward trend, and the Community Team (of which I am a member) has taken notice.

Music SE will be graduating soon. Congratulations!

You've done a great job, and you should be very proud.

What happens now?

The SE Design Team will begin drafting site designs for you. I should warn you though, the team is a bit backlogged, and it may be a couple of months before you see our designers drop by to share mockups. Don't fret; graduation is on its way.

In the meantime, this provides an opportunity to think about how to be an even better site as privilege thresholds increase, elections are held, and you continue to grow. In the interest of reflecting and planning ahead, I'm posing a question to the community:

Is there anything you'd like to see Music Stack Exchange do better?

Weigh in below.

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    I think some sort of music rendering should definitely be top of the list. (Re: this post)
    – Chris
    Sep 23, 2014 at 21:00
  • 3
    This is good news. I've been contributing here for what seems like ages.
    – user1044
    Sep 25, 2014 at 15:51
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    Hooray! This is brilliant news!
    – Bob Broadley
    Sep 25, 2014 at 19:28
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    Great! I await the new designs :)
    – ThunderToes
    Sep 26, 2014 at 12:29
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    Good stuff !! But we do deserve it !!
    – Tim
    Sep 27, 2014 at 16:49
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    My very important and valuable input: Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
    – Lee White
    Oct 1, 2014 at 6:16
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    Ana - just in case you hadn't followed NReilingh's link on Shevliaskovic's post below: looking good on consensus for a naming tweak for the site - meta.music.stackexchange.com/q/928/104
    – Doktor Mayhem Mod
    Oct 1, 2014 at 7:29
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    Thanks for pointing this out. I'm currently speaking with the rest of the community team to get a handle on what sort of considerations there are for site name changes. You can expect a meta post shortly.
    – Ana
    Oct 3, 2014 at 18:08
  • @WheatWilliams: And you've done good! Keep up the good spirit :)
    – awe
    Oct 13, 2014 at 12:39
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    Well done! This great site does deserve a graduation. ☺☺
    – mey
    Jan 30, 2015 at 17:55

3 Answers 3

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Excellent news Ana,

As per Chris's comment, some kind of music rendering, probably a JS implementation of Lilypond, is likely to be required, although having a basic set of musical characters to include in questions may also be useful.

And we already have some initial thoughts on a logo - will need to be brought up to date etc.

We also reckon a Music blog will be very useful - this is a very subjective topic, and many interesting areas which wouldn't necessarily make it into a question/answer could be very useful to have on site.

Aside from that, I had a quick browse through the top 4 pages of meta questions and I can't see anything else that is critical (although anyone feel free to edit in any extras you think are important)

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    Good suggestions. We're aware of the Lilypond conversation and we'll follow up there soon. I would also encourage you to ponder questions of site governance or question quality -- if you have big picture thoughts about how this community works, this is an ideal opportunity to bring them up.
    – Ana
    Sep 23, 2014 at 22:59
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    Good start @DrMayhem. Two other issues that we should probably think about is jTab only being active on guitar tagged questions and a possible site name change. Also it would be nice if we as a site cleaned up the tags a bit before graduation.
    – Dom Mod
    Sep 23, 2014 at 23:14
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    Open question: should we re-run the site name "poll" question? It was almost three years between when it was first posted and when I came up with the second place answer, so it might be a good idea to get the current userships' opinion on the matter.
    – NReilingh
    Sep 24, 2014 at 2:58
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    I'm still pretty new here, but looking over the suggested logos I didn't see anything that looks very professional. I might try my hand at something but I'm not much of a graphic artist, just a lover of clean UI. When does the vote on the new name get finalized?
    – charlie
    Sep 27, 2014 at 7:29
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    A Javascript interpretation of Lilypond would be rather hard and put a lot of burden on the server. (Though the rendering is beautiful) An implementation of VexFlow would be easier to adapt (I've written an intermediary library, music21j that can make it easier to port to; it also adds sound playback via MIDI.js; since parsing MusicXML is possible via an external library, it'd allow for more software tools than just lilypond). But agreed, something to render.
    – Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
    Oct 19, 2014 at 0:06
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    Does this help with the lilypond integration? mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Score
    – Dave
    Jul 29, 2015 at 17:39
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There has been a long discussion with quite a few suggestions on the name of the site.

I don't know if we can/will change it, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

I personally like the Music: Theory & Practice name.

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    I like that a lot! Because performance is a type of practice, and theory is neither, but we get a lot of music theory questions.
    – Caleb Hines
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:41
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    Hey folks! We decided to do another round of voting for the site name question -- see here: meta.music.stackexchange.com/questions/928/…
    – NReilingh
    Sep 24, 2014 at 20:29
  • I like that better as well. There are more theory questions than performance questions.
    – empty
    Sep 30, 2014 at 22:32
  • I like "Theory and Practice" because it is literary convention. Look up "Practice and Theory" on a book selling website, no results. Only "Theory and Practice". Why break this convention? I'm open to the idea that there is a good reason, for example to emphasize Practice over Theory...is that the case? Or to give Practice a different meaning than in books. If it's arbitrary, should have stuck to literary convention...
    – Wilbur Whateley
    Jun 10, 2015 at 21:03
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I think the only governance/quality question that is currently not fully satisfied is around defining the scope.

At the one end, questions on specific songs may well be covered by the Music Fans proposal, so we have been pointing folks in that direction. It's only halfway towards being fully committed though, but I think until then, we keep those sorts of questions out of scope.

We have more difficulty at the crossover between music and hardware - specifically around electronic music, where there may not be any real instruments, and DJ'ing, where there may not be any creation of music as such (yes - I know I'm probably wording that wrongly) For these, I think the consensus is firmly that they are on topic, but getting clarity within our scope text is quite important.

Overall though, and our August site eval supports this, our quality is good and we are definitely going the right direction.

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    There is also much overlap on music programming questions w/ StackOverflow. I think that they're valuable to allow on either forum since the differences in expertise to solve them can be subtle.
    – Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
    Oct 19, 2014 at 0:07
  • Overlap is inevitable and acceptable, I think. But I also think this site is overloaded by the way its scope is defined, which is why we have these issues. Perhaps there is no getting around this: music is art, but a very cross-disciplinary one. In computer science, the lines are thin but can be drawn. If we could draw such lines in music, it would not be art.
    – Wilbur Whateley
    Jun 11, 2015 at 8:15

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