Roots Archives new update

[seb]

We're pleased to share a series of improvements made to Roots Archives. Here's a quick overview:

Header Search

Direct search is now available from the header on desktop and tablet.

Album Pages

You can now open multiple releases simultaneously and aggregate their information, giving a more complete view of an album's release history.

Quick Search on Artists, Labels & Studios pages

After 4 characters, the quick search now scans across all entries, not just those starting with the typed letters.

Search Engine
Various improvements to accuracy and relevance throughout the site.

Statistics Page
Completely redesigned. Global counters (albums, releases, songs, artists, credits, labels, studios), format breakdown (LP vs CD), top-10 rankings for artists, producers, engineers, labels and studios shown as interactive donut charts, and a release timeline by year. The highlight is the Dream Band: based on credit data, the site assembles a full lineup from the most credited musicians in the database — with a shuffle button to regenerate it.

Graphs Page : Five interactive visualisations

Reggae Galaxy — a full constellation map of the database with 5 switchable views and an animated 1969–1986 timeline slider.
Producer Possee — pick a producer, explore their entire ecosystem in role-based zones (drums, bass, horns, engineers, studios…), with 40+ tunable layout parameters and preset export/import.
Network Explorer — a 3D force-directed graph mapping connections between artists; nodes cluster by strength of collaboration.
Studio Timeline — a vertical year axis (1969–1988) tracing how artists migrated between studios, with color-coded trajectories.
Artist Tree — an ego-centred radial tree: pick any artist, see all collaborators by role, with year encoded as distance from the center.

Games Page : Six album cover-based games

Cover Puzzle — slide pieces back into place.
Hangman — guess album title and artist name letter by letter.
Mosaic — identify the album hidden behind a mosaic, revealing tiles one by one.
Zoom In — a blurry cover gradually sharpens; score decreases over time.
Odd One Out — six albums, one doesn't belong. Find it.
Cover vs Cover — two covers, pick the earlier one; build a streak for bonus points.

News Section

A new section dedicated to label news and reggae press archives. Many thanks to Manwel Tabone for granting us permission to include his material from facebook.
The latest news are on the homepage as well.

Releases page

Releases can now be browsed and filtered by year, showing latest releases first.

We hope these additions are useful. As always, feedback is welcome.

All the best,
The Roots Archives Team

[hans]

Great one