Hey Danny,

Thanks for your response to my concerns. Please forgive my lengthy response here but again, I have many concerns.

Is there any reason to hope that the photo album edit function at OurStage will be made functional any time soon, for those of us with plenty of great shots to share?

I also recently wanted to update my songs. I didn't read the fine print the first time round and noticed that the quality of the songs offered was a pivotal factor. The Mbps needed to be higher on some of my earlier song offerings.

So, I went looking for a way to perform that edit of my songs at OurStage and was surprised to find that we, as users, have no capability to edit our songs once they're uploaded. By that I mean that we cannot delete them and re-upload our music in a higher Mbps format, which is what I wanted to do.

This didn't sit right with me. I felt that I wanted to put my best musical foot forward. I thought that I should be free and able to correct the quality level of a few of my songs that I had uploaded. I suspected that offering a better quality recording, as the site suggests, may increase my chances in the competitions.

I wrote in to ask why users could not edit their own songs in this way and was offered a form letter response. The letter said I would lose my song's favorited denotations. That didn't concern me, because the songs in question had either not been favorited at all or were only favorited by a few. I countered by telling them that the measure of true fan of my music would be those that would return a second time to re-favorite my songs. I also offered that I have fans on other sites that are that rabid for my songs. The form letter also said that the number of times that the songs were listened to by judges would be erased as well. That didn't really concern me either. The letter further said something about not allowing songs in competition to be re-uploaded. There was some concern that users could use the function to cheat in the competitions. I answered this concern with the fact that none of the songs in question were in competition at the time. (They weren't) It also stated that all of my awards or medallions would forever be irretrievable. I had not won or received any awards or medallions.

Someone at the site then simply deleted all of my songs, except the two that were in competition. They did this without trying to coordinate with me about which songs I wanted to delete. I wrote back and mentioned that I had specifically said some and not all of my songs. In fact, I had just been working on the first of several that I wanted to upgrade and did mention that title.

Then, to my surprise, all of the previously deleted songs reappeared. What's this about then! Question: Did they actually delete my songs, or merely hide them from view? Does this site keep a cache of my songs that I upload forever to use as they wish? (Perhaps I should have read that fine print more closely.)

Is there any plan to offer users an edit function for their songs? Is the deletion of my page at OurStage the only way to ensure the removal of my songs from this database? Will my song uploads forever be controlled by this site?

Other sites that I have uploaded my songs to all offer their users the ability to edit their own songs without having to go through a site admin. MySpace, EZ Folk, Motagator, SoundClick ...It's a long list. We also compete at those sites too, but not for prizes.

Maybe I'm naive with regard to the big wide world of cheaters out there. In truth, I usually steer clear of competitions because I assume they are all fixed in some way. But I'm surprised at this site's presumption that users are to be considered so full of guile as to not be trusted with the editing of their own songs. It doesn't make me feel very good to be treated that way.

I guess they are just doing what they deem necessary to ensure the proper distribution of the prizes involved but somehow, since I haven't won anything, the prizes don't mean as much to me given the treatment I have to endure to compete.

I thought that, once deleted, all of the old song versions would be gone forever and that I would then have to reload them all. It would be a little time consuming to do that but it's something that I was willing to do to ensure that the ones that needed to be upgraded were presented on the site in the best possible format.

I had hidden that first song in question from view on my site thinking that I could then upload the new version. But the site would not allow my newer version to be recognized while the old version was uploaded and as I said there was no way for me to delete the old version.

When the administrator deleted all of my songs that were not competition, that one song that I had hidden, the one I was first trying to delete, did not get deleted with the rest. I suppose, because I had hidden it from view. I un-hid the one song later and mentioned this to the OurStage crew and they then deleted that song for me.

I gave up trying to figure out how to upgrade the few songs that I was concerned about. There seems to be no way to do so without going through an admin and since the admins for this site don't offer me an adequate means to communicate what I want done, I'm thinking that the best way to get done what I want done with my offerings on this site is to delete my page altogether and perhaps start again from scratch.

Question: will my songs actually get deleted from this site if I should take that step? Or, will my songs continue to be used by this site and therefore block any future attempts that I may wish to take to upload different versions of the same songs?

I had to do a similar thing with my photo album on this site. I had a large number of photos to upload but once uploaded the edit function ceased to work to allow me to move them around within my album. Again, I was surprised by this because there are so many different sites that I have photo albums on. All of these other sites have perfectly functional albums. The possibility of not being able to easily edit my album at OurStage was simply... surprising.

Again, I wrote the site to ask if they knew what the reason for this might be but when I received no clear answer, I simply took the matter into my own hands and began to delete the photos that I had uploaded in order to edit their position within the album by uploading them in order. I found that when I had removed enough of them from the album the edit function was enabled once again. I thought that was weird.

So, here's a note of warning to those of you who would like to show a lot of photos at your page. More than two rows of photos on my page caused the edit function to go haywire and not work at all. Somehow this kind of a glitch doesn't seem very professional at a site of this caliber but so far this glitch has not been cured. I still cannot edit my photos.

Okay, just one more concern to point out. I noticed that one of the other sites at OurStage had a slide show of photos happening on their page. I wrote the admins once again to ask if they could explian why I could not included the same on my page. Does this site offer differing functionality to different users? Or do I simply need to understand more about the mechanics of progarmming to be able to edit my page at OurStage to include the same?

Okay, I think I'm about done for today. ;o)

Reg