Custom Shuffle, New Features and What’s Next

Sharing your favorite music with friends is always a joy. We hope the playlist update that we released last month is equally joyful for you and helps you with collecting and sharing your favorite themes!

Since the big release a few weeks ago, we are working to further improve the playlist features as well as the overall site. We already released a handful of new features, which we will go over in this status update, so be sure to read until the end.

Join the Team

Before going into the details, we’d like to encourage everyone who likes this project to help. Whether it’s encoding videos, filling the database with information or developing the site, every helping hand is appreciated. You can always message one of the moderators on our Discord, if you are interested.

Playlist Update in Review

The playlist update is only out for around a month and your response to it is overwhelming. Because of that we want to take a moment and share some statistics as well as thanking everyone for the massive support!

With the playlist update we also introduced the AnimeThemes account, which is the basis for the playlist feature. Since launch over 850 people have created an AnimeThemes account. That are almost 30 registrations per day!

Together users already created over 800 playlists, covering many different topics. In total users added over 43,000 themes to their playlists.

Especially interesting is looking at the themes that were added to playlists the most. This is a cool metric to see which themes are the most popular. For this we created an infographic, here are the top ten themes used in playlists:

Custom Shuffle

An often requested feature finally made it’s way on the site. You can now make your own custom shuffle watch list. Before you could only shuffle through the entire database of themes, which means every OP and ED from every year could come up. We often got the request to make it possible to only shuffle through OPs. This is now possible, alongside with other options.

Here’s how it works: When you click on the "Shuffle" button, either on the home page or in the navigation on the top, you’ll get the new shuffle dialog:

Here you can configure your shuffle watch list. By default you’ll get the same behavior as previously, that means all themes in the entire database (except for themes marked as Spoiler, those were and are always excluded).

The available options are:

• Theme Type: Define if you only want to get Openings, Endings or both.
• Premiered Before/After: Here you can define the timeframe in which the theme’s anime should have premiered. Both values are inclusive, meaning if you define "Premiered After" as 2000, you will only get themes whose anime premiered in the year 2000 or later. Leaving one field (or both) empty is also possible to not set a boundary and that direction.

In the example above, you would only get Openings whose anime have aired in the 2000s. Feel free to play around with these settings and find your optimal shuffle mode. Who knows, maybe you find your new favorite era of anime themes? In the future we plan to expand the options to allow for even more options, so stay tuned.

New Features

Besides the new shuffle mode, there were also a handful of other new features added to the site. Here are some of the highlights:

• Added option to change username and e-mail address to the profile page. This is especially useful when you mistyped your username or e-mail address during registration and want to change it without creating a new account.
• Added autoplay toggle to shuffle and playlists. Previously it was only possible to toggle autoplay for contextual watch lists (e.g. when playing a theme from an anime page). This is now also possible for playlists and the shuffle mode. This setting however is not saved and will reset when you start playing a new playlist or shuffle.
• Added related playlists to video page. If you want to know who also likes your favorite themes, you will now find all (public) playlists containing a theme on the video page. It’s located under the "Related" tab.
• Added download option to share menu. A feature that was missed was the possibility to download themes directly from the video page. This was now added back in the "Share" menu.

What’s Next

With the big playlist update behind us, we are already deep into development of some minor and major updates for the coming months. A few of the short term goals we are working towards are:

• An improved video player on mobile, including the "Share" and "Add to Playlist" buttons, that are currently missing.
• Hotkeys for controlling the video player.
• Option to repeat the currently playing theme.
• Better performance. We are aware of the performance issues with big playlists (>200 themes) and are working hard to improve that.

These are all things that should come out soon. Beyond that we are already working on the next big update, which is: External Lists.

External Lists are now in development

External lists (previously called user lists) are very similar to playlists with the key difference that they are synced to an external service (hence the name). An external service could be MyAnimeList or AniList. You probably already guessed it, this will make it possible to have access to your MAL/AniList directly from AnimeThemes. This has always been one of the most requested features so we are excited to finally deliver on it. We will let you know once a first beta is available for this feature. Speaking of which…

Beta has been reset

Our beta site was disabled recently because we took the time to completely reset it. This means all user data was wiped and a fresh production dump (without user data) was imported. In the future we want to do this more often, to prevent the beta site from diverging too far from production. The beta will soon be used for upcoming features we want to give a larger test before deployment.

Technical changes

Behind the scenes we’ve been working on some upgrades to our tech stack.

For our admin panel we are currently moving from Laravel Nova to Filament, which is a community alternative with the benefit of being free to use. Contributors had the problem before that they couldn’t set up a local animethemes-server project, because it requires a Nova license. Moving to Filament will remove that requirement.

On the frontend, we are currently investigating a new strategy for styling our components. We have are using styled-components, but it has recently become a blocker for other migrations. We haven’t decided on a new solution, so if you have experience and want to contribute to the project, let us know.

Backup torrent updated for Winter 2024

The winter season ended, so we are again updating our backup torrent.

There are two versions of the backup torrent: One for all video files (in WebM format) and one for all audio files (in Ogg format). The current torrents, AnimeThemes.moe - OP/ED Collection Audio/Video Backup [2024.04.01], can be found here:

Video: https://files.catbox.moe/cvi7fz.torrent

Audio: https://files.catbox.moe/1acmqc.torrent

The next torrent update will be 2024-07-01.

Transparency Update

As in our previous status update, we want to give an update on our transparency efforts. Here are the transactions since February:

Month	Amount	Description
February 2024	$128.14	Patreon income
	$-82.86	Monthly costs for our hosting provider
March 2024	$123.50	Patreon income
	$-82.86	Monthly costs for our hosting provider

As you can see, our monthly costs are consistent while our income varies a bit from month to month. Because of the net positive at the end of the month, we should have no problems operating at the moment.

We are currently looking into investing some of the left-over funds into a password manager. With a more distributed team it will make our lives easier and more importantly more secure. This will probably come up in the next transparency update should we decide on a solution.

Thank You

Last but not least we want to give a huge thank you to everyone supporting the AnimeThemes project. Special shout out to everyone subscribed to our Patreon, without you we wouldn’t be able to keep this project alive.