This article highlights the most important new features and functions made available to all publishing members and clients using their stores. Most have been developed and released on the live site over the last several months. The newest features and updates are listed from the top (newest) down:

* Added Price column on the Sold Licenes console to easily see the price for each license sale.

* The Old store was retired (on November 11, 2013) and replaced by the New store which features the waveform player, track navigation paging options and many new buyer-facing features.

* The old Captcha (human filter check) on the store Contact form was replaced with a new streamlined, automated filter. This provides robot-generated spam protection while making it much easier for buyers to send messages to publishers from their store contact form.

* Added option to hide the Contact link from the Store header, which can now be set on the Advanced Settings page. This is a nice option for publishers that already have a contact form on their website, and don’t need an extra one dedicated only for their licensing store.

* Buyer’s license contract for publisher t0 approve. This new feature lets buyers offer to use their own license contract, which for example, certain buyers or agents may already have in place, and/or require to be used. The publisher can access the uploaded contract (in their account) for review and approval.

* The Global Store registration page now contains a special text message to inform new store users about the advantages and benefits of registering to use the Global Store. The message is currently posted as follows:

* The Small play buttons on the track rows (in New store) now function the same way as the main Play button in the Waveform player, simply click to Play and click to Pause.

* The Global Store now has a Projects page and feature which lets buyers create custom-named project folders to save tracks to. When there are two or more tracks, a “Multiple Tracks Licensing Inquiry” button appears which lets the buyer send a quote request to the publisher based on total number of selected tracks which have been added to the project folder. It’s also possible to remove tracks or add other ones, but this should be done before a multiple tracks license inquiry is sent.

* The Advanced Settings page now has an option to “hide” the total number of tracks from the store. This is for new, small or specialty catalogs where the focus is on newly featured tracks and less on total number of available tracks. The default setting is to display the total track stats, so check this option if you want to hide them.

* On the Profiles & Brands admin page, “Songwriter” has been added as a brand type which now appears in the combo-box (pull down) menu. We already had Artist, Composer, Performer, Vocalist and several others, but now Songwriter has been added to the list as a new brand type option.

* On the Tracks Edit page, the Type and Source filters are now required to be selected from the combo-box menus. This encourages “best practice” which give buyers these filter options in the Store to easily target the type and source of music they are most commonly searching for. In most cases one of the options will fit best, otherwise the publisher can select “Unspecified”.

* It’s now possible to upload master and preview audio files directly from the Edit Track page, but you can still use the Upload/Files page to upload and check your uploaded files. This saves time in case you start adding a new track, but forgot to first upload the audio files.

* After a payment is made (via the store’s PayPal interface), buyers are now taken back to the publisher’s embed store page (on their website) instead of their stand-alone store on the LicenseQuote website.

* Three new file formats are supported for integrated files hosting and LTF (Link To File) options, which are PDF, MID and ZIP files. The ZIP files format makes it easy to include, for example, different versions of the same master files, and PDF is a great format for selling sheet music. Some publishers or libaries may also want to sell (or license) their source Midifiles, so this is another option, however, they should still use MP3 audio files for buyers to Preview their music in the store.

* On the Receipt, a VAT/TAX Info field is now supported for optional use, which can be pre-filled by the publisher on the Billing Options admin page.

* Google Spreadsheets (Drive) integration lets you import, export, edit and manage your catalog songs meta-data using the Free Google Spreadsheets service. In most cases you already have access if you have a gmail account, or you can easily sign up for a Free google account.

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Thanks to all publishers, and/or their licensing clients, for their suggestions and feedback which helps us continuously evaluate and improve our most important site functions and features.