Release Notes

Chordata 2.0.0

Released November 26, 2025

New Features Include:

  • New Look and Feel!
  • Chordata is now completely cloud-based and leverages a modern framework.
  • Users can enable Two-Factor Authentication
  • A robust Permissions system, which will allow us to house more of our data and functionality.
  • CSV download that can limit which fields are included and remembers what the user chose previously.
  • Robust API. Integrations will now be easier to execute.
  • Entity save paradigm that allows more than one user to edit an entity at the same time. Users now edit and save field groups individually causing only the field group to be locked to other users.
  • A Dynamically generated print specs section.
  • YouTube Links are now pushed to the website automatically
  • Instrumentation has been integrated with the UIC standard instrumentation code.
  • Zinfonia integration
  • Updated asset viewer.

First official update since 2020

Chordata 1.8

Released April 28, 2020

New Features Include:

  • Add New Digital Derivative Product button added on product pages. This allows digital derivative products to be added from a print product. Various methods are used to convert the product data, including modifying Digital Assets and Components. Multiple publication types are supported, including books and self-cover books and octavos. When in a relevant circumstance, the user will also be prompted to fill in data about the first and last pages of content in the product for use in the conversion.
  • New fields have been added in Digital Assets for recording the first and last pages of content or music.
  • Newzik has been added as an integration option for Products. These use Newzik’s API to push Product data and attached Component Assets. A cron task exists to push files in a batches.
  • Magento integration updated to handle Newzik license count. Fixes and preperations have bee made in anticipation of sales of digital products.
  • Fix to State Lists on Product Page when null values.
  • PDF Scraper will now not error when dealing with older PDF versions.
  • Updates to HLMSW integration.
  • Other minor updates and fixes.

Released September 29, 2020

  • Fix for promo categories when only one item in category
  • Get promo categories from DB instead of API call
  • Newzik empty products cron
  • Publisher relationship check in magento integration
  • Disable product cover dropzone. Now display only.

Chordata 1.7

Released December 17, 2019

New Features Include:

  • Product Components module handles all connections and data organization between Products and Digital Assets. Product Components are individual parts of a product that share a set of common metadata and set of files. For more info on this extensive feature, consult the page in the documentation.
  • State Lists module handles gives a place for State List data to be saved with Products. Lists can be created and modified directly while List data can be imported with CSV. Products can also be added to lists directly if needed.
  • Awards module provides a place where awards records can be saved with Work and Human records. The name of the award, dates, and comments can be saved in a list form.
  • Reviews module provides a place where reviews about works and composers can be saved with Work and Human records. The text of the review and other various information about it can be saved in a list form.
  • Backend optimization for several plugins.
  • Fixed bug in Table of Contents where duplicates were showing incorrectly.
  • Other minor bug fixes.

Chordata 1.7.1

Released January 24, 2020

New Features Include:

  • Product Components have been improved. When uploading a new file, much more data that is inherent in the file and the product’s metadata is taken into account when autofilling the parameters for making a new component. This streamlines the import process considerably.
  • Batch Uploader for Product Components. This module allows the uploading of hundreds of files at a time into new components across products. This greatly improves the usability of components on a larger scale, allowing entire archives to be consumed in a single import job. The user can set all sorts of parameters to automatically adjust the data in the newly-created components.
  • New Digital Derivative button in products allows making a new digital product directly from the print product. This function will copy all the relevant data from the print product; adjust the SKU to add a “D” suffix; adjust the various data such as categories, print specs, and status; assign a new barcode (if applicable); and make new components that are of the “digital” type. Assets that were attached to the old print components will be modified to be “digital-ready.” Currently only choral templates are well-supported but further templates will be supported in future updates.
  • Asset Download in Search Results is now available. Any asset results set can be downloaded to a .zip file.
  • On Asset Entity Pages, an Asset’s related Product Components are shown in a table. Assets are also shown on the Map connected to their respective Product.
  • When making a direct derivative product, several fields were erroneously displaying data from the old product. These have now been corrected.
  • NAV Status code automatically updates on a Status change.
  • Improvements to the SOAP API.
  • A REST API has been made.
  • Various smaller fixes to in instrumentation and language lookup fields.

Chordata 1.7.2

Released February 14, 2020

New Features Include:

  • Product Components have been significantly optimized and will be faster to upload and modify metadata fields.
  • Batch Uploaderfor Product Components. Bulk actions have been added to allow changing of parameters for all queued products at once.
  • Product Covers have been integrated into Product Components. Any assets of the \”cover-image\” kind will become the cover of the product on the website. It will also be displayed on the top right of the Product entry.
  • Sibelius Cloud Publishing has been integrated into Product Components. Sibelius files and PDFs can now be uploaded to SCP directly from components. Multiple scores per product are also supported.
  • Product Status has two new metadata fields to better describe delivery times of products: a Foreign checkbox for imported delivery, and Delivery Time to show a range of estimated delivery times. These fields are synced with NAV.
  • Add Asset in Product Components now works properly. This can be used to add an existing Digital Asset to a Product Component.
  • Other various fixes to Product Components.
  • Fixes to SOAP API.
  • Fixes to IDML composer name handling.
  • Added integration with Digital Ocean spaces to allow direct access to TPCF Assets.

Chordata 1.7.3

Released February 24, 2020

New Features Include:

  • Sibelius Cloud Publishing now shows scores available on the service. Scores can now be deleted from the service independently of a product. Ability to choose which SCP Score per product to display on the website was also added. Other tweaks to this page were added such as being able to show the entire score info if needed for debugging.
  • Fixed PDF data scraper to scrape “Copies” custom metadata.
  • Multiple signees are now supported in Contract generation. This will create a zip file with multiple contracts which can be sent to each respective party.
  • Various bux fixes with the Magento integration.
  • Added subtitles to the main Title column in Work and Product tables.
  • Various bug fixes to the Table views, especially Relationship Tables which were not displaying connections properly.
  • Changed vars to lets.

Chordata 1.7.4

Released March 11, 2020

New Features Include:

  • Raw Scans is a new Digital Asset kind. It is intended for scans of products that have not been cleaned up by Production. These are not public-facing and are stored for future use and/or historical reference.
  • Registered Media tool now is integrated into products. With it, users can see the download code for files on the website, and download the Cover 2 instructions. These have been revised to reflect the current website situation.
  • Zinfonia information is added to products. A field for the Zinfonia ID is provided, as well as a checkbox to mark a product to be included in Zinfonia.
  • Tag Tables now load dynamically to prevent slowdowns.
  • Instrumentation Compare Tool gives users the ability to see instrumentation in parallel between products and other products with different suffixes, i.e. CPS123, CPS123F, and CPS123P will all be shown in columns. This can be used to diagnose instrumentation data inconsistencies.
  • Product Components Batch Uploader now respects score order when importing new files to create new Components. This tool also has a clearer name under the Tools menu.
  • Any import of PDFs will check for a price string in the content and tag the resulting Digital Asset with “#found price”.
  • In Product Tables, the Composer Column now can be expanded or contracted to save space.
  • NAV Cron syncs any changes in Products with NAV based on date modified, which allows for mass data changes to be synced automatically.
  • A bug was fixed where Digital Assets were not properly trashed when a Product Component was deleted.
  • Fixes to errors on the Instrumentation Ensembles page.
  • Various fixes to the menu items, some of which were vague or miscategorized.

Chordata 1.6

Released October 4, 2019

New Features Include:

  • Table of Contents module allows for a highly structured method of writing and consuming table of contents data. Each item in a table of contents list can be nested and given a page number to show hierarchy of items in a structured way. These data also connect with the website. The original data in the old table of contents field (which is now deprecated) was cleaned and parsed into this new structure and is far more regulated in terms of special characters and formatting.
  • Sibelius Cloud Publishing is now integrated into Chordata. Sibelius and/or PDF files can be uploaded to this cloud service, and a web-based viewer is generated for use by third-party apps, such as the website. The score ID for each file uploaded is saved with Chordata, and that ID is synced with the website to allow the website to access that score on product pages.
  • Category Search The three new category fields are now searchable in the main search page.
  • Website Composer Date Options The birth and death dates of Human entries can now be synced to the website in a variety of formats, either the complete date, just the year, or to not display the date at all.
  • Diacritics Cleaning Much of the data in foreign languages suffered from missing diacritics and/or corrupted special characters. These have now been fixed after a large effort of manual cleaning. Older, outdated conventions, such as substituting ue for ü or oe for œ, have also been corrected wherever possible. Since Chordata supports all special characters, it is imperative that users utilize the correct characters when processing data in foreign languages.
  • “Unit Price” field has now been corrected to “Retail Price.”
  • Updates to contract templates.
  • Other minor bug fixes.

Chordata 1.6.1

Released October 22, 2019

Maintenance release

  • Added auto-assign to Contract numbers. Chordata also will add TP year as current year if it is not provided.
  • Fixes to IDML exporter to allow for more rich color manipulation of objects. Also fixed problems with PDF embedding.
  • Fixes to Magento integration to account for changes in Magento core code, and to account for ElasticSearch object size bugs.
  • Improvements to SOAP API for integration with third party apps, like HLMSW. WSDL is generated dynamically.
  • Data fixes where old Presser “six-digit” SKUs were removed.
  • Refactoring of Digital Asset classes for future provisioning and above fixes.
  • Fixes to Table of Contents module sometimes saving errant blank lines.
  • Fixes to ranges module.

Chordata 1.5

Released February 19, 2019

New Features Include:

  • Tags Field is a brand new concept for Chordata that allows users to tag various entities to categorize and describe the content in a free-form way. Tags can be added on the fly to the database, are searchable, and can be viewed on the dedicated “Tags” settings page. All former fields relating to genre or holiday designations have been converted into tags.
  • Table Improvements All tables in Chordata now support proper sorting by column. Reliability of the tables have also been improved.
  • Automatic Catalog Number Assignment For the product SKU field, a new feature of automatically assinging these numbers is now available. The user can imput a prefix for the sku, then Chordata will search the database for the next available sku in that series. This is useful to find the last SKU of a series and to fill gaps in the catalog number sequence.
  • NAV Automatic Updates In the background, Chordata will automatically get the latest data from NAV for inventory and price information and save it in Chordata products.
  • CSV Export Improvements All exports will export the columns in a consistent order and format. The reliability of this export has also been dramatically improved.
  • Metabox Positions When using Chordata, users can collapse and reposition metaboxes on entity pages. These positions are now saved with the user’s settings to allow the position to be consistent across entries. This can be very convenient for users doing lots of data work and require a streamlined screen. This streamlining will now persist.
  • Word Count In large text block fields, a total word count is now available below the edit box.
  • Various other smaller bugs have been fixed and new settings added. Under the hood fonts management has also been improved.

Chordata 1.5.1

Released March 14, 2019

New Features Include:

  • Instrumentation: Various bugs related to edition of advanced properties of instruments have been fixed.
  • IDML Config: A set of config options can be attached to an IDML Template to affect the processes in exporting an IDML file.
  • Custom Names: Lookups under Products for Composer/Arranger etc. have always allowed for a “custom display name” when clicking on the pencil edit icon. Now a wrench icon will show to the left of the name when it is customized.

Chordata 1.5.2

Released April 30, 2019

  • Contracts: Templates for generating Contracts have been finalized.
  • New Fields: Several new fields have been added, most notably, an “Instrumentation Comments” field, to allow for non-standard instrumentation instructions to be placed; “Comments”, a general-purpose editor block to make comments on Products; and “Program Notes Author”, which allows to enter the author’s name of any given program notes.
  • Role Fields: Several new role fields have been updated to accommodate more nuanced data such as orchestrator, translator, and text author. All role fields are also now symmetrical between Work and Product entries.
  • New transitional fields have been added to accommodate rental works, such as System 36 ID
  • Text Editor: The custom button to remove double spaces now has it’s icon fixed.
  • Small bugs affecting instrumentation and internal field mechanisms have been fixed.

Chordata 1.5.3

Released May 9, 2019

  • Premiere Info: A new metabox and set of fields have been added in Works. This allows a more structured model for saving premiere information.
  • IDML: Bugs have been fixed.

Chordata 1.5.4

Released June 13, 2019

  • Category Fields: The old format and category fields (formerly from NAV) have been deprecated and replaced with three new fields. These are . Each describes in a hierarchical tree a specific domain about a product.
    • Category-Forces: This field describes the instrumental or vocal forces required to perform a piece of music. This is also acts as a succinct summary of the instrumentation field.
    • Category-Function: This field describes the function of the product in a musical sense. In other words, it describes the purpose and function of the ink on the page. Here we can distinguish between a product being music-based or text-based, a score or part, and if downloadable media is also included.
    • Category-Format: This field describes the physical media the product is printed or produced on. Usually, this is a form of paper printing, but could also be a downloadable file, or optical disc media.
  • Cover Field: Products now have a location to upload Cover images. These would be used on the website.
  • YouTube Field: Products now have a location to save the main YouTube upload of the score/audio samples. These would be used on the website.
  • Edition Flavor: Products now have a new flavor of connection. Editions connect multiple similar version of the same product but are not hierarchical, i.e. O21X and O21XSB.

Chordata 1.4

Released November 30, 2018

New Features Include:

  • Performance Improvements A lot of effort has been taken to fix some of the performance problems in Chordata causing long page loads or some pages to not load at all. These include:
    • All tables of Entity records now load in the background. These were very slow to load if a lot of records were required to display. Now they don’t hold up the entire page from loading. Large pages, such as [http://chordata.presserfischer.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=edit-publisher&id=245 Carl Fischer’s Publisher page], which previously had thousands of records in the table, are now accessible within seconds.
    • Tables showing relationships between Entities now only show a limited amount of records and users can view more records on command if required.
    • The Map showing relationships between Entities now loads in the background. It also has some subtle improvements such as preventing icons moving on their own.
    • Searches are faster because of optimizations of underlying query code.
    • Improvements to the Nav Integration (see below) have dramatically improved page load times.
  • Navision Integration
    • All fields that take data directly from Nav now have their data saved within Chordata. This means there’s no need for Chordata to connect with Nav every time there is a page load, leading to much better performance.
    • “Description” and “Unit Price” fields are now editable in Chordata and will flow to Nav on Save.
    • Inventory, Gross Weight, and Net Weight fields are now saved in Chordata but will continue to be edited in Nav. On page load they are updated every 15 seconds to get the latest data in case there has been a change. In the background, Chordata updates these fields once a day.
  • Sticky Header The various elements of the header will now dynamically truncate for space if a title gets too long. The timestamp will also reformat for the best fit. Hovering over truncated items in the header will also cause the complete version of the item to show.Example of Sticky Header dynamic truncation (click to see animation)
  • Search Improvements
    • Advanced Search fields are now much more robust and reliable. Several fields that were returning unreliable results have been corrected. Many fields have also had their operators (such a “is”, “contains”, “between”) overhauled and now work correctly.
    • You can now search by any of the Barcodes fields.
    • Duplicate search results when connecting different entity types (such as Human to Product) have been removed.
  • Chordata Documentation All of Chordata’s old help articles and the reference have been moved to a dedicated wiki. Anyone can view these articles and we plan on updating them continuously. Head to chordata.presserfischer.com/docs to check them out.
  • PDF Export Fixes Barcode Labels, Ranges, and other various PDF exporting now properly export mono-chromatically.
  • New Holiday Skins Deck out your Chordata screen with festive Hanukkah and Christmas colors.
  • Contract Export Various fixes to the templates and data logic.
  • Numerous smaller bug fixes.

Chordata 1.4.1

Released December 5, 2018

  • Composer Search: The problems with searching and adding composers have now been fixed.
  • Particle Name: This new field adds support for “particle” parts of names, or words that connect the First and Last name in various languages. The most famous example of this is Ludwig van Beethoven where the “van” is a Dutch article. These words are considered part of the Last Name, but take a subsidiary role by not being capitalized or taken into account when alphabetizing.
  • Publisher to Publisher Connections: These connections now work properly. Brilee Music can now be designated as an imprint of Carl Fischer, LLC for example.
  • Table Dates now display the correct time zone in the Date Modified column.
  • Other bugs in relation to tables have been fixed.

Chordata 1.4.2

Released January 15, 2019

  • Entity Errors: Errors can now be submitted globally for an entity and do not need to be attached to any particular field.
  • Data Validation: Duration field now validates timestamps and insists on a colon format for the values. It will also suggest possible error correction if applicable.
  • Field Prefix & Suffix: Certain fields (i.e. royalties) now support a prefix or suffix within the value automatically.
  • Product Status: Changing a product from Published to Withdrawn now works correctly, and the NAV Status automatically changes and save correctly.
  • Search: Publishers can now be searched properly in the advanced search.
  • Contract Generation: Fixes to Theodore Presser template signature lines. Other minor fixes also applied.
  • Font Awesome: The icons library has been updated to its latest version. Most of the icons will be sharper, clearer, and of a cleaner design.
  • CSV Import/Export: Minor fixes to enahnce reliability of complex fields translating between Chordata and CSV format.
  • Sticky Header: Minor UI Improvements.

Chordata 1.3

Released October 23, 2018

New features include:

  • SKUs in URLs: Just like the website, [http://chordata.presserfischer.com/O21X chordata.presserfischer.com/O21X] now takes you to the O21X product page.
  • IDML Export
    • InDesign Markup Language (IDML) documents can now be exported from products. Choose a template, upload an artwork-pdf file, and the system will automatically insert data and files where needed to build a complete publication.
    • IDML Templates can now be uploaded and downloaded into Chordata.
  • Ranges: Ranges now display correctly and are available for download in PDF and SVG format.
  • [http://chordata.presserfischer.com/wp-admin/tools.php?page=registered-products-pdf-export Registered Media Export]: A tool to calculate the download codes for a given SKU. It also can export the Cover-2 instructions to add to a publication.
  • New and Improved Search
    • Lots of under the hood serch optimizations
    • You can now quick search multiple SKUs with a comma delimited list.
    • Comma-delimited lists now work in the Search using the “IN” operator.
  • Updates to the About Pages with an added Modules page.
  • Bulk Operations in Trash: You can now trash and restore multiple items at once.
  • Instrumentation Improvements: You can now select multiple instrumentation boxes at once using shift-click.
  • Notable Bug Fixes
    • You can now push NAV Status Codes when a product is Withdrawn.
    • Improvements to the contract generation module.
    • Other smaller improvements.

Chordata 1.3.1

Released October 26, 2018

A quick hotfix update just in time for Halloween!

  • NAV Errors: We have fixed the major issue with NAV errors and barcodes which causes product info to not be saved in NAV.
  • Search Fields: Some small but important fields in Search have been added such as “date modified”, “date created”, “creator”, and “modifier”, where you can search by the user that modified or created the entry.
  • Happy Halloween! We’ve added a Halloween skin just for fun. You can turn it on or off in your user profile.

Chordata 1.2

Released September 18, 2018

New features include:

  • New Fields from Nav: Additional fields from Nav are now supported in Chordata. These values will flow into Nav upon save of a Product.
    • Classes: The category system in Nav has been brought in to Products. These select boxes cascade into one another allowing a tightly validated list of categories.
    • Format: This field has been brought in to Products under “Print Specs” and can be used to determine the type of publication.
  • Contract Generation: Now it is possible to generate a Contract\’s Word Document on the fly and have it auto-fill data from the Contract record.
  • Barcode Symbologies: Any number in the Barcodes Module can now be downloaded as a Barcode Symbology PDF file. These files can be downloaded on the Barcodes settings page, or on individual Product pages as needed.
  • Orchestra Shorthand Notation: Instrumentation data can now be represented as “Orchestra Shorthand” in appropriate contexts.
    • On the Instrument Ensembles page, the instrumentation column can be displayed in shorthand
    • On the Work and Product main table pages, the instrumentation column can be displayed in shorthand
    • On Work and Product entry pages, the instrumentation field data can be exported in shorthand
    • On Work and Product entry pages, or the Instrument Ensembles page, the instrumentation field will now accept shorthand as a posibilitiy when building instrumentation data.
    • Users can choose whether to display the shorthand by default on all instrumentation fields. Just change the setting in your user profile.

Chordata 1.1

Released August 13, 2018

New features include:

  • Product Status Module
  • Sticky Entity Page Header:
    • The title header on edit pages is now sticky to the top of the page, so you will always know where you are even when scrolled far down a page.
    • Major action buttons have been placed in the header so you have access to them at any given moment.
    • The “title” on edit pages are now dynamic and will change depending on context. Former “title” fields are now moved down in the metaboxes with the rest of the primary info.
  • Refreshed Look and Feel:
    • Improvements to fields\’ appearance, such as labels above input boxes and larger arrows on selects.
    • Transitional fields are now pushed down into a small box to get them out of the way of more important work.
  • Barcodes Module for assigning and storing UPC, ISBN, and ISMN numbers.
  • Real-time data now flows from NAV. Inventory and price fields now update automatically.
  • New dashboard widgets and about page.