Hello everybody!
I’ve been active here on Hooktheory for close to a year now. Analyzing songs for this site has helped me unbelievably much in learning music theory and improving my ear, and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it. Over the past year I’ve spent countless hours in the Hookpad UI, and with that comes the inevitable bumping into a few things you think could be improved.
The most frustrating one in the lot is without a doubt the restrictions placed on the title/artist name when submitting an analysis. Why is this so bad, you ask? Well, I’m from Sweden. The fact that a title can only contain letters from A to Z (and numbers from 0-9 plus ’ and -) severely cripples my ability to upload Swedish songs with correct titles, since a large portion of Swedish words contain either Å, Ä, or Ö, which despite looking like A:s and O:s with dots and circles on them are in fact completely unique letters. Sure, I could just replace the Å:s, Ä:s, and Ö:s in the titles with A:s or O:s,(and I have: Björnes Magasin), but I’d much rather do it right. Earlier today I got the idea to analyse Håkan Hellströms “Du kan gå din egen väg”, and I refrained from publishing it because of this.
If you fix this seemingly minor issue I can assure you that I will be adding a lot more Swedish songs to the database in the future. Being able to use a comma, a colon, a slash, or even a dot every now and then wouldn’t hurt either. 