This is easily one of the best interfaces for a music player that I have ever seen. The music selection is great, load times are nice and there are no ads. Did I mention the interface is both gorgeous and efficient?
I would prefer that it played a song when I clicked on the title rather than having to hit 'Play Song' each time. Other than that stunning job on this application.
Edit: I felt I should have been more constructive/useful.
The download client stinks. I have OS.X Tiger, and the client farked on me, and doesn't allow me to do anything else to it. No idea how to fix it.
It took me 3 days to get accepted into program. That isn't such a big deal, except there was no confirmation email/text to let me know that the request went through. I ended up signing up three times till I figured it out.
Songs keep disappearing and reappearing when doing a song search. Within minutes. If a song disappears and it's on your queue, there is now way to know. The playlist just gets stuck there. And as others have stated, the play button not actually starting any playing is rather annoying. And this was on XP.
1 Search for song "Concord Dawn Morning Light"
2 Click on first song title
3 Click on Play button on lower right, as I'm used to from every audio device and program since I've been born.
4 Uh, nothing.
5 Double click on song.
6 Nothing.
7 Oh, I have to click Play Song, or that cryptic little control on the right of the name.
I tried it out at work this morning, and couldn't get anything to play on either firefox or safari. I can queue up music, and hitting play changes it to a pause button, but the song never starts.
Heh, when I load the page it just says "Alternative content" in an H1. I am using Iceweasel with javascript disabled and Gnash instead of Flash though :)
Excellent design. Really, much better than anything I could ever do. My humble attempt at constructive criticism follows.
The "play song" overlay is too obtrusive. It feels interruptive, which is what the transparency is trying to avoid. Maybe make the X out button bigger and more prominent?
Also, does anyone know if there is a way to kill the Flex initialization and loading bar? It just feels amateur.
Finally, the biggest thing I'm looking for in a site like this is the ability to quickly download whole albums? Maybe you should cross-reference the album search with an index of the album, so as to ensure it only downloads one copy of each song, and have a one-button album download feature.
Also, isn't it a trivial process to determine which links are still live by seeing if each user plays through the song's entirety?
Lots of labels have distribution deals with GS, and more are signing on everyday. They have an escrow system set up so that as the deals are signed, the labels can collect any money that has accrued.
I would argue that the law is ill equipped (or not the best place) to hammer out the rights and wrongs of emerging technologies that clearly will not go away. The only way forward for the labels is to embrace these 'upstarts' and work with all of them for a few years in profit sharing deals (reasonable ones not like the Imeem deal) and with a little lateral thinking imagine the profits to be made in a world full of content on demand (films included). But due to the nature of the beast, costs must come down 'right down' before they will go back up (legally).
Way cool, fast and responsive with a clean interface. I was impressed when I drag and dropped an album to my playlist, it's nice to see such an intuitive GUI.
Cool, but it stops every 15 seconds for me, making the music unlistenable (the "Popular" category is already 95% unlistenable due to the horror that is average taste in music...but searching turns up all sorts of good stuff). Since the major labels aren't historically friendly to this kind of thing, I suspect it won't last long even if they try to make it profitable for the labels. Indie labels are far more open-minded.
This is easily one of the best interfaces for a music player that I have ever seen. The music selection is great, load times are nice and there are no ads. Did I mention the interface is both gorgeous and efficient?
I would prefer that it played a song when I clicked on the title rather than having to hit 'Play Song' each time. Other than that stunning job on this application.
Edit: I felt I should have been more constructive/useful.