Ask YC: Grooveshark Lite, What Do You Think?

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.

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.

http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/04/22/update-grooveshar...

  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.

Nonetheless, pretty cool.

But then the music stops - shouldn't it continue playing on down the list? Seems to me the right default is to play until told to stop.

(Oh and that's Mac + FF2, worked fine for me unlike the other guy on this thread)

Barring that, I am impressed with the clean UI, very iPhone-esque.

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?

By the way, was this made in Adobe Flex?

Otherwise, fracking awesome.