The New Grooveshark | Hacker News Reader

The New Grooveshark

blog.grooveshark.com

103 pointsandrijac89 comments

I've never used this site before, so I can't comment on how it used to work. This interface is not at all intuitive though.

  - click a play button on a song
    - music starts playing
  - click a different play button
    - nothing happens
  - click pause
    - music stops
  - click a different play button
    - nothing happens
  - click play
    - first song continues playing

Steps to get a second song to actually play after you've got a first one playing:

  - find the word Queue (non-underlined, not a button) in the lower right
  - click it
  - click "clear queue"
  - hit the back button (for some reason, the page has navigated away)
  - click the play button on a song

I can understand how they want it to work, after plenty of frustration just trying to listen to some songs. But they've clearly been spending way too much time with it internally without showing it to real world users.

Expectation: clicking the play button on a song plays the song.

Suggestion: make all this "queueing" stuff be something you opt into, after deciding that you want it and learning how it's supposed to work. Or at the very least add a second play button per song that actually plays the song.

EDIT: I just found the link to see the old interface, and despite the above, this new interface is a million times better. The old interface was an empty box saying "what song do you want to hear?" I have no f'ng clue what song I want to hear. I'm on your site so that you can show me some cool new music that I might want to hear.

Every link on that old interface leads to an empty screen saying basically "go away, you uncultured, non-music-knowing-about person and don't come back until you've researched enough about music to add some songs to your collection." This new look comes across more like "check out all this music. It's all good, so come in and play around". Much better way to greet newcomers to your site.

After reading everything you wrote I immediately thought..damn that must be a really horrible website navigation nightmare. So I went to the website, searched for an artist and dragged it. Then I played it. Then ..(cringe)..I did it....again. In summary, as of the moment of this post, the small scale nuclear holocaust of complexity you have described apparently lay dormant. My experience was actually kind of boring.

Edit*

I see what is happening. There are a couple of paths users can take based on if they click or drag items, and I just so happened to take the smoothest one.

Click to add is faster when adding to the playlist. It's just the addition of the small plus to the play symbol isn't immediately obvious if your mouse is hovering over it. I like it better than click to drag. But drag is surely best for first encounter.

If you're currently listening to a song and you hit play on another song, it should queue up the second song to play when the first finishes. When you started playing the first song, also, the queue should have opened up at the bottom to show a list of the songs, and if you wanted to skip to the second song you could either hit the next button or the play button in the second song in the list.

http://cl.ly/image/390409163d2D Song playing is in orange, you can see the play button on the second song when you hover it.

Did the queue not open up for you after hitting play on the first song? Normally it should, unless you've manually closed the queue previously, but if this was your first visit that shouldn't be the case. When the queue is open, it should be pretty visually apparent what clicking the play button did. Also, most places that will add instead of play immediately should have an icon change (play+) http://cl.ly/image/1R3n1I1S0y0i

There may be a few places that either are not updating their icon or should be playing immediately but have the wrong classname and are getting caught in the 'play next' process. Bugs happen, I'll make sure it's on the list of things to check.

When you click on a playlist, it seems to drop about 20 songs into that queue, completely filling the bottom of the browser window. So clicking another song gives precisely no feedback.

I imagine it's happily dropping an icon off the screen someplace, but there's no evidence of it. Unless you happen to open the aforementioned "queue" box and see that the number has changed.

Incidentally, I notice that the box at the bottom says "drag music here." On Win7/Chrome, attempting to drag a song usually just selects the entire page. I gave up on trying until coming back here and seeing people talking about that ability. I'd recommend getting an onselectstart handler onto that page.

Hey Jason thanks for the feedback!

Queue Feedback: You're right that we need some queue adding feedback and we've been trying to find a way to go about it that won't prove to annoying to the user. Next week you should see a small popup above the queue count every time you add :)

Dragging: We're trying to figure out what page you were trying to drag song from. Many of the pages/grids are draggable but we still have a few places left to implement it.

Was it the Community page by chance? We'll be adding the ability to drag from there, hopefully by the end of the month.

I was dragging from the homepage. It seemed to happen more often when I was scrolled down a bit, but overall about half my drag attempts dragged whereas the other half selected.

You can reproduce the select effect by simply missing an icon when you start your drag. Now imagine that happening when you were directly over one.

All the best. As I said before, this is a massive improvement on the original. I'll actually use this site.

>they've clearly been spending way too much time with it internally without showing it to real world users //

I find it quite easy to use but have used the old interface - which incidentally I don't see this as that much different to, much more responsive (in the non-web3 sense).

What they're trying to do is allow you to select a playlist of music whilst listening. Their primary use-case appears to be someone who knows what they want to listen to, but they offer "radio stations" if you just want a sample of a category of music.

First song you add to the playlist (at bottom of screen) is autostarted. You search for another song, click the triangle-plus button and that song is added to playlist.

You can hover a song in the playlist to get more options or just click it to play that song.

If you select a few songs then click "radio off" (to turn it on!) then the "radio" feature selects similar songs and continues to do so. Songs in the selection can be up/downvoted to say you want more/none of that type of song (used to be anyway, too granular IMO).

One thing they do really well is to let you login without stopping the music.

> Or at the very least add a second play button per song that actually plays the song.

Right click, Play Song Now. Not as discoverable as the play/queue button, but at least the option exists.

I think an animation of the item flying down to the queue would help emphasize that you're queuing a song, not playing it. But I don't know how easy that would be.

> The old interface was an empty box saying "what song do you want to hear?" I have no f'ng clue what song I want to hear. I'm on your site so that you can show me some cool new music that I might want to hear.

Then you should listen to some radio site that feeds you music. I enjoy Grooveshark precisely for this reason: I can make a playlist of things I want to listen to, and listen to them.

I'm VIP user on GS for 3 years now.

The interface was just downhill ever since they've switched from Flash. And not only that, but this thing hogs entire CPU sometimes.

Android app is pretty sweet, though it didn't received update in quite a while.

Btw, you can be on the edge all the time on http://preview.grooveshark.com

Not only that but they've broke the promise that they'll be always free (they're not in a lot of countries) and a promise to keep my VIP subscription cost permamently at what I've subscribed too.

I'm still a whore and use them as my primary source of music though, so I guess I endorse them.

EDIT: No, they've actually kept the original pricing. My mistake.

GS dev here, you should be grandfathered at the old price, if that's not the case for you then we goofed! If you contact support@grooveshark.com they should be able to get that corrected for you. :)

Actually, no, everything's fine. My mistake, editing the original complaint now.

Is html5.grooveshark.com going away any time soon? Ive been using that for a while on my phone and it works pretty good.

No way! We just put a ton of blood, sweat and tears into it, and we're not done. :)

> The interface was just downhill ever since they've switched from Flash. And not only that, but this thing hogs entire CPU sometimes.

Absolutely agreed! I sent them feedback about this when that change happened. The first UI was perfect!

The Android app manages to get stuck buffering a song nearly every time I use it, even on a wifi connection. The widget on my homescreen still has a spinning circle instead of a play button even though I killed the app after it got stuck days ago.

How grooveshark remains in business blows my mind. They must have super lawyers, and super investors to pay them.

How is Grooveshark still in business? Weren't they having a lot of issues with copyright?

yes, like youtube and the piratebay. ;)

This is a wonderful update. I'll allow that it takes a moment to understand that the playlist along the lower edge should be thought of separately from the navigation it really only takes a moment. And the new front page opening is much more welcoming and I'd say the subtle addition of the (+) on the play symbol is enough of a cue. I never liked seeing the adverts page, so big and open, and found the old left hand navigation cluttered, useless, and to be ignored. But I'm happy to see that everything flows better now and like everything about it.

The artist overview looks much better now that the bio has been added and only a few album covers are showcased followed by a list of the artists most frequented songs. Which is what I want to see. I was always annoyed by the Activity Feed for taking up the space which ought to have been granted to Top Songs. My favorite change is the large Share Song invitation seen after clicking on a song. I'd really like to see Grooveshark replace YouTube for non-video music streaming and linking and I hope making that link so prominent will make it happen.

I do have a couple questions though. As someone who doesn't have an account I didn't see a link to add music and if I wasn't familiar with Grooveshark I wouldn't even know that was an option. Also I was wondering why the Artists Top Songs and Comments aren't switched when viewing a single song. And last, I noticed the radio button has been tucked away nicely. Since it's a switch would you consider leaving the menu up for a half second? That may be an awful idea but switches are meant to be seen and felt so I thought I'd mention it just the same.

edit: Since I was praising the quick sharing might as well: http://grooveshark.com/s/Do+Ya+Thang/4wvNTg?src=5

Took a look at the code. It's built with Backbone.js!

Yup! The previous version used JMVC but it was a poor fit. Backbone does juuuust enough to help you out then gets out of your way. Means you have to write a lot of your own architecture but that's pretty much my favorite thing to do ever (and I hated JMVC) so I gladly did so.

The site is way faster now, despite having more stuff going on, just because half the codebase is no longer trying to hack around the parts of JMVC we didn't need.

Did you ever look into using something like LayoutManager or Marionette?

No, after JMVC I just wanted to write it to work the way we wanted it to work without dealing with yet another framework.

+1. I was using marionette, but again, it's buying into an entire system. I ended up writing my own lightweight (15 lines?) version of their region manager and use that now.

(Marionette is a great project though!)

Hey cowpewter -- I'd love to have you write up your experience for http://backbonejs.org/#examples ... email me a paragraph if you're interested.

Edit: One tip for you as well. I noticed that you're using "#!" in your URL routes. You probably don't want to be doing that these days -- either just plain "#" works, or pushState with hybrid server-side renders if you want to be indexed by search engines.

Sure thing, just got some bugs to squash first. And thanks for making such an awesome lightweight framework.

pushState is somewhere on the backburner...

We definitely need to get to the pushState change but #! is the way to go for being indexed properly without pushState (via _escaped_fragment_).

I'm a frequent user, and I am really liking this design. Change is always a little difficult to get used to, but I'm finding it snappier.

The "Playlists" screen doesn't seem to be working. I tried visiting it and the spinner's been going for a long time. I only have about 20. I also right clicked a song and clicked 'Add to Playlist' > 'New Playlist' and it said it was created, but when I right clicked another song, the new playlist wasn't available in the list of my playlists. I said 'New Playlist' again and typed in the same thing, and it created it again. I clicked the button to view the new playlist and it only had the one song in it, so it must have overwritten what I'd just created. Dragging songs into the playlist is working fine, but I have no idea if it's getting saved, since I can't view the "My Playlists" page, and it's not showing up in the context menu listing my playlists. Anyways, hope this helps you do some debugging in the area.

I actually found the interface smooth and intuitive.

One gotcha, however. Selecting a video to play while a song is already playing produces a broken UX for me - the video appeared in a modal box, but was truncated by the queue and play bars at the bottom of the screen. There was no obvious way to view the whole video since the controls at the bottom were hidden.

I went to grooveshark.com and looked at the page for a few seconds. When I went to close the tab, a JavaScript popup asked me if I was sure that I wanted to "navigate away". Why, oh why does Grooveshark think that was useful, necessary, or a good way to treat a user?

Looks like it's to catch the case where you've got music playing and inadvertently close the tab. There should probably be a check to make sure you've actually got something playing in your queue.

We do that when you have music playing and we also currently do it in the first 30 seconds of loading the page as an awful hack around some completely crappy ads that force redirects that have gotten into our ad networks. It's just in there until we can get the ad problem fixed.

I do something similar on my own site, but the difference is it only kicks in if playing has started. I think they have the right intention, but they need to add an if statement in their window.onbeforeunload hook. (Edit - I see Grooveshark said they only do it for the first 30 seconds of the site loading as a workaround.)

I haven't had any complaints about it and personally find it useful. Especially as it lets me quickly "close all right tabs" without stopping to think if I'm about to break what I'm listening to. However, these are podcasts and maybe people are less fussed about a random song stopping halfway through.

I love Grooveshark and this redesign is really nice. It clears out a lot of the menu and features.

But the MyMusic page is really messy... I hope it's a bug because it's barely usable (http://i.imgur.com/TAzxG.jpg)

That's a bug. What browser/OS are you using?

This looks to be a zoom bug. We're looking into a fix for this!

Never used the site before, I gave it a go. What I wanted to find, I could not find. What I did find, the sound quality was, to me, awful. Maybe its just my taste in music and ears, but for me, still a long way to go.

Curious as to what you were looking for but was missing? I've noticed over the last year more 'obscure' artists starting to appear, and less '0 results' searches - though this is mainly electronica, so maybe holes elsewhere.

I think it depends on how much widespread is what you want to find. Personally I would rather see people use this service, than playing low quality videos on youtube.

Yes, you need a 90MB FLAC file to hear all those "decibels bro".

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/concluding-the-grea...

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/04/mp3-or-lossless-see-if-...

While yes, that is true, it doesn't necessarily apply to this circumstance. The person you replied to might have played a song by an artist that was an inferior copy uploaded by another user.

We restrict uploads to a minimum of 128kbps and prefer 192kbps if it's available. It is of course possible for someone to transcode a 64kbps file up to 128 or 192kbps to make us play something that truly sounds awful, but based on my own personal listening that doesn't seem to be the case often, if ever, in practice.

Seems like there's a few issues with sections expanding to 100% of the available width within the main centered container. If anything they should just have the centered container expand to the full width of the screen a-la Netflix to make use of maximum screen real estate (not that I condone Netflix's obscene use of use of hover events to scroll sideways).

Screenshot for reference (1440x900): http://cl.ly/image/1r2906063g20

A great improvement over the old interface, but still has some room to improve.

Looks clean, and seems to be faster as well. Only regret, they are still using flash for audio: would have been nice to use HTML5 like with html5.grooveshark.com.

We use it for a lot more than that, actually. Cross-domain request support that works even in browsers that don't do CORS, and a persistent socket connection to our servers that takes care of all the new awesome real-time social stuff (so we don't have to poll). Seeing what your friends are playing in real-time in the sidebar is just the beginning. We have a lot more stuff planned that uses that functionality.

When not having flash installed, the site popups a dialog suggesting to go to html5.grooveshark.com "for a flash-free experience". When clicking that link, the browser gets redirected to grooveshark.com and the dialog popups again.

Chrome 20.0.1132.47 Ubuntu 12.04

Thanks for the bug report, I'll look into it.

Edit: Can't reproduce on my machine. Can you clear any cookies related to Grooveshark and try it? I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the cookies we're using to direct people to the new interface.

I deleted all cookies and the issue remains.

... I think I got it. For unblocking youtube-videos which are heavily censored here in Germany, I have the extension Proxmate installed. Which offers access to Grooveshark, which I just noticed. Without it, I can't even access the site, so it's safe to assume the extension is responsible, probably detecting the blockade and redirecting.

A shame you geocensor your site :( But sorry for the false bugreport.

No problem, thanks for reporting back on it.

I like it a lot more than the old interface, way more speedy. I have two questions. 1) Does linking to last.fm scrobble your tracks? The description doesn't say. And 2) Can I disable the sidebar when logged in? I just used an adblock filter for now but that's a bit inelegant. Thanks!

Thanks ^^ We're still working on trying to make it even speedier.

And yes, if you link your Last.fm account we scrobble your listens. If you're listening to something embarrassing or just letting people use your account to add music at a party or something, you can disable scrobbling for the current session (until you refresh the page) by clicking on the Gear in the top right, choosing Settings, Connect, then clicking the "Disable Scrobbling for this session" button.

The sidebar will shrink to a super narrow version if your browser window is narrow enough, but there's not currently a button to toggle it. There was at one point during the redesign though, so it's still a good possibility it will come back if there is user demand for it.

That's awesome, I'll link last.fm now then.

I do have a suggestion, which may or may not be a terrible idea. If somebody does a perfect search for an artist, why not go directly to that artists page instead of a search page? If I type "Supertramp", I'm probably not looking for a genre or album by that name.

I suppose it could have adverse effects in corner cases (common sounding artist names like "rock" maybe?), but I bet there's a way to determine with pretty good accuracy if they're trying to do a search or go directly to an artist page.

If we find an exact match, we should feature the artist above the song results. Not exactly going straight to the artist's page, but just one click away.

It does seem to work for me for "Supertramp" http://cl.ly/image/0S253x0J3p2v

I wrote about half that feature and I made extra sure that something like "rock" should highlight the Rock genre and "kid rock" should highlight the artist and "party rock" should highlight the album.

Oh I see, I figured Artists were just listed above songs. I didn't realize it made guesses about your search. Okay, cool, that's neat. I guess you guys opted to show search results in all cases even if you were pretty sure you knew what the person was looking for - which is fair.

The only feature I was looking for was "Now with less legal issues". I have used Grooveshark a lot, but songs would keep disappearing due to DMCA take downs. They have a very innovative HTML5 web app and I love their selection, but there is a little too much legal grey ground for me to invest my long term usage in their service.

When I visit the site from firefox I receive an SELinux notice. "SELinux is preventing /usr/lib64/xulrunner-2/plugin-container from name_connect access on the tcp_socket" [for port 81]

Also, my firewall is blocking the app from connecting to 8.20.213.43:843

Not sure about port 843, but port 81 is for our chat server that allows you to see realtime updates to the sidebar showing what your friends are listening to. We will probably end up moving that over to port 80 so we don't end up triggering blocks like this.

I don't notice any difference in the ui but I guess that's because I'm never logged in, if I want to share music I usually just send a new artist to my friends manually. Speed has increased though which is very nice, good work!

It seems like there's no ordered sorting. I can't say sort my library by track and then by album to you know... play songs in order unless I select a specific album and sort on that. Not especially straightforward.

This is definitely a missing feature/bug - we'll address it as soon as possible.

And still not available in Germany anymore thanks to GEMA. I use Spotify now.

I think the GEMA should be their smallest problem given the amount of illegal content they keep offering. In my opinion they should have been shut down by now.

Grooveshark or Spotify?

works just fine with proxies ( see xroxy ). Listening right now to it, from the very Germany.

Same with youtube, etc. GEMA cannot enforce this at all, just normal people are collateral victims, as usual.

They should use that OPUS codec soon, and give up Flash completely.

I'm really liking the new interface, but damn that's a lot of wasted space. Trying to click through songs is like looking through a pin hole. Why is it all so small?

Just played around with it a bit. Looks like a more cluttered version of Soundcloud without as engaging of a social aspect.

Used to use it all the time though.

Music recommendation/discovery feature - finally!

The interface looks a lot cleaner. Good work.

Too bad they can't get their iOS app through the apple approval process. It would be a serious contender to Spotify.

I am pretty sure that they can't get the approval from Apple because they cannot prove that they have the rights to publish the content.

Indeed, i'm not saying apple is unfair but it's just a pity we don't have a native ios app, despite the legal affairs of grooveshark. There is a cydia version though :)

They would have a significant financial advantage over Spotify, who pay a large sum to licence the music they carry.

Weren't they also yanked from the Google Play store?

Yes, you can download the app from http://mobile.grooveshark.com/android

Their webpage for iOS devices is actually serviceable.

I primarily use Grooveshark to find tunes I can't find on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon, or iTunes (I listen to a lot of import Jazz and 60s French pop.) For the dozen times a year I fire it up on my iOS device, it performs well.

Give http://html5.grooveshark.com a try (or just http://grooveshark.com on your phone)!

I love it. Grooveshark now has the best digital music browsing experience, IMHO.

unfortunately it's blocked in germany (due to "unreasonably high cost of operation").

does anyone know if this has something to do with the GEMA (which also won't let us watch so many youtube-videos in germany)?

Looks a little bootstrappy.

my fav ui is still html5.grooveshark.com tho

My Android keeps auto stopping after current song... probably, due to screen power saving(?)

Yeah unfortunately this is a browser thing. We are actively searching for hacks/workarounds but haven't found anything yet. In fact it's even worse with the Chrome browser, music stops playing the second you lock the screen. :(

It does not do last.fm scrobbling, though. Sent them an email about it a few days ago.

Does the default Grooveshark site let you scrobble to last.fm? If so, how do you do it?

Yes.

Might be a VIP feature, I'm not sure.

yep, just go to the profile settings, under "connect accounts" tab you can connect it with your last.fm account.

Excellent, I learned something new, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com