Just in case anyone is still using YouTube for music
grooveshark.com
grooveshark.com
For me, this is groundbreaking. It's like last.fm done right. I feel the same elation as when I first used Napster.
Quick check. Lots of metal and folk. Some local stuff (Scandinavian). Seems to be little jazz and world (balkan folk, arabic, etc. Had e.g. Natacha Atlas and Susheela Raman.) Problems with Unicode.
Really really good start. Now just needs to add lots more esoteric stuff I can find! (Unicode would be nice.)
Since using that, iTunes: "Last opened: Thursday, 26 February 2009 11:27"
It just feels like I'm browsing for music on iTunes, and listening to the previews....except the previews are the full songs! It rocks! :)
In case anyone from Grooveshark is reading this, here are two minor UI suggestions:
- It's rather easy to miss the volume control since it's so far removed from the other play controls. Perhaps it would be an idea to move it over there.
- A button to queue up all the songs in a search result. If it exists already I'm not seeing it.
The only problem for me, and the thing that it lacks that YouTube doesn't, is music that isn't mainstream and hasn't been released by a label. Songs that make it on mixtapes and other singles that artists use to promote themselves and their future albums don't seem to be available from the searches that I've run. But they are available on YouTube.
Just like with YouTube. But with an Java app that would upload folders in batches.
I did so back in september. At the time there was even some scheme in which uploader would get money for uploading popular stuff, but I don't remember any details.
Facebook Connect / OpenID would be nice. Also, when I signed up with a taken username it gave me an "unexpected error" message, a bit sloppy.
Dragon's Den is fun to watch.
Some of the metadata appears to be messed up, as well. I clicked on what I thought was a Lemonheads album and got Presidents of the United States of America covering "Video Killed The Radio Star" instead.
And the billion-dollar question: How can this possibly be a sustainable business model? Ads for Verizon surely won't cover the development, licensing, and operating expenses for this site, will it?
Just wondering, they may have some reasons
Back to the topic, as a music site developer myself, I can assure you that everything (except streaming[1]) you see on grooveshark can be implemented using XHTML, a JS framework (I love jQuery über alles) and an HTTP backend. Wheter or not do it depends mainly from the target of your audience and the browsers they use, because to achieve 100% browser compatibility, especially when dealing with older IE versions, imposes a bit of headbanging over their quirks and issues. Another point is performance: on older machines, animating big elements on the page (like grooveshark does) causes flicker and a clumsy experience for the user. The last point is maintainability and integration: after all, flash software is another piece of the stack you have to coordinate, implement, integrate and deploy.
So, it's a bit controversial which path to choose; on our project we're following a mix of the two, by reducing the flash implementation to the bare minimum to accomplish streaming, upload (ajax upload via iframe is a bit of a mess) and a set of JS interfaces to implement the rest of the interface via XHTML. Similar to http://playlist.com 's approach.
The last consideration that comes to my mind is purely ethical/political: I prefer to use open standards and contribute back to open projects via source code, and not be forced to use closed technologies and tools and contribute back via cash, having to read clumsy documentation, little opportunity to improve anything, and the list could go on and on.. :).
[1] Luckily this is gonna change with HTML5!
I found the moving elements on grooveshark to be quite a bit annoying anyway.
Also the database is much less complete than the one of www.deezer.com as of now.
Been using that site for months, all the other ones (even grooveshark) lack certain alternative songs which you can find on hypem.
The list with popular songs on hypem is also better, but that might just be my personal taste.
Surprised to find some nice international selections on there; usually have a hard time locating some non-Western music so it's refreshing to find some good World genres out there especially in such high quality and with such a nice, clean interface.
(Y)
After a while it gets a bit too "flashy" though.
Would like to see some social/discussion functionalities.
Life is too short for Flash pages (without graceful alt's degrading to html).
1) It protects me from any security, privacy, and correctness flaws that might exist in the Flash implementation on my computer.
2) It makes my computer snappier by not letting poorly written Flash ads eat my CPU, RAM, and battery.
3) It keeps the blinky flashy ads to a minimum while I read content.
It is one click on the content area to load and run a flash, so if I go to a web site and really want to see the flash content that isn't too high a price to pay. (modifier click to white list).