
The New Grooveshark - andrijac
http://blog.grooveshark.com/post/33776758687/the-new-grooveshark
======
jasonkester
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.

~~~
cowpewter
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.

~~~
jasonkester
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.

~~~
blueys54
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.

~~~
jasonkester
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.

------
dsirijus
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.

~~~
wanderr
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. :)

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

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

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

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

~~~
bookwormAT
yes, like youtube and the piratebay. ;)

------
Radix_
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>

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

~~~
cowpewter
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.

~~~
jashkenas
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.

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

pushState is somewhere on the backburner...

------
alainbryden
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.

------
Angostura
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.

------
jimm
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?

~~~
edoloughlin
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.

~~~
cowpewter
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.

------
grosbisou
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>)

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

------
alan_cx
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.

~~~
sergiotapia
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.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/concluding-the-great-
mp3-bitrate-experiment.html)

[http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/04/mp3-or-lossless-see-
if-...](http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/04/mp3-or-lossless-see-if-you-can-
hear-the-difference-with-this-test/)

~~~
fireflash38
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.

~~~
wanderr
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.

------
robertnealan
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.

------
moystard
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.

~~~
cowpewter
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.

~~~
SquareWheel
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!

~~~
cowpewter
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.

~~~
SquareWheel
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.

~~~
cowpewter
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.

~~~
SquareWheel
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.

------
mrinterweb
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.

------
zoowar
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

~~~
wanderr
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.

------
precisioncoder
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!

------
meunier
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.

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

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

~~~
thirdsun
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.

~~~
thomaslutz
Grooveshark or Spotify?

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

------
laserDinosaur
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?

------
TimSchumann
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.

------
jitbit
Music recommendation/discovery feature - finally!

------
munyukim
The interface looks a lot cleaner. Good work.

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

~~~
LinaLauneBaer
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.

~~~
risratorn
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 :)

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

------
Joe-Z
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)?

------
lewisflude
Looks a little bootstrappy.

------
zobzu
my fav ui is still html5.grooveshark.com tho

~~~
johnx123-up
My Android keeps auto stopping after current song... probably, due to screen
power saving(?)

~~~
wanderr
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. :(

