

JamLegend is hiring interns this summer - sharpshoot
http://snaptalent.com/company/jamlegend/

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chris11
I like the layout of the JamLegend page on Snaptalent. The job is something
I'm interested in and Snaptalent seems to do a good job aggregating info about
JamLegend.

One quick question though. What are the benefits to signing up? The sign up ad
could be read as implying that signing up would be beneficial to me in
applying to JamLegend. Are you offering any services, like resume review? Or
is this page all that a logged in user would see, and account benefits are
more general things like search access?

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ALee
Chris, I'm one of the founders of JamLegend, so feel free to e-mail me
directly if you have any questions about JamLegend. We have been in News.YC
for a while, so it holds a particular place in our hearts if people are
referred from there.

I've been very happy with SnapTalent because I think it authentically conveys
our company and we've helped test parts of their system. Snaptalent is so
refreshing because it's a company that finally gets it.

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amohr
So your Snaptalent profile says it's 1-10 employees, and there's 4 positions
for interns. That seems like a pretty high intern/fulltime ratio. Are you
planning on filling all 4 of those?

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ALee
We hope to, but the decision for us is not to bring in a warm body, but to
have a high threshold and if someone clears it then then they join.

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mcastner
That's really cool, I'd never heard of either of these sites before. Too bad
I'm on the east coast or I would definitely apply for this internship.

Now I'm looking for internships closer to home on SnapTalent.

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sharpshoot
<http://snaptalent.com/company/112/> \- Odylfarm

and Buglabs <http://snaptalent.com/company/172/>

are hiring on the East coast among others.

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bcater
What a cool company! JamLegend, that is.

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ALee
Thanks Bcater. Please spread the word to those who want to join us in
revolutionizing music gaming, the people we bring on will have HUGE impact on
products that our users will immediately use.

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10ren
The site and game look great, success seem inevitable; but I find playing
unsatisfying.

The chosen notes often seem independent of the guitar lines in the song; and
when played, they're not in sync. So for me, it's more like a simon-says game
with incidental background music. :-)

\- Is this a technical problem? Flash is not so great at syncing sounds and
actions; and additionally, I'm trying it on a low-powered eee PC (most flash
games are fine on it).

\- Or is it me? I've heard that these games are not like playing the
instrument at all (I'm an old guitar player, just garage bands and teaching,
but I can play), and so maybe this spoils the experience for me.

I hope this feedback is useful to you - and even better if you can enlighten
me! Thanks :-)

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mcastner
They seemed to be about as in sync as any other game of this genre. Your eeepc
might be part of the sync issues.

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10ren
But how in sync is the genre? :-) That's part of my question.

However, it now seems the eeePC is the main factor, as it's straining at some
other points in the UI.

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triplefox
It is entirely a technical limitation of Flash. You have no way of
guaranteeing a set sound latency, or even monitoring how much is present.
According to the Adobe devs this might change in future versions.

But for right now, music games on Flash can't live up to the expectations set
by games on other platforms.

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ALee
All true on this thread. We push Flash pretty hard (could probably beat it a
little further), but if you're interested in helping solve these tough
problems, we'd love to talk.

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10ren
To be honest, until Adobe changes Flash, I think Java is the best bet in terms
of responsiveness (there's still random garbage collection delays of around
100ms so not perfect; but an improvement). Installation base is comparable to
Flash.

But not in terms of design: for although a Java version theoretically could be
as pretty as your Flash version (and it _is_ very pretty), the designer-tool
support really isn't there. It would be hard to port; and hard to modify. Sun
has some tool support for designers, but I'm sure it has nightmare usability.

I think both design and responsiveness are crucial in your space, so this is a
difficult one.

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RWilson
This is something we looked at for a while when starting out, and even posted
on HN to ask about (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203864>). In the end,
we chose Flex because it seemed like we could get good enough performance
while enjoying the benefits of quicker development. We mostly use pure AS3,
but we saved some time with a few components. Hopefully someday we can strip
those out and cut the Flex framework overhead.

But yes, Flash player has an unpredictably crappy internal clock and
performance varies significantly based on the browser and OS, so synchronizing
the notes with the music has been a challenge. For the most part, I think
we've done a fairly good job compared to the existing players. We scale
intense tasks dynamically in game but there is definitely room to improve
(custom a/v delay, controller delay, really-crappy-performance mode, etc).

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10ren
Sorry, I made a mistake: I was thinking you are producing sound when the
player hits a key - but you aren't. I think that's not part of the "guitar
hero" concept anyway (it is in a drum version I saw in an arcade; a different
story).

Anyway, I found that java can play user-triggered sounds instantly (or
perceived as such), whereas Flash can't. I experimented with this in Flash,
researched it/asked about it on FlashKit - and all the Flash music games I
found with triggered sounds suffered from this same problem. So it's very
likely true, but not relevant for you. :-)

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jrnkntl
I'm still looking for an internship abroad (I'm from the Netherlands), and
this sounds like a cool opportunity! I only hope that JamLegend or any other
company on snaptalent are waiting for some european knowledge ;)

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auston
Here is a gem (Twitter) - <http://snaptalent.com/company/100/>

p.s. more descriptive (company name in) urls would be awesome?

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sharpshoot
<http://snaptalent.com/company/twitter/>

Every company has an associated URL

