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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
