Newsletter
First published: Sept. 9, 2008, 9:35 p.m. MDT
Last edited: Sept. 12, 2008, 1:29 p.m. MDT
Last edited: Sept. 12, 2008, 1:29 p.m. MDT
To Grooveshark: So close to awesome.
Another update: They responded.The following is a (slightly modified) email I just sent to Grooveshark's feedback system. If you haven't seen Grooveshark yet, it's so close to awesome, but check it out! http://listen.grooveshark.com/
Update: So, the email below laments the song fragmentation on Grooveshark. Since sending, I've decided that my suggestions just might already be implemented on Grooveshark, and I'm not noticing them due to user interface crappiness. Basically, I'm upset that when I search for a music artist, I want to add one of each of their unique songs into my play queue. The easiest way to add all of an artist's songs is to search for them, go to the artist search results, and drag in their name into your queue. That ends up with tons of song duplicates though. However, the initial search results do seem to do a pretty good job of removing duplicate songs. But there's no way to just say "add all these to my queue." So, that would be easy to fix.
To: feedback@grooveshark
Subject: So close to awesome!
Grooveshark is amazing, and potentially a complete game changer. I've found that while I used to listen to my meticulously organized music collection, I now find myself using Grooveshark in many cases instead.
Completely ignoring the possibly uncountable future directions Grooveshark could move [(they have so much potential! they could become the universal music gateway, streaming any music you want to any device you have!)], here's the biggest problems [(besides a worrisome revenue model)] with Grooveshark I've found that prevent it from replacing my music library completely, in decreasing order:
- Grooveshark suffers from massive fragmentation of songs. Popular songs are listed thousands of times in a search, while unpopular songs are listed maybe once or twice. This is to be expected for a service that culls its musical library from its diverse users. However: this could be easily fixed by employing some sort of audio fingerprinting to identify duplicate songs, and only list songs once. I vaguely understand that users get compensated when their version of a song is used, but this is a huge user interface problem. Implement audio fingerprinting-based duplicate removal, and choose which user gets compensated via round robin selection. Or whichever song is of the highest quality. Or something. Suggestion for audio fingerprinting? Look at http://musicbrainz.org/.
All the other problems below are tiny compared to the huge, glaring one above.
- The search interface is unintuitive. When I search for a term, I want the initial response list to be every song that matches the term. Then, when I click "Artists", I want to filter those results, not get a list of all artists that matched that search. When I click a specific artist, I want the songs that matched my search from that artist, not all songs from that artist, since the artist matched my search. Really, the iTunes interface is great. You can search, and then add filters by selecting Artists or Albums by which to filter. Just do it that way.
- I want to be able to drag my whole list of favorites (a new feature, I understand) into my queue.
- I want to have profiles for the autoplay feature. I want to train the machine learning algorithm behind it with soft rock when I'm in a soft rock mood, and not have that affect the training of jazz I did when I was in a jazz mood. [Haha, as an example. Smooth jazz rocks.]
- Update: Please cache the most recent play queue between website visits! That way, if someone accidentally closes a window or navigates away from Grooveshark, they can return and not lose their play queue. You could even do it just for logged in users.
All in all, a great product, but please add audio fingerprinting-based duplicate removal! Please!
(I'm posting this to my blog, too)
-JT