[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.

[code_duck]

> 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.

Then you should listen to some radio site that feeds you music. I enjoy Grooveshark precisely for this reason: I can make a playlist of things I want to listen to, and listen to them.

[wturner]

After reading everything you wrote I immediately thought..damn that must be a really horrible website navigation nightmare. So I went to the website, searched for an artist and dragged it. Then I played it. Then ..(cringe)..I did it....again. In summary, as of the moment of this post, the small scale nuclear holocaust of complexity you have described apparently lay dormant. My experience was actually kind of boring.

Edit*

I see what is happening. There are a couple of paths users can take based on if they click or drag items, and I just so happened to take the smoothest one.

[Radix_]

Click to add is faster when adding to the playlist. It's just the addition of the small plus to the play symbol isn't immediately obvious if your mouse is hovering over it. I like it better than click to drag. But drag is surely best for first encounter.

[pbhjpbhj]

>they've clearly been spending way too much time with it internally without showing it to real world users //

I find it quite easy to use but have used the old interface - which incidentally I don't see this as that much different to, much more responsive (in the non-web3 sense).

What they're trying to do is allow you to select a playlist of music whilst listening. Their primary use-case appears to be someone who knows what they want to listen to, but they offer "radio stations" if you just want a sample of a category of music.

First song you add to the playlist (at bottom of screen) is autostarted. You search for another song, click the triangle-plus button and that song is added to playlist.

You can hover a song in the playlist to get more options or just click it to play that song.

If you select a few songs then click "radio off" (to turn it on!) then the "radio" feature selects similar songs and continues to do so. Songs in the selection can be up/downvoted to say you want more/none of that type of song (used to be anyway, too granular IMO).

One thing they do really well is to let you login without stopping the music.

[ajanuary]

> Or at the very least add a second play button per song that actually plays the song.

Right click, Play Song Now. Not as discoverable as the play/queue button, but at least the option exists.

I think an animation of the item flying down to the queue would help emphasize that you're queuing a song, not playing it. But I don't know how easy that would be.