On the magnatune home page (http://magnatune.com) you will now find a new 3rd column of choices.
The four choices in this new column are:
1) podcasts
2) collections
3) best-sellers
4) browse
The "podcast" and "browse" choices are totally new features.
PODCASTS
There are 45 different podcasts, ranging from different moods (wake-up, relaxing) to genres (rock, classical) to niche (Intense Metal, Indian Classical), with a new episode for each appearing once a week. You can listen to them to each podcast as an mp3 stream (playing immediately to your computer), or subscribe to them with a program such as iTunes
. We'll be submitting these podcasts to the various directories, and once iTunes accepts them, we'll also have a subscribe-to-podcast-in-itunes link.
The podcasts have a short (13 second) spoken intro and an ending spoken credit, but otherwise are talk-free, for an hour of uninterrupted music.
I've been listening to these podcasts all week, and I'm really enjoying this different way of exploring the magnatune collection. In the details for each podcast, the start time of each song is given, so it's easy to find what is currently playing.
The songs in the podcasts have all had their volumes adjusted to be similar, silence at the end and beginning has been trimmed, and the songs cross-fade at the last second into each other, so there are no silent gaps. This makes, I've found, for a more pleasant experience than listening to the .m3u playlists, taht don't do these things.
BROWSE MUSIC
I've written an iTunes-style music browser, showing all our albums in an organized, simple fashion, making quick work of playing lots of different music.
This is meant to be a fast way to move around the Magnatune music library and pick things to listen to. The interface is stripped to the bare minimum, so that the pages load quickly and there's no visual clutter.
I really like how iTunes organizes music by genre/artist/album/songs, and wanted to do something similar. I'm also showing the album art (under the selected album text) and links back to the full artist's page.
My hope is that many of you will bookmark this "Browse" page, and simply use it as your music library, slowly building up familiarity with Magnatune's music and discovering music you love.
I'm not entirely happy with how the album art and additional links are integrated, in under the list of albums, but it was the best solution I could come up with. Initially, I had the songs appearing in their own cell at the bottom, spanning the width of the page, like iTunes does. But, this seemed like a waste of space as there isn't much data to display about each song, as iTunes uses that space to repeat the artist/album/genre info that is already above anyway.
Unlike iTunes, if an album spans more than one genre, (ie, Artemis is in electronica and rock) it *will* appear in both.
I did not use HTML frames to do this, because I wanted each page to be fully book-markable, so that if you find an album you like, you can bookmark and come back to it easily, as well, as give it to your friends.
A future use of this "Browse music" function will be to allow magnatune subscribers an easily way to play the commercial-free music they're paying for access to. That's what I'm working on next.
Make your own skin
If you're graphically inclined, I'd love to see some alternative "skins" for this page.
This file: browse_skin.html is the template for this page, and should be self-explanatory. To make a "skin", just change the HTML table to use your graphics and colors. Send me an email if you've made one up you want me to look at.
OTHER CHANGES
Now that "collections" and "best-sellers" have a highly visible link on the home page, I removed the tiny text links they had on the bottom left of the home page. That cleared up some space at the bottom left, so I moved the less-interesting items that were on the top left (links for reviewers & podcasters, give 3 copies away & recruiting cards) and moved them to the bottom left. That leaves just 3 important thing on the top left space (licensing & missing & why-we-are-not-evil), which is better, as those are important and need to be visible.
Hmm... Re the browser. It's not very intuitive. When I click the Browse link, I see a list of genres at the left, but since most of the window is empty, it looks like something's wrong. You might want to add a sort of watermark graphic that says Click a genre to browse its contents, which then disappears after clicking. I think once users do that, they'll realize that they need to click other columns to get more info.
As for album art and other links, I'd have them display in the Songs column, above the song list. It would be more logical than having them display below the album list. The other possibility I see is to have _each_ album display with name, art and links in the Albums column, rather than awaiting the selection. Since the album art can help users get some idea of the music (well, not in all cases), that would be useful. And it would pretty up the page a bit.
Now, what would be really cool would be to integrate the player function in the browser, rather than bouncing it via .m3u files to the user's default music player...
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 03, 2006 at 03:22 AM
Oh, one more thing. I'd see a slim frame at the top with links back to the main page, and perhaps other links. The little logo at the bottom is, well, at the bottom, and hard to see if the page is longer than the browser window.
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 03, 2006 at 03:23 AM
Me again. :-)
Re podcasts - is it possible to have multiple podcasts show up under a single Magnatune Podcasts entry in iTunes, rather than each podcast having its own line?
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 03, 2006 at 03:26 AM
Re podcasts - is it possible to have multiple podcasts show up under a single Magnatune Podcasts entry in iTunes, rather than each podcast having its own line?
That would be the "everything" podcast that is mention at http://magnatune.com/podcasts and in the left column
-john
Posted by: John Buckman | April 03, 2006 at 05:46 AM
Ah, I didn't realize that the everything podcast was all the other podcasts - I thought it was a mix of everything. Thanks!
I'm already discovering lots of new music with these podcasts. I'm making a list... :-)
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 03, 2006 at 07:16 AM
love the functionality but you should keep at least the top magnatune banner until someone designs a nice skin as going into browse mode is currently such an aesthetic departure...
great, clean, fast displays though! a great piece of programming!
Posted by: Eric Redlinger | April 03, 2006 at 08:22 AM
Ah, I didn't realize that the everything podcast was all the other podcasts - I thought it was a mix of everything.
hmm.. I probably should have called it something else: I've changed the description now to say "all our podcasts bundled together", so that should be clearer.
love the functionality but you should keep at least the top magnatune banner until someone designs a nice skin as going into browse mode is currently such an aesthetic departure...
Good suggestion, I've done that now (logo on top). You, Kirk and Jan all said the same thing, and I had it that way in a test phase.
great, clean, fast displays though! a great piece of programming!
Thanks!
The funny thing is that I did the whole thing in one evening, thinking of it around 7p, finished at midnight. And that after struggling for 2 days on the "keep up to date" feature for the upcoming "fill your ipod" promotion. I think I was burnt out by the not-so-fun programming, and jumped all over this more fun stuff.
-john
Posted by: John Buckman | April 03, 2006 at 10:58 AM
Another thought, as long as you felt the browse thing didn't take up enough of your time... :-)
How about tooltips when hovering over artist's names that give more info about their music? For example, I've just been enjoying the Jay Kishor stuff in the podcasts, but if I were to browse, I'd have no idea what kind of music he plays. So why not use the artist description that's already on their pages (in this case: Jay Kishor: Indian classical sitar and surbahar) as the tooltip?
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 03, 2006 at 11:43 AM
How about tooltips when hovering over artist's names that give more info about their music?
I like that suggestion, I've gone and done it.
-john
Posted by: John Buckman | April 04, 2006 at 12:44 AM
Is there any reason why the podcasts show as "Clean" in iTunes?
Kirk
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 05, 2006 at 08:40 AM
Because they do not contain "Dirty" words.
Posted by: Someone | April 05, 2006 at 01:45 PM
Yeah, but I don't have any other "Clean" podcasts. They should only be labeled if they are explicit; the clean label is only used for songs that have explicit equivalents.
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 05, 2006 at 11:25 PM
They should only be labeled if they are explicit; the clean label is only used for songs that have explicit equivalents.
"Liberated Syndication" uses the "clean" descriptor on their podcasts, and I consider them to be quite serious about podcasts. The other podcasts you subscribe to don't have that label because it's an itunes-proprietary label, and they haven't bothered. The specs for apple podcasts at http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/techspecs.html indicate that I'm doing it correctly.
Posted by: John Buckman | April 06, 2006 at 12:11 AM
But do you really think that labelling them clean makes any sense? I can understand explicit labels when necessary, but clean seems illogical. Especially for music...
Apple says:
"
This tag should be used to indicate whether or not your podcast contains explicit material. The three values for this tag are “yes", “no", and “clean".
If you populate this tag with “yes", an “explicit" parental advisory graphic will appear next to your podcast artwork on the iTunes Music Store, and in the Name column in iTunes. If the value is “clean", the parental advisory type is considered Clean, meaning that no explicit language or adult content is included anywhere in the episodes, and a “clean" graphic will appear. If the explicit tag is present and has any other value (e.g. “no") you see no indicator — blank is the default advisory type."
If blank is the default, then shouldn't any other choice be made only if the content is not default?
Posted by: Kirk McElhearn | April 06, 2006 at 04:47 AM
FYI, all my podcasts are now "explicit: no" which means that iTunes will NOT put the "clean" graphic next to the podcasts. Thanks for the feedback.
-john
Posted by: John Buckman | April 09, 2006 at 08:48 AM