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April 03, 2006

Comments

Kirk McElhearn

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...

Kirk McElhearn

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.

Kirk McElhearn

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?

John Buckman

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

Kirk McElhearn

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... :-)

Eric Redlinger

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!

John Buckman

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

Kirk McElhearn

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?

John Buckman

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

Kirk McElhearn

Is there any reason why the podcasts show as "Clean" in iTunes?

Kirk

Someone

Because they do not contain "Dirty" words.

Kirk McElhearn

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.

John Buckman

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.

Kirk McElhearn

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?

John Buckman

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

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