As expected, lots of people have emailed us with their thoughts, problems and suggestions on the rewritten Magnatune web site. We haven't replied to all the email yet, because we wanted to first provide solutions.
So... below is a list of improvements (all based on emails we've received!) and bug fixes (also emails!) that are now live on the site.
Improvements:
- volume, auto-play and album repeat are now all things you can set yourself, if you want to.
- "add to favorites" feature is now available on all albums
- members who log in are now given a "you are now logged in" main page, so it's clear that you've successfully logged in
- Popular albums are now much more recent (the past two days) and also no longer show recently released albums that are also popular (no need to show the same album twice on the same page)
- "loading" text is now displayed, with a progress indicator, to let you know that you just need to wait a few more seconds, nothing has gone wrong.
- Improved accessibility for blind users of Magnatune
- various people reported reliability problems with the audio player, especially if playing the same album for a while. I think think is due to our trying to store the music in your browser cache. I've changed the player to now only cache the current song, and when you stop/start the song is reloaded. It's less efficient, but hopefully will be more reliable.
- the search feature was leading users of some browser (such as firefox) off the member site.
- the right and left gutters were repeating on long pages, in Firefox
- IE6 users (and users of browsers without HTML5 audio or Flash) are now better treated, with the entire album playing, not just the song.