I was browsing Masterbeat and noticed that all navigation is in-page, using either Flash or Ajax. There is only one page for the entire site.
The reason as always with music sites is to allow the user to browse without interrupting playback. Not interrupting the music is such a pressing need that I can imagine virtually all music-oriented sites moving to this development paradigm.
Other music sites doing it: Hype Machine, Bandzoogle, Critical Metrics.
Complete rip-off of Beatport.com, which has been around a while.
Beatport also has always stuck with the single page navigation/app style as well.
This is bad, nothing can be bookmarked. It’s user-hostile. Can’t the player be persisted while also having URL nav?
Flash is the Internet’s media file darling, isn’t it?
Except at Apple, no iPhone + Safari love for sites like these…
Flash has nice measurement/instrumentation baked in, if you choose to use it.
Are they protecting the user’s experience or raising the barrier to link to content?
If the former, they could supply a link to the playlist URLs _somewhere_ on the page.
If the backend is flash streaming and the content isn’t really accessible via non-flash player, then that’s another set of choices.
I miss WebJay’s ability to expose content URLs easily.
Unfortunately, the Adobe products are the biggest malware targets for exploitation because they are ubiquious. Exploits for Flash and Acrobat get big bucks on the black market these days. If alternative flash players step up, there is no guarantee that they will be any safer to use than the Adobe products, if they are protocol for protocol compatible.
It’s great to see sites working hard to update the music player experience, even by elliminating the stand-alone music player. It’s even better when the player is the web browser (and doesn’t have to run flash to do it).
Still a trend is a trend.
@Michael Hart, that is indeed a total rip of Beatport. I thought it looked familiar.
EH, it’s possible to do bookmarking if the site uses something like the Really Simple History library. Sites that are heavily flash based rarely do that, though.
Len, what’s cool to me here is that the best of these sites are not as opaque as a Flash site. You can still right click + save as, for example.
These sorts of choices about one page/more pages/flash player/media player are a bit like the story of tantalus. all this great feast of user interface experience is out there, but it still hovers just out of reach.
Whoa, that IS such a Beatport ripoff, can’t believe people do this.
For the record, on the Hype Machine, the URLs in the location bar are functional when you use the ajax-ified version of the site. It’s only active anyway, when you are logged in.
If you can’t send a page to someone and say “hey, listen to this song” that’s not helpful. It also doesn’t solve the problem of the music stopping when you close your browser tab. Even a warning (blogtalkradio does this) telling you “hey, you’re listening to something, are you sure you want to do that?” would help. But generally no one does that.
About the ability to link to the song, these sites should always have that. You can do it with ajax.
Not sure what I think of warning the user that they’re going to stop the music. I think it’s more important for their to be an affordance that there’s music playing, like a big pause button, so they know before closing the window that the music will go away. An interruption would create work that could be avoided.
I just know that I’ve accidentally closed the window that my player is in more than once and it was annoying. Maybe it’s just me.
Sure. I know what you mean. But I’m not convinced that that’s more annoying than having a confirmation pop up every time closing the window is what you intend.
Hi, Im doing a website (html) using dream weaver cs3 and I need to add a song to the site that can keep playing while browsing through the site. Were can I get Ajax? Were can I get more information on how can I install it using dream weaver?
hi there,
try soundklan.com also, it is %100 in-page radio.. i was the front-end developer of that site :)