The New Grooveshark

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.

Yup! The previous version used JMVC but it was a poor fit. Backbone does juuuust enough to help you out then gets out of your way. Means you have to write a lot of your own architecture but that's pretty much my favorite thing to do ever (and I hated JMVC) so I gladly did so.

The site is way faster now, despite having more stuff going on, just because half the codebase is no longer trying to hack around the parts of JMVC we didn't need.

We use it for a lot more than that, actually. Cross-domain request support that works even in browsers that don't do CORS, and a persistent socket connection to our servers that takes care of all the new awesome real-time social stuff (so we don't have to poll). Seeing what your friends are playing in real-time in the sidebar is just the beginning. We have a lot more stuff planned that uses that functionality.

Looks like it's to catch the case where you've got music playing and inadvertently close the tab. There should probably be a check to make sure you've actually got something playing in your queue.

We do that when you have music playing and we also currently do it in the first 30 seconds of loading the page as an awful hack around some completely crappy ads that force redirects that have gotten into our ad networks. It's just in there until we can get the ad problem fixed.