Grooveshark Beta

Update: If you came across this on Google, you can basically ignore this, it's from August 2007.

Yesterday I got a nice email invite from the cool Grooveshark crowd for their beta. The want to create a platform for downloading music powered by users uploading and getting paid to do so and no DRM. I really hope their site takes off and thus follows some constructive criticism:

So, while setting up the account, the site doesn't actually give you a warning if your cookies are off, you have to enable them. Now then, you are logged in and your email is shown by default on your profile. That irked me but at least one could turn it off in the preferences. The site feels intuitive but the Javascript is a bit heavy at times, Firefox handles it well but Konqueror just turns the screen black entirely when hitting play or buy. I didn't want to dive through all that code but might get back to it sometime.

The Linux client is still quite beta but at least they have one right from the start. First things first, the client (if you are not a deb or rpm system) comes in a Zip archive, so executable mode is not set for the launching script so a Tar file would be a nice addition. The application wanted to save downloads in ~/User/nick/grooveshark which of course doesn't make much sense for *nix systems where this turns into /home/nick/User/nick/grooveshark. Also the application data is put into ~/Grooveshark (probably someone didn't look out for case-sensitivity). I started by adding an album sitting on my desktop which I had found through the very cool music site Jamendo (from the words jam and crescendo). Music on that site is free but donations are encouraged. Now, the client behaved admirably and scanned and cached the files and all seemed well. Only that under my profile they now are listed at the price of 99 cents each. Now, I have no doubt that the collection agency will happily collect the cents no matter what but would it actually get to the artists if they are not signed by an organization that is represented by those collectors? I suppose one could start actively tagging pages of performers who also provide their songs for free to let others be aware of the fact but it might hurt the artist's popularity since downloads as a measurement will probably influence recommendations for users. I tried to buy two songs but they only entered my download queue and stayed at status "Searching" and the logs indicated "Received deny". Growing pains, maybe? I tried it on one song in my collection and that worked fine, though the file had ".mp3.mp3" at the end.

Now for things that definitely still need to be added:

• Some sort of last.fm intergration, I have a profile there and their recommendations are really helpful in finding interesting stuff and I don't want to start all over again.
• Related to the first item: Get the Amarok guys to write a plugin like the one for last.fm that they have that keeps track of what you listened to so you don't have to go and rate everything by hand

If I find the time I'll try to play around with the social networking aspect of the site since I have some ideas about that but they'll have to germinate a bit more. Oh yeah, if you want an invite send me a mail or IM me.