In posts past “Music for the rest of us….” I suggested (and even linked to) numerous sites that provide a lot of different ways to discover new music. One of these sights that soon clearly became my favorite was “The Hype Machine“. Recently they have redone their system and have provide a new cutesy interface for their users while stripping so much of the functionality that the old user base had grown to love.

Within the past week or so I was allowed to participate in the closed beta. I found a couple of minor bugs as well as provided a lot of suggestions as to how the new site seemed to be lacking compared to the old one, as well as suggested features that didn’t exist on the new OR old sites. Today, the new Hype Machine was deployed to the masses, after a somewhat failed attempt to promote their own hype. They wanted users to sit at a page that contained an actively moving counter, and wait for 10,000 continuous users to be viewing that page before the actual site was deployed. Either they got antsy, or realized that they set their sights a little high and just called it good at 3000 some.
Upon my arrival to the new site I poked around for a bit, and for the most part it appeared to be the same as the beta that I had been toying with days before. They did fix the bug I found, but there was no implementation of any of the old or new features that I had suggested. Personally I was a little disappointed, secretly hoping that this was/is just the initial version of the new Hype Machine. But as far as I can tell, I don’t think it is. After reading through the comments on the latest hype machine blog post, it becomes quite evident that most everyone feels the same as I do. The general consensus is that we want our flash player back!

If you’re not familiar with The Hype Machine I’ll try my best to explain to you what it was then and how it is now. To start, site still allows you to search for artists or songs, and find blog postings about these artists and their music. Great, base functionality! So, the site still does allow you to discover music (it’s true purpose), it’s just not as friendly as it used to be. In the past there was a flash based player that would pop out and generally list 25-50 songs based on your selection (popular, what is being searched for now (now called SPY), or results from an artist or song search) You could see artist/title in this player, as well as skip, fast forward, rewind, randomize, loop etc.. Basically it had the functionality of any modern day media player, however it played songs over the web, instead of your personal music collection. This player has now gone missing. Instead you get a web page with songs listed. You can still play them, one at a time. If you play one, it will continue on to the next song, but only IF you have the browser window in front/active. No longer can you just start playing music and have it continue on it’s own. There is no way to Fast Forward or rewind a song any longer, just start, stop, and pause.

No one seems to know why this massively popular feature was stripped, and thus far the Hype Machine crew has not come forward and said why? If it was for legal reasons, I’d understand. I’ll still continue to use the site to find music I love, but it probably will no longer be my go to place to discover new tunes or just listen to a compilation of what the blogosphere (i promise I’ll never use that word again) is all a titter about.

Technorati Tags: The Hype Machine, Hype Machine, Music

EDIT 10/17/07: Do you miss the flash player (for me it’s mostly for the NOW(spy) music) If so, Read the post above