Well, The Hype Machine appears to be listening to what their users want, although I think they still have their fingers partially in their ears. They have recently reinstated a pop up flash player so that users can play music from a seperate window. (read their blog post here) However this new ‘pop up player’ (and I use the term very loosely) definitely leads some things to be desired.
The old player had a true playlist that I could access from the small, yet manageable window. It also had the ability to scroll through the list of songs and choose what I wanted and did not want to hear. It also had the features that we generally associate with the most basic of music players (shuffle, repeat, volume, playlists etc.), those are now gone. The new ‘player’ window itself doesn’t really resemble the old flash player at all. It looks more like a banner/pop up ad. When I first clicked on it, I kind of half hoped to shoot monkeys, or play the orbitz football game, and that it wasn’t the player at all. The window has the one song title in a large cutesy bold font type with 4+ lines of information about the blog post, and of couse the 4 buttons (back,pause,stop,forward) that only somehow make it look like some vague sort of audio playing tool.
Am I let down by the ‘pop up’ player? Yes! It’s still not up to par with what was once available, but will this stop me from using the site all together? At the moment no, but I can hold one hell of a grudge. If the Hype Machine considers the matter of a decent pop up audio player resolved, then perhaps I will go eventually look elsewhere.

One final note for those of you that had been accessing the old flash player via my site. The directories on their site that had the old flash player in it have been removed and the location of the XSPF (the open source playlist they use) has been encoded so unfortunately without a lot of work I can’t use this to play their tunes elsewhere. Here’s a tip to the Hype Machine. Release an open API so people can really use your site the way they want to use it. Thats the only way you’ll be able to become one of the ‘big boys’

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