Songza Launch

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I am proud to announce the release of Songza, a music search engine and Internet jukebox. Songza solves the related problems of “I want to hear a song” and “I want to share a song with a friend.” Released on November 8, its popularity is growing rapidly: We’re poised to reach one million songs played within just a week of launching Songza.

Songza is also an interface showcase. I’ve used the interface principles discussed here on the Humanized blog to design Songza to be humane, slick, and viral. Play with the interface for a bit, and you’ll find habituatable pie-menus instead of slow linear menus; an inviting design that uses only two icons, both of which act as illustrations for words; an incredibly high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction; undo instead of warnings; and transparent messages that don’t break your train of thought.

Ironically, there’s a lot that went into making Songza so simply. Achieving such a high level of simplification required a lot of code, in part because we couldn’t just use standard widgets. It was worth it, though.

You can’t be better without being different — I think Songza is both.

I appluad the demonstration of new ideas… but this baby has hatched a tad too early.

While listening to a song, I click on it, rate it “bad recording”…. and it disappears from currently playing, but I still hear music!

Additionally there are options there that don’t make sense for currently playing song… like “play” for instance. Or add to playlist, if it’s playing since I put it there.

Bugs are ok… but this is your interface showcase! Since you achieved simplicity by reducing the number of operations, it ought to be straight forward to find the cases where the operations don’t make sense.

Two comments:

1) Superb interface. Find something, play it now. Simpler and more direct you can’t get.

2) Certainly there are legal issues with the online availability of a lot of this material. Is this a general web search?

This app is really going to take off , esp for those of us stuck at desk jobs. I don’t need a CD, and Ipod, or to download - all I need is my internet connection, and I’m good to go! Can’t believe it actually works!

I like it. The interface is very intuitive and easy to use; you have obviously put a lot of thought into finding the essential features.

I noticed that when the playlist is on the right (and the songs are moved to the left), click a song close to the left edge of the title, then click share. The options for share are displayed past the window’s left edge (rendered unusable). This is easily fixed by not selecting the song so close to the left edge, but it may annoy some users.

Nice.
That’s an improved radio blog club for my use case: searching a music I don’t have and listening to it.
Though, on Safari 3, a dialog box telling that a javascript is running for a long time is popping periodically while playing a music.

The ease of use is remarkable. Well done.

By way of a bug report, the search result list looks hideous in Internet Explorer (6.0). The white text on orange background has black lines behind it, making it really uncomfortable to read. For what it’s worth, I’m using LCD screens.

(Everything looks fine in Firefox, but the music wouldn’t play. :j )

I can’t actually say much about the actual playback since swfdec didn’t seem to want to handle it, but I did enjoy playing with the interface aside from a few things. The box around the Share options does not actual hold all of the options, so some of them are just floating above the regular page. The one interface point i found annoying is that to just get a link to an object is 3 steps, plus a html/css popup which “takes over” the interface in the process of just showing you a URL. One thing I might suggest is putting a link to the song in the href of the A tag for each song, and just having the onclick return false, so you can right-click “copy location” to get a URL without having to go through 3 or 4 steps.

Missed this one at first, but the email to a friend thing is just begging for some idiot to write a spam bot around it ;) CAPCHA maybe?

Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but how do you scroll the list of search results? All I can see is one “page” of results.

What is the purpose of the rating? Does it affect the ranking of songs in a search and if so, is it “safe” (spam-resistant - I don’t want to listen to Incubus when I search for the Floyd’s Wish You Were Here!)?

The interface is otherwise very intuitive and interesting. I am just wondering if the number of clicks to play and/or enqueue a song could be reduced. For instance, double-clicking a song could play it (faster than click, move, click, but possibly counter-intuitive in a web environment)? And drag and drop for search items to the playlist would be nice (since items can already be reordered in the playlist itself).

Sending a playlist to a friend would also be very nice.

Anyway, nice job!

Are you loading a hidden youtube video with javascript into the page to get the sound? And working with the youtube APIs to search, and get information about each? If it’s youtube, it should be possible to listen using the Gnu Flash player.

Here is resource using just javascript: http://www.zwitserloot.com/files/soundkit/soundcheck.html

And here another resource for audio video streaming: http://klaus.geekserver.net/flash/streaming.html

What about being tolerant of user mistakes? Before one arrives at your site? I notice that Songzaa.com is already taken by domain squatters; did you try to get it?

Wow, awesome feature you didn’t mention, and which makes it very humane indeed: You can hit “Space” on the page to pause and unpause! Excellent! I was about to say that the Play/Pause buttons are located rather out-of-the-way in the corner of the screen, but this is nice. What other “keyboard shortcuts” do you have? :-)

Clicking the pause button twice turns it into “stop” (surprisingly!) and loses saved position in the song… isn’t this too destructive? Is there an undo for this? Why do music players have a “stop”, anyway?

The orange background (plus white text) isn’t exactly easy on the eyes.

I love pie menus. But why are the buttons as small as usual? And why isn’t it quasimodal? I was expecting something similar to mouse gestures in Opera or Firefox, where only the direction(s) matter. Rate good could be “right, up”. And cancel could be “garbage input”, as in Enso.

Rating: Shouldn’t buttons have more meaningful labels than yes and no?

Looks great. Although, as far as I could tell, neither of the two songs I tried actually played for me. No sound came out.

Very nice. Is this a youtube mashup? Excellent reduction of the cluttered youtube interface to just a very simple set of functions. Will be watching your next move!

that is great idea
i used it on my blog and it is awesome
fast,usefull,great
thanx for everything

wonderful concept and i love it. no more mp3 on my office comp

Aza -

Great job. It’s excellent. I’d love to see an “add all to playlist” option. Or maybe it’s there and I just haven’t found it yet.

At some point (maybe a future blog post), I’d love to know your thoughts on progressive exposure of navigation. I agree, hiding unneeded options is good. I also know that users are often thinking “I’d like to ________,” and they look for pre-committal cues that will help them do that.

Regardless, Songza’s cool.

Very nice and very usable.
I would, however, criticise the lack of consistency with respects to play/pause. Clicking on the play button in the bottom does nothing, but clicking on the play button in the radial menu on an item that is already playing will restart it. I understand the desire for consistency in the radial menu but it just isn’t the behaviour I would expect or want.
Perhaps a solution can be found combining with SR’s comment about pause/stopping.

Also I notice that the share and rate items have a hand cursor while the item’s in them don’t. The hand icon on the web has a a strong link with “this can be clicked”, so maybe swapping that around will help people find what can and can’t be clicked.

Lots of great stuff in the design but it would be most usable if it told me why it doesn’t play the selected music. Like PaulDWaite the app doesn’t play music.

This is fantastic stuff, Aza. The progressive disclosure throughout the UI is done as well or better than I’ve ever seen. The pie menus work very well (though I might have put play at the bottom, pointing down to where the playback controls exist) and functionality is limited to the most important use cases.

This is a great tool, not only for finding and playing that song that I just heard but didn’t really want to buy or transfer to my iPod or whatever, but also for showing off how minimalist design can be extremely effective. Also, it’s great that you implemented it all (except, I guess, for the minimum amount required for .swf playback) using web standard technology.

Songza is like a dream come true! When am I going to be able to control it from Enso? =)

hi Aza,
I like the system alot. Simple to use.

I have made a simple review of Songza in my site with some improvement suggestions.

Hopefully, some features could be addressed.

Thank for the system.

Certainly a good implementation. Click and play. It’s also interesting how it can find rather obscure Turkish tracks even.

I’ve got some concerns though.

-White on red/orange is not exactly easy on the eyes. It might be my color settings but I feel it’s kind of too hot.
-I’ve got a concern with the pie menu as well. The color of the menu is simply too close to the background; it almost feels like it’s transparent. Therefore, I actually did not notice anything but the play button for while. It might be my lack of sleep or color settings but that’s still a concern.
-Also a problem with the pie menus is that when you adapt a compass organization, the north gets disproportionately higher clicks. It makes somewhat sense but I feel like a more distributed fashion (like in the Sims game) might be better than this.

But hey, I love this thing.

Great system, simple, usable, and to the point. One observation though: when I started to play a song it was too loud (of course not songza’s problem), immediatly I started looking for the volume control to turn it down a bit, but found none. I had to go to the system volume icon to do so, which is not exactly the intuitive way to do so since every player (at least every player I’ve seen) out there has an integrated volume control and I expected one to be right there on the webpage.

“…an inviting design that uses only two icons, both of which act as illustrations for words…”

Two? I count five (the ‘rate’ icons, the play and pause buttons, and the position marker in the playlist). Since when was ‘thumbs up’ the opposite of ‘no entry’?

Why no skip forward/back buttons? And clearing a playlist one item at a time is somewhat painful…

Congratulations!!, as a always very intuitive interface, and a great idea.

I love the fact that you didn’t collapse the play and pause buttons into one.

I don’t understand why media player keep toggling the play and pause buttons every time you press on them, its very annoying and i admit i even find confusing.

I forgot to thank you in the last post for not adding a volume control.So THANKS :-) !!

Nice, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to see more search results. If all you can see is one page I think some text explaining that would help.

Sorry, I will mention difficult things only (just haven’t habituated yet to the good ones, I am sure)

*) Menus are cute, though second level navigation was odd. Also I expected click (without move) to start playing. Isn’t that a well-defined behaviour?

*) People mentioned colors before. I would not want to spend more than a couple of minutes staring at the red/orange. Especially with black text being that small.

*) Some of the search titles put (Video) in the brackets. But only audio seems to be played. That’s against expectations.

*) It would be nice to have Rate buttons visible for the current song, otherwise it is 3 clicks and I may not be bothered. Pandora is good that way.

*) In Firefox with flashblock installed, nothing will play and no indications are given. I think I have seen some websites to detect disabled flash and put up a message. Given that the player itself is hidden, it is quite hard to enable it otherwise (I had to hunt through CSS with Firebug).

Songa is by far the best online music application I’ve ever seen. As a matter of fact I loved it so much I told the world about Songza.

Now I plan to look at some of your other toys– got anything else for us Mac users?

I am very i9nterested in what you are doing with Songza. I have a bunch of questions and would like to speak to someone about what you are doing. Drop me a line and we can chat.

“…awesome feature you didn’t mention, and which makes it very humane indeed…”

How is it humane to have functionality which the user has to find by accident?

“Also I expected click (without move) to start playing. Isn’t that a well-defined behaviour?”

I guess one could argue it’s too easy to accidentally click and play (a somewhat destructive behaviour).

I think integrating enso into songza would be really cool. For example making the media control beta work in songza. Also continuous play would eliminate the need to go back to the site to pick another song. A volume control would be nice too.

Very interesting ideas. The interaction has a lot of pluses. With that said, don’t forget some UI basics - like font resizing.

I really enjoyed your discussion of Modes cause misery. I had just been explaining to a friend that I’m not writing much music right now because I keep getting stuck debugging my sound card driver. It forces me to switch modes from creativity/writing to technical problem solving, and after that gear change it’s never the same getting back into the groove.
Elegant premise for a company and very interesting products. I imagine you’ll be getting some big acquisition offers from the usual suspects. Best wishes to your gang, I’m already really enjoying Songza.

Great site. Hope you can add a capture feature.

A great app. Just a little suggestion.

You can take it to the next level by allowing us to carry our play list anywhere where there is internet. Right now, the playlist is is saved on cookies. Once I erase my history, my collection is gone :(

Would it be possible to make accounts and store our playlist on the server?

a widget !!!!!

Do a widget!!!!

a widget is
more wins people…

freaking awesome webapp aza. keep up the amazing work.

Do you have a way for suggesting additional songs? Any way to capture your music?

I made a similar app for Facebook a while ago: http://apps.facebook.com/jookbox. It shows the videos as well. YouTube is a great resource for music :)

I went to the Sonza Home Page.
Searched Classical.
Found great music.
However, there was no sound and my speakers are working fine.
Is there something else I should be doing or what do I check?
Thank you for keeping everything so simple -

I love it! The next thing I’d love to see is some hook into last.fm so that I can easily listen to things that my friends are listening to.

Songza is exactly what I have been thinking about for quite some time and I realized just like you said that putting it together would be a significant undertaking.

I love it!

I also must ask you something in an email.

Awesome work!

I love Songza! I found it through StumbleUpon and I haven’t closed the window yet.

It’s great how it gives users the ability to search practically any known music file and stream it.

I’d love to see some sort of widget available so you could show people what you listen to and they can check it out for themselves.

Great work! Keep it up!

Really good work Aza! The only gripe I have at the moment is the background color is incredibly hard on the eyes. Red translates into war, lust, action, etc and it really stands out, so it is a bad background color–it is best for grabbing attention. (As a bg, red repulses people.) The more serene colors of blue and green are better suited for backgrounds as they translate into tranquility, life, calmness, etc. (ie they’re more welcoming). Darker shades of blue and green are even better for the eyes and lets text stick out more (light colors direct the attention, dark colors kind of disappear). Dark/navy blue would be your best choice, as it is the most pleasing color to the human eye.

While designing great interaction experiences, don’t forget the most important aspect of interaction: vision. Color is a very important/powerful tool (second only to use of space/layout) in your design arsenal for visual design.

I hope that made sense. Later,
//corey

People complain about color. I can understand their complaint. I am a designer. it is nice to see a change. I don’t mind the color. I would like to see a Stand Alone app. or a more compact window option. I love the use of ajax.

I love this site. Pretty simple and straightforward and the best part is almost zero learning curve..

IMHO the bitrate should be a bit lower as it lags a lot on my PC… The orange feels catastrophic on the eyes for a multitasker like me. Other than that, too easy to comment upon :P

From the website:
“Like all good ideas, both the concept and design came to Aza while he was in the shower.”
I thought it was the toilet seat ;)

Am I missing something?

I don’t want to embed just one song on my site, I need to embed my whole playlist.

Also, Multiple Playlists please - all selectable from the same embed.

And, skins/colors schemes.

Otherwise - great app, easy to use.

Leafy, re: bitrate.

I’ve got 8Mb connection and it streams at about 5x playrate - so please don’t compromise quality.

Remember - the bitrate depends on the source material - Songza has no control over that.

NIce program, but if you continue in popularity you will get shut down due to copyright!

Technology is cool! Copywrongs are just that!

You can say you are just using the audio from YouTube, but YouTube has the license and now Songza!

You can say you are going to use Creative Commons stuff, but there goes your traffic.

Sucks, but it’s reality, unless you move offshore or get funded to pay for those insane licenses!

Copyright laws are out of date in this day and age, and are a problem.

Hey where is the recommend to a friend button ???

Way to represent Chicago. Perfectly executed.

Raza Imam
http://www.software-sweatshop.com

Superb usability. Exclellent app. 99/100

But what’s up with the colors? Black on orange is nice but this particular nasty orange color hurts my eyes. Different color-scheme and it would’ve been 100/100

Just agree with Kasper Marstal..
The screen is really too sharp..
And I’ve been founding the button to change the skins..

I love the service.
“I know the name of the group,
just lie google : I type.
And the song is there.
Clean quiet display.
Simple functions.
Bravo.

Every things work fine, but NO SOUND at all like others in here .

Anybody that know what the problem could be?

For a couple of days now, some song splay ok and some not at all, it keeps on on loading. What should I do ?

Same here . its only loading…and loading
but some of the top song on the front page(commeciel I think) play okay.

Its must bee the program that are realy bad, -come again when its work!

Worked great for me! I really like the variety of relatively obscure artists I found and had no trouble with the sound, icons, or use and believe me, I am techno-illiterate! I added the firefox plug-in and it works great too. Kudos all!

Worked great in the beginning, now it plays some songs okay or not at all. How do I fix it.

Most of the tracks i play are impossible to listen to, i don’t know why. Too bad !

OOps…i correct myself: i can’t listen to nothing ! Songza doesn’ t work. See you when troubles are solved.

Er.. Am I missing something or is there really no way to save a playlist?

It is a great concept - unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work on my computer: the menu won’t load, songs won’t play, if they do start playing, there is no sound.

Since other internet radios work perfectly, I guess I’ll have to get my music fix elsewhere.

Really slick.

Two comments, both relating to the fact that you should test/review your app on a small/low contrast laptop…

On my ultra-portable, the “share” submenu falls off the screen… With the browser maximized… That’s 1024 x 768. 1280×960 people would be in a similar boat with a history/favorites pane open to the left or not maximized for any reason.

http://justaddwater.dk/2006/08/17/design-for-browser-size-not-screen-size/

Also the black text on the red background is pretty hard to read on the laptop screen. On my external monitor, it’s just fine. Using that color combination seems like a pure-and-simple sacrifice of readability for aesthetics (a bad choice for a tool like this, IMO).

Bonus issue– Just IM’ed it to a friend and he said it doesn’t work in Safari.

Still, that’s all somewhat nitpicky. Awesome work!

Love the interface and the lack of sales pitch. You get want you want NOW - talking about instant gratification!

Having launched my first “real” site a few months back, I’ve been working on another one, much simpler and more streamlined to the visitor than the first one. Songza is a great inspiration for that. Thanks!

I just have a question:
How do you deal with paying royalties for all the songs? Or how do you get away with it?

I can’t get any sound using either Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers.

Is there an additional download in order to hear the music. Just found the songza site advertisec in PC Magazine. Love the site, just can’t hear the music.

Site had no sound on playback on both my WinXP machines but played fine on my Win98se machines. Go figure. This would be a great site if my main XP computers could produce any sound!

NO ONE HAS ANSWERED WHY THERE IS NO SOUND!!! ???? (yes i am shouting)

It seems there is sound on the top playlist but not on deeper tracks. Why list them if they can’t play them? Thi site is in alpha mode at best. great idea, just horrid execution. . . :(

think its sucks no songs played but one

Why won’t songs play?

Some songs play and some don’t.

great and simple look up.
Pity……. songs won’t play

I added some songs to the playlist and clicked ”play”,than it showed that the song was playing but I can’t hear any music. (I already checked the volume) What can I do?

Nice ….

I like http://www.jango.com better than this when it comes to the quality of the music.

will never took I assumed acorns off were the best, to my parents I go back We had on me. and cutting off

I like http://www.flashwidgetz.com better than songza. It has a larger selection of music and it allows you to save your playlist for keeping. You can also view videos directly on the site.

Hi there, I have been using Songza for quite a while now and really enjoy it’s simplicity. Even my 5 year old can use it! I have a couple of suggestions for making the interface slightly better:

1. With the playlist you should perhaps have a shuffle and/or repeat button?

2. How about starting to have usernames? There has been many a time where I have had a playlist at home, and wished I had it at my friends house so we could also listen to it there.

Many Thanks,

Jeremy

What’s with http://www.songza.co.uk?

@Eloquent: Thanks for the heads up. We’ve blocked access to our site from their servers, and everything stopped working :)

I just signed up for a Songza account so that I could, as the come-on advised, save my playlist. In doing so I actually lost the playlist I had accumulated over the last few months, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to recover.

I know it was probably just a design oversight (resetting my cookie when I created a login or some such), but that’s definitely not humane.

I just posted an entry My music communities on my blog, in which I describe how I use Songza, among other tools, to build my personal playlist. I would be interested in hearing your comments and stories.

Hello. Let’s get acquainted!
My name is Jessika.

Hey I am a huge fan of Songza, from a programmers perspective the use of JQuery and AJAX implementations are really advanced for this little player. On my first sweep through the site I was checking everything with Firebug and it is great so see people taking over with DOM and AJAX scripting where so many people would take the easy route and just use Flash or FLEX, great job, wonderful site, easy to use and overall a great product.

The server imujination.com at Music requires a username and password.

Warning: This server is requesting that your username and password be sent in an insecure manner (basic authentication without a secure connection). WHAT does all this mean?I never receieved this before and if I don’t fill it in it refuses to play.Is this new?