Problems solved:
- The new player will go through an entire playlist in Firefox without stopping, even in inactive tabs. This is great for Firefox and Flock users, because in the previous version, once a song would finish, the next one wouldn't load unless it was visible at the time.
- The return of a transport bar lets users once again skip to any part of the song that's loaded at the time, and see where they are in the track.
- By making use of a hard-to-see scrollbar on the bottom right of the "widget," it's possible to scroll around in the playlist. Unfortunately only one track is visible at any given time.
- The main problem with the new player is that the player element is divorced visually from the tracklisting, necessitating excessive scrolling between the player and the rest of the page. I have to say it was nice to have a player for each song. Keeping the player and information elements working together well has been a long-standing technical challenge for the Hypemachine people.
- Some users have commented that the black player kind of stands out from the colours in the rest of the design. While this is true, I don't think it's enough of a departure to be a problem.
- If these dudes added a "pan" button to the player, it would actually be possible to use Hypemachine as a DJ tool. Here's how: open two hypemachine windows, pan one left and the other right, hook the left and right audio outs into seperate channels in an outboard mixer, cue up a track in one of them and put it out to the mains, and then find another one, cue it in the headphones and use the crossfader as with a pair of turntables. Think of the possibilities! If somebody could make a flash plugin that could slow down and speed up mp3s by increments, basic beatmatching would also be possible. Imagine that - DJing from your web browser.
- Making the player follow the track it's playing in the track list, or making the player's track list expandable, would allow for tighter integration of info and song playing features.
