On both the iOS app and the website, I am finding that when I click on the buy album button, the first step, the confirm pop-up, is super-responsive (startlingly fast compared to what I am used to on the old site) but then when I click confirm, the actual adding of the album is SUPER slow. I just let a couple of albums sit for over two minutes each (I times it) and the e and the little red dots were still thinking. If I click out of the dialog, the album has in fact been added to my albums, but the confirmation is not working. Using Chrome on the web and the app on an iPad - problem affects both.
There's something weird going on with the purchase confirmation. We're checking it out as I type. This is exactly what a beta is for! Should be back to normal shortly.
Matt, I understand all is going on, when will the roll out start and when will be able see the reinstatement of Warp, Just Music labels just 2 of which have been missing. It has been so frustrating trying to find music, so much so that I was about to go on hold from E Music due to the fact that response to queries were not answered and finding new releases was just becoming too hard and quite frankly no fun anymore. I understand there is commercial reasons why things have to be kept quiet but an outline would be good.
-> Matt I have to say interactions do seem more responsive. I thought the slow (faux) purchase confirmation was on par with the old site, where selecting a track for download ended up taking a fraction of a minute to prepare, so it's good to know we can expect performance improvements.
The artist file photos under the My eMusic tab are nice. I uploaded 9 tracks, and the site found photos for most of the artists, but didn't find one for a "Stereo Total" track that I "purchased" from the site.
Matt, I understand all is going on, when will the roll out start and when will be able see the reinstatement of Warp, Just Music labels just 2 of which have been missing. It has been so frustrating trying to find music, so much so that I was about to go on hold from E Music due to the fact that response to queries were not answered and finding new releases was just becoming too hard and quite frankly no fun anymore. I understand there is commercial reasons why things have to be kept quiet but an outline would be good.
We plan to roll the new site in stages starting April. All going well it should be May when complete.
Warp and co should be reinstated when launched.
There's definitely no secrecy, or intention to be secretive around what is or isn't available. Our catalog is key to the success of the product. It all comes down to resources really - The changes we are implementing are just so vast that alterations have had to be made across the board. This includes content. We've had to go through labels/distributors one by one to negotiate how we can continue to get their content from our new provider. eMusic as a company is a lot smaller in terms of headcount than it used to be so this is a lengthy process.
The layout and features remind me a lot of the PLEX web interface. Especially when going to an Artist page with a photo at top, popular tracks below that, album listing below that.
One thing that would drive me crazy on the old site is that if you select "View All [albums]", browse a bit there, then back track to the artist level, the page reverted to the original subset of albums again. It made it difficult to systematically walk through the full set of albums.
One thing that would drive me crazy on the old site is that if you select "View All [albums]", browse a bit there, then back track to the artist level, the page reverted to the original subset of albums again. It made it difficult to systematically walk through the full set of albums.
If I understand you correctly, this is something that is fixed in the beta (i.e. it 'saves' your selection of filters as you browse through the site)
It looks like it may work better on the Beta site. Up to 12 albums are displayed initially (8 on existing site). "Load More" quickly populates more. Drilling down into an album and then hitting back on the browser does take you back to an abbreviated set of albums. Since it is more responsive and displays more, I think it is more workable now. Thanks!
i agree with GP that the purchase feature has got slower. Last week it was quite speedy, but has really slowed recently to the extent that I initially thought that my internet connection was not working properly, soon discounted that though. another problem i have come across is that I can't copy album covers to post here.
Purchase feature should be backup to speed. Faster than before even.
Thanks for the welcome.
I'm a bit of a mixed bag musically. Mainly listen to reggae, dub, ska and all their offshoots/pre-cursors, as well as a lot of 90s and 90s-style hip hop. Also into a lot of electronic stuff. Grew up on a diet of britpop, motown and classic rock so they're always staples too.
A typical playlist of mine will go from Aby Ngana Diop to Gregor Salto via King Gizzard, Don Cavalli and Grand Puba.
Had a little look at the beta site. To me it looks to be quite some distance from feature complete, with even some quite basic things missing - such as getting from an artist page in 'my music' to that artist's page in 'browse music'.
Search seems to find some very strange results. While for classical music I could believe this could be down to poor quality control, and an perverse sense of what should go into the artist tag. I'm not sure that is the whole story, for example try a search of 'Steve Hackett' some of the artists in the results seem to be matching on just 'Steve'. Worse try searching for 'Ian Boddy', goodness know why the majority of those 147 artists, or 2602 albums, appear in the results.
Search also lacks both the ability to search by label, and more importantly the ability to sort the results.
Hmm, that's right. @Matt, search by label is quite important to me. Given the other quirks in emusic's tagging/search function, it is sometimes the only way to find an album. Ian Boddy only returns 17 results on the old site, so something new did break here.
ETA: Maybe if the engine could speed up the effort from 20% to 100% ?
ETA 2: It would be useful if the search result could make room for the whole result instead of just a fraction, so you don't have to mouse over each and every result. Various Artists & An... - James Gilchrist/An... Is just a few examples
- That was a major PITA on the current Emusic too.
I have a small suggestion. It has taken me a few tries to start getting used to spotting whether I am in "My Music" or "Browse" mode when hitting search, and pausing to check when hit by a sudden inspiration feels like a minor chore. I know it says "Search the store" or "search my music" in the search field and has a little toggle thing, but I am not in the habit of reading the sample text in the search field. I'll get used to it, but having a different background color for the two different search modes could be a nice cue as to which toggle I have active and would be psychologically quicker than reading the text. Not a big thing, but the slickness of the user experience is made of many such small things.
I've noticed a number of albums available on the Beta site, not available on the normal emusic site. This includes some by artists and labels already here in the UK. I wonder of this indicated we might get them in the future?
My hunch is that the selection on the beta doesn't relate to future availability - Just a shakedown on 'buying' and streaming music. Many labels are incomplete, and some aren't there at all.
Once the full libraries show up, we're going to need to be able to make playlists as well. This can be done in the current "Music Cloud." Genre would be helpful too, which the Music Cloud doesn't have.
Purchase feature should be backup to speed. Faster than before even.
Thanks for the welcome.
I'm a bit of a mixed bag musically. Mainly listen to reggae, dub, ska and all their offshoots/pre-cursors, as well as a lot of 90s and 90s-style hip hop. Also into a lot of electronic stuff. Grew up on a diet of britpop, motown and classic rock so they're always staples too.
A typical playlist of mine will go from Aby Ngana Diop to Gregor Salto via King Gizzard, Don Cavalli and Grand Puba.
Thanks for your reply . . .
- When I look at album pages, it says:
BUY ALBUM $0.00
(I'm in Europe, Denmark) - I guess this will change at some point ?
Pricing (catalog is still US only - other countries will be rolled out in the coming weeks). There are some changes to pricing in alignment with label demands. With that, you’re going to find that some prices have gone up, while others have gone down. Be assured, your eMusic membership will continue to give you the best pricing available, with discounts up to 50% off iTunes, Google Play or Amazon. Please note that during the Beta you may see prices being adjusted as we finalize content and fine-tune pricing with our new provider.
Purchasing is no longer unlimited. This is to test the credit balance mechanism. Everyone will get $250 to spend on the beta. You should be logged out automatically, if not please log out and log back in to see your credit.
Save For Later - we are now calling this 'Wish List'. Lists are not yet available but you can now add music to your Wish List in the same way as you would Save For Later.
Purchasing is no longer available on iOS - as we get closer to releasing, we must align with apple requirements. Selling music on apple devices is still not allowed. Thems the rules unfortunately. You can however browse, play, upload and add to your Wish List
Reset password - a small but necessary feature.
To answer some other questions/issues... - label search and label details page are coming very soon - We now have access to a great dataset for classical content. The integration of it is pending as we have a number of other features to build out first. It's very much an important piece for us, it's just not very straight forward. - Seven Digital is our content partner but they are in no way involved in the building of the site/app. - We are continually working to finalize the catalog. We are about 70-80% there so I think it's fair to say that what you see on the beta site is around about that in terms of what to expect on the site once live. Again though, we're talking US only for now. Apologies for keeping you on tenter hooks here.
Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for your continued support and for helping us test the new site.
-Matt
p.s. the mobile apps will be updated shortly. They take a little longer to go live.
There is obviously something going on with prices, I was going to remark about one ablum being $103, but it dropped to $64 just now, so it is moving in the right direction - but the physical version is only $27 at Amazon so...
It will be interesting to see UK pricing, and more features added, to get a better feel.
I can't help but notice that prices are not shown on the search results. Is this on the list of features still to be added back in?
We are indeed still working on pricing. multi-cd releases are posing a bit of an issue. Essentially some distributors send a wholesale price per CD, some for the whole release. We're working to normalize.
@matt it was a number of albums by Klaus Schulze I was looking at - the one I was referring to above was "La vie électronique, Vol. 16", but also the three "The Dark Side Of The Moog" collections for example vol. 1 the other 2 volumes are much the same.
@matt It seems that it's no longer possible to copy / paste album covers from the new emusic onto this this message board
It's not a browser thing. I've tried Crome, Firefox and IE and there's no image url (jpeg) to be found.
- It's a feature that are beeing used quite alot by us and I'm sure it will be missed, at least by me.
ETA: As for Emusic purchases, I save a copy of the size 600x600 image with label and release date info. to the folder instead of the 155x155 "folder" that usually comes along with the mp3 files.
ETA: Ooooooops ! Sorry, I just found out how to do it:
Comments
Matt, I understand all is going on, when will the roll out start and when will be able see the reinstatement of Warp, Just Music labels just 2 of which have been missing. It has been so frustrating trying to find music, so much so that I was about to go on hold from E Music due to the fact that response to queries were not answered and finding new releases was just becoming too hard and quite frankly no fun anymore. I understand there is commercial reasons why things have to be kept quiet but an outline would be good.
The artist file photos under the My eMusic tab are nice. I uploaded 9 tracks, and the site found photos for most of the artists, but didn't find one for a "Stereo Total" track that I "purchased" from the site.
Warp and co should be reinstated when launched.
There's definitely no secrecy, or intention to be secretive around what is or isn't available. Our catalog is key to the success of the product. It all comes down to resources really - The changes we are implementing are just so vast that alterations have had to be made across the board. This includes content. We've had to go through labels/distributors one by one to negotiate how we can continue to get their content from our new provider. eMusic as a company is a lot smaller in terms of headcount than it used to be so this is a lengthy process.
One thing that would drive me crazy on the old site is that if you select "View All [albums]", browse a bit there, then back track to the artist level, the page reverted to the original subset of albums again. It made it difficult to systematically walk through the full set of albums.
By all means, feel free to share your musical preferences with us.
Thanks for the welcome.
I'm a bit of a mixed bag musically. Mainly listen to reggae, dub, ska and all their offshoots/pre-cursors, as well as a lot of 90s and 90s-style hip hop. Also into a lot of electronic stuff. Grew up on a diet of britpop, motown and classic rock so they're always staples too.
A typical playlist of mine will go from Aby Ngana Diop to Gregor Salto via King Gizzard, Don Cavalli and Grand Puba.
Search seems to find some very strange results. While for classical music I could believe this could be down to poor quality control, and an perverse sense of what should go into the artist tag. I'm not sure that is the whole story, for example try a search of 'Steve Hackett' some of the artists in the results seem to be matching on just 'Steve'. Worse try searching for 'Ian Boddy', goodness know why the majority of those 147 artists, or 2602 albums, appear in the results.
Search also lacks both the ability to search by label, and more importantly the ability to sort the results.
Ian Boddy only returns 17 results on the old site, so something new did break here.
I hope that we are still in a very early and far from complete stage of the new Emusic.
I've searched for albums and artists that didn't come up with anything.
As an example, this album by Annea Lockwood / Ruth Anderson:
http://www.emusic.com/album/annea-lockwood-ruth-anderson/sinopah/10826487/
And the Beta search:
https://beta.emusic.com/search/Annea%20Lockwood%20%2F%20Ruth%20Anderson
Searching the names individually did not do the job either
ETA: Maybe if the engine could speed up the effort from 20% to 100% ?
ETA 2: It would be useful if the search result could make room for the whole result instead of just a fraction, so you don't have to mouse over each and every result.
Various Artists & An... - James Gilchrist/An... Is just a few examples
- That was a major PITA on the current Emusic too.
ETA 3: I would prefer albums before tracks on the artist pages:
https://beta.emusic.com/artist/SEVENDIGITAL_2087025
Once the full libraries show up, we're going to need to be able to make playlists as well. This can be done in the current "Music Cloud." Genre would be helpful too, which the Music Cloud doesn't have.
- When I look at album pages, it says:
- I guess this will change at some point ?
I've located some Warp albums, all of them are:
An example: https://beta.emusic.com/album/6389420
- I think it's very important that Emusic get the dates right
Keep up the good work !
We just released an update to the beta.
Included in this version is:
Pricing (catalog is still US only - other countries will be rolled out in the coming weeks). There are some changes to pricing in alignment with label demands. With that, you’re going to find that some prices have gone up, while others have gone down. Be assured, your eMusic membership will continue to give you the best pricing available, with discounts up to 50% off iTunes, Google Play or Amazon. Please note that during the Beta you may see prices being adjusted as we finalize content and fine-tune pricing with our new provider.
Purchasing is no longer unlimited. This is to test the credit balance mechanism. Everyone will get $250 to spend on the beta. You should be logged out automatically, if not please log out and log back in to see your credit.
Save For Later - we are now calling this 'Wish List'. Lists are not yet available but you can now add music to your Wish List in the same way as you would Save For Later.
Purchasing is no longer available on iOS - as we get closer to releasing, we must align with apple requirements. Selling music on apple devices is still not allowed. Thems the rules unfortunately. You can however browse, play, upload and add to your Wish List
Reset password - a small but necessary feature.
To answer some other questions/issues...
- label search and label details page are coming very soon
- We now have access to a great dataset for classical content. The integration of it is pending as we have a number of other features to build out first. It's very much an important piece for us, it's just not very straight forward.
- Seven Digital is our content partner but they are in no way involved in the building of the site/app.
- We are continually working to finalize the catalog. We are about 70-80% there so I think it's fair to say that what you see on the beta site is around about that in terms of what to expect on the site once live. Again though, we're talking US only for now. Apologies for keeping you on tenter hooks here.
Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for your continued support and for helping us test the new site.
-Matt
p.s. the mobile apps will be updated shortly. They take a little longer to go live.
It will be interesting to see UK pricing, and more features added, to get a better feel.
I can't help but notice that prices are not shown on the search results. Is this on the list of features still to be added back in?
We are indeed still working on pricing. multi-cd releases are posing a bit of an issue. Essentially some distributors send a wholesale price per CD, some for the whole release. We're working to normalize.
It seems that it's no longer possible to copy / paste album covers from the new emusic onto this this message board
It's not a browser thing.
I've tried Crome, Firefox and IE and there's no image url (jpeg) to be found.
- It's a feature that are beeing used quite alot by us and I'm sure it will be missed, at least by me.
ETA: As for Emusic purchases, I save a copy of the size 600x600 image with label and release date info. to the folder instead of the 155x155 "folder" that usually comes along with the mp3 files.
ETA: Ooooooops !
Sorry, I just found out how to do it: