good or bad on new ImagineRadio site?

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Imagine Radio has redesigned their site, added stuff, and changed stuff. What pleases you or bugs you about it? (or have you ever tried it out in the first place?)

-- Anita Rowland (anitar@halcyon.com), October 14, 1999

Answers

Their FAQ says some odd things about not being allowed to specify exact artists, but also that they're working on some way to specify better than the current lame-o setup.

But they promised to keep supporting non-G2 RealAudio, and without that I just can't use it at all-- G2 slows my 75MHz PowerMac to a crawl.

-- Jorn (jorn@mcs.com), October 14, 1999.


I liked the old site better, I think!

now I can't select specific artists, which is critical to me. I don't want to select between their precanned musical genres. The response to my complaint mail implied that this would be added back in.

I have to log in every time now, instead of them saving my info in a cookie (or whatever they were doing before).

They do have classical music now, which they didn't before.

Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL

-- Anita Rowland (anitar@halcyon.com), October 14, 1999.


Ladies and gents the beta absolutely BLOWS. Gone is what made ImagineRadio a neat little tweak--the ability to program your own radio station. Now I can't even banish crappy artists who keep popping up on my station. All I can do is skip them. Lame.

Worse, a well hidden FAQ blames the changes on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It isn' beyond the dolts in Congress to outlaw something so pure and good, but a quick look doesn't convince me they did. (They didn't repeal the fair use doctrine did they?) So, my first impulse is to say the re-design is a corporate idea of improved effiency with an attempt at using some ill-defined legislation as cover. I'll have to research it further to decide.

Finally, it might be neat for all those use spent many man hours programming their unique stations to consider a class action suit against ImagineRadio to recover damages. All that work is now worthless, the stations are now longer user programmed. It seems to me ImagineRadio entered into a prima facie contract with visitors, to wit we'd program stations with interesting music, and Imagine would festoon the stations with their ads.

So, any pro bono types out there want to swing for the fences and get their name in the paper?

Later, Big Monkey

-- JAT (jeffataylor@earthlink.net), October 15, 1999.


I couldn't ever get into Imagine Radio: I simply didn't have the patience to slog through thousands upon thousands of artists so that I might magically get some random combination of things I like. I ended up just picking created stations instead, and that wasn't great fun.

I've become a new convert to LaunchCast (http://www.launch.com/, some link on the right). This is really what I want: some music I choose, some music I haven't chosen, the ability to use other's preferences, etc. I think there are some problematic things (it's not easy to find the right people to act as your djs) but am, in general, really happy with it.

Oh, and if you fiddle around, my station's ruthfield. I'll be listening when I get back in town on Wednesday.

-- Scott Ruthfield (scottlr@hotmail.com), November 28, 1999.


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