I finally made some time to work on hopscotch.fm this past week. I was able to make a couple of major improvements to the site, mostly based on what I found to be annoying/missing when I was using it.
Soundcloud! – First was Youtube, gone. Terrible success rate in finding videos for artists. Next was Tomahk, also gone. Better success rate but kludgy ux. Now, Soundcloud! All the songs are now streamed from Soundcloud. The success rate is great, and I can have much more control over the player.
Artist Radio – now when you like the song you’re listening to, you can turn on Artist Radio and listen to more songs by that artist.
Performance – the unsexy beast in the room. It was taking up to a minute to build a radio station, making changing stations a task for only the very determined. Now all the stations are pre-built so they load up almost instantly.
I am finding I listen to hopscotch daily now as it is a great background stream of music while I work. And last week I went to two shows that were featured on hopscotch radio, Rodriguez at the Warfield (awesome show) and White Ring at Elbo Room (good but not nearly as awesome).
the Fresh Basil Binder 