Radio OneLlama Goes Public | Hacker News Reader

Radio OneLlama Goes Public

onellama.com

Greetings, HN! Couple of changes we've made recently:

- You no longer need an invite or registration to use the site - API is available at http://company.onellama.com/section/labs/api/ - Feel free to experiment with the API (no keys necessary for now), if we really like what you build, our connections with the North Pole enable us to send you a free iPod Touch - iPhone version is in the works - Flash widget is in the works - Improvements made to search (added a location search), with more info given on results

Have a Happy Holidays! Cheers, -The Llama

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Onellama doesn't stack up well against it's competitors whatsoever. Here's why:

ONELLAMA vs DEEZER.COM To compare, deezer.com allows you to both make pandora style radios, discover new music, & make your own free to play playlists and it's all easy to do. Onellama only gives you the option of listening to 30 second snippits or paying for the rhapsody player to listen to your music + their new radio service. So why would you choose Onellama when there are better services?

THEIR MUSIC SEARCH FEATURE When searching for music, it brings up only a few songs by the artist you're looking for and presents with other related options. This is sometimes good for discovering new music, but often you just want more songs from the artist you searched for and they don't let you easily do that. Also, the related music if often overly mainstream music - not cool if you like indy stuff.

OVERALL INTERFACE Onellama has a penchat for developing confusing interfaces. Sure, they're somewhat neat as far as creative flash design, but they come together to make a pretty confusing experience. It's really hard to find what you actually want. For instance, it's great that they just launched their radio - but where did the music search feature go? Also, within their music search feature - it brings up some crazy interface for searching for related music - but I can only play 30 second of music each?

RADIO The radio is not that bad. Despite the radio search feature being a little confusing to a new user (who will type a band they like and expect to hear that band - not some other music) it's probably one of the best online tools now for searching for radio stations that play what you like.

So overall Onellama, you have potential, but the way it's coming together needs some serious improvement to stack up against competitors like deezer.com. Here's what I recommend.

1. SIMPLIFY YOUR INTERFACE!! - One your homepage, make one button for Radio, one for music search, and one for personal playlists. Right now you're hiding search functionality & putting way too many options for your radio on your direct homepage.

2. Make it free to play music Downloading Rhapsody sucks and turns people off. Make it free to play on your website.

Starting with those two things will help the quality of your website a lot. But right now, it's substandard compared to your competitors.

Ok, after some playing I think I got this.

First of all, I don't think it works in Google Chrome (Windows XP) .. every station I tried just errored saying it couldn't load the stream. Same stations worked in Firefox.

The interface is neat, but when I typed my artist in I got a list of random radio stations. It would be nice to show us a tiny bit more info on the station before I load it

It seems more obscure artists are totally broken. Try typing "Godspeed you! Black emperor" I love the band, but I know they most likely won't show up on online radio due to the length of songs and the results seem to show that .. got a bunch of weird results that did not even match the artist at all (Soul? No.)

Either way ... Very interesting I have to say, will definitely give it a few more tries.

Edit: Also needs some volume normalization. Getting my brain blasted despite being on Volume-2 on some stations and then a nice quiet sound on others is no fun.

Changes:

[1] No longer need an invite or registration to use the site [2] API available at http://company.onellama.com/section/labs/api/ [3] Feel free to experiment with the API (no keys necessary for now), if we really like what you build, our connections with the North Pole enable us to send you a free iPod Touch [4] iPhone version is in the works [5] Flash widget is in the works [6] Improvements made to search (added a location search), with more info given on results

Cheers, -The Llama

"Founded by some of the world's leading experts in machine learning and semantic web, One Llama offers a unique approach the world of personalization and recommendation combining the best techniques from collaborative filtering and machine learning."

Who are these experts?

Is it winamp people?

I hope so because if not their use of the llama and online radio will cause confusion.

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