Yesterday I was ranting about MySpace, in particular how their music downloads don’t actually let you download the song. While I’m at it I’ve got another mySpace gripe I’d like to get of my chest…

MySpace lets people include lots of things on their profiles such as songs, video’s, flash animations, etc. Due to this lots of profiles are slow to load. Often I’ll want to add comments to lots of people’s profiles, I’ve found the fastest way to do this is load each of their profiles up in a tab on my browser. I can see when a profile has finished loading, go to it, click the “add comments” link and then write my comment.

The problem with this is most profiles have a song which starts playing, if you load lots of profiles in tabs then all the songs start trying to stream at the same time and play over the top of each other, highly irritating! All these songs are being played with the mySpace media player, I’d like to see the developers change it so the player only plays one song at a time. I’m not sure if this is possible as I’m not a Flash programmer but you’d think mySpace would have enough money to figure out how to do this if it is.

One thing that definitely could be developed is an option to switch off the mySpace media player in your account preferences, not only would this make profiles faster loading but if you wanted to listen to your own music it would make using mySpace much less annoying.

Some people might say that mySpace isn’t designed to be opened in multiple tabs and I’m just causing these annoyances for myself. I think mySpace is designed for tabs but very badly. Consider the situation: you’re going to comment on someone’s profile, you notice they have got a good song on their profile and want to listen to it. The only way you can do this is either wait till the song has finished, or open the “add comment” link in a new tab.

Well that’s my mySpace rant over for the today, I hate you Tom!

# Pete Graham

Today like most days I got added as a “friend” by a band on mySpace. Surprisingly the band was quite good and some of their tracks were available to download from their mySpace page, great!

When I clicked on the download track link the mp3 actually gets streamed in your browser using quicktime. It is not possible to right click the download link and “Save File As” because the mySpace media-player is flash based. What is the point of offering a download
link if your not going to provide a proper download?

The amount of bands using mySpace is quite staggering now days, it seems that every new band that comes out has a mySpace page, some don’t even bother with separate website. mySpace has multi-millions of dollars behind it and must have hundred of developers, the mind boggles why they can’t sort this, especially when one of the sites main appeal is supposed to be the music.

Now I sure the mySpace download feature used to work, interestingly I received a newsletter from mySpace the other day promoting their new Music Store. Conspiracy theorists will probably claim they’ve sabotaged the free downloads on purpose so people pay for music in the store. Well it certainly doesn’t entice me to buy anything from them, if they can’t offer downloads correctly imagine what they might do with your credit card information!

# Pete Graham