Junecloud

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Subtle Changes, Drastic Results

In February I made some changes to Tense Radio, a Flash-based MP3 player for Tense Forms (a label and publisher I co-founded). The new player had a variety of subtle changes.

Previously it used a default buffering time of 15 seconds, adding to that as necessary. That’s about all Flash provides for on its own. The result is that users with fast connections had to wait longer than they should have for anything to play, and users with slow connections occasionally had to put up with pauses in the middle of a song while it stopped to load more.

I wrote a new script that looks at how much of the song has loaded and uses that to estimate the download speed. From there it can guess how long the song will take to load, and how long it needs to buffer to ensure uninterrupted playback. The result is that songs play in just a couple of seconds on broadband connections. Over dial-up they may take a bit longer to load, but are much less likely to stop midway through the song.

A volume control was also added to the player. While this is somewhat redundant (I prefer to simply adjust the system volume myself) it seems that Flash will play sound much louder on some systems compared to other applications. The volume control allows users to adjust Tense Radio to match.

Settings are now saved transparently as well. Previously I had opened a new window in order to save cookies through PHP. I now keep track of the cookies with JavaScript and simply save them when the window is closed. The result is much nicer to use and less obtrusive.

Finally, visitors are now asked to choose between HI-FI and LO-FI before they start listening. The HI-FI streams are top quality, whereas the LO-FI streams sacrifice quality for the ability to load quickly over a slow connection. When the player debuted three years ago, it made sense to make LO-FI the default, as dial-up connections were still very common. We recently found that the overwhelming majority of our audience has a broadband connection, yet they were still listening to the LO-FI streams! It was clear they simply hadn’t noticed that there was a high-quality option available.

Previously, only 18% of our visitors were hearing our music at its best. Since the change, an amazing 97% are listening to the high-quality streams. We’ve also made the player much more useful to our visitors… Prior to the change, an average of around 68% simply downloaded the songs, preferring their standalone MP3 player to Tense Radio. Since the change, only 54% have done so. This is good for Tense Forms because it helps our visitors discover more of our music.

Most importantly, there was a 300% increase in the overall number of songs streamed and downloaded. While some of this can be attributed to other sources, it’s clear that much of it is a result of the new player.

So with some subtle changes, we’ve had drastic results. We now have far more people hearing our music as it was intended, as well as more people listening overall. It’s easy to say that this was well worth a few weeks of discussions and development time.

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