RIP Hype Machine
November 19, 2007
Casey Muller

I've been a huge fan of the hype machine for a while, telling dozens of people about it, posting here about my love, and even trying to start a (small/lame) new blog post series about it.

Well, it's over- they've turned the corner from openness and being user-centric to focusing on themselves and their own goals. It's natural but sad, let me explain what happened.

I used the hype machine three ways:

  1. download the m3u for a given page and listen in Winamp (I'm old skool)
  2. or put the xml feed into my podcast reader to download the tracks for portable listening
  3. or for cases where I want to hear a single track, listen via their conveniently located flash player.

Number 1 was the first to go, they stopped supporting m3u links- no idea why. I switched to putting the xml feed into Winamp, which was fine, if a little more of a pain (the Winamp interface's fault).

Now their XML feeds exist, but have no podcast metadata or media info at all- just the titles and descriptions (gee thanks). This means no more mobile use, and no more less-convenient Winamp.

I'm left with their flash player. I don't know about everybody else's experience with it, but the performance is completely unacceptable to me. With Winamp, I've carefully tweaked the streaming and CPU settings, and have it to a point where it never skips for network or processor reasons.

Not so with the flash player- try as I might I cannot get a seamless audio experience. The best I've found so far is to open up a completely new Firefox or IE profile (FF seems marginally better), and play things there. Even with this, any kind of bursty network traffic imposes itself on my ears in a most unwelcome way. I realize the CPU side is partially because I have a lot of plugins in my browsers, and occaisionally need to swap in the debug flash plugin, but still.

This partial workaround is also bad memory drain (supposedly FF3 will fix those leaks), sucks up way more of my processor than Winamp ever did, and also just needlessly forces me out of my preferred applications/workflow.

I understand forcing people to the website generates advertising revenue, locks the user in, etc. But what I appreciated about the Hype Machine was that it really spoke my language and understood my desires, and was positioned to be part of the greater web ecosystem I participate in. Web services fall into two broad categories- sites that stand alone and sites that complement all the other services that users already use. Flipping from the latter to the former is unfortunate.

RIP Hype Machine

previous entry:

The gender and celebrity of Casey
October 29, 2007



Old-school comments: 
The Hype machine is a large driver of traffic to music blogs but it is so flakey. Frequently I've posted to find that the Hype Machine has not updated for hours and sometimes days! Elbo is a much less flaky aggregator but for some reason it gets less attention than the over hyped Hype machine.

The Devill


Yeah, for reals. I used to load the m3u into winamp, reverse the order (oldest first) and listen to it for the first half of my day at work. Had a simple shortcut for next track (Win X) and could listen to new music without letting it disrupt my workflow. By the time I'd finished the 100tracks, there'd be another 50 new ones. I don't have skipping problems, but in Opera the metadata doesn't update at all, so I'm left with the ability to play tracks, but blindly so. How much hype can that generate? Hype Machine, you're dead to me. -notpeter
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