AOL Music Team Blog

The Winamp team stayed up late to release the media player's newest version last night. Winamp 5.57 is Windows 7-compliant and pushes the music listening experience to another level with many new and improved features. We'll take you through them.

Winamp 5.57 New Features:

-- Fully Windows 7 compliant, including new Win7 preview capabilities with the new Aero Interface.

-- One-click access to tour dates, tickets, music downloads and song lyrics.

-- Winamp Add-On gallery lets you search, browse and install Winamp skins, plug-ins, visualizations and online services directly from within Winamp.

-- Native video support, including the most popular file formats for H.264 encoded video (Pro only)

-- Redesigned Podcast Directory interface now lets you quickly subscribe to popular podcasts, adds more ways to customize your subscriptions and offers the ability to remember your last playback position.

With all of these new features, Winamp 5.57 still includes popular features, like the ability to customize the Winamp player (skins, plug-ins, visualizations).

The recently added Orgler has been improved to better track, chart and share your listening history. Winamp Charts has also been improved within the Winamp Media Player and on Winamp.com. The charts show the most popular songs and artists that people are listening to with Winamp. In fact, now with the new Orgler Module you can post your play history on your blog, website, e-mail/forum signature, or pretty much anywhere else you want to put it.

Get the new version here!

Now that the nominees are in, what better time to reveal our new Grammys page! Read all about the nominees, watch exclusive videos and more all on our new page.



Interested in the latest news on the nominees? Our 'Real-Time Awards Show News' module has all the latest stories from across the web.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we have ported this blog over to our new design template. We now have our standard header and footer as well as our standard layout. If you are reading this in a feed reader click on through and check it out. If you are interested in our new design direction check out our series of posts on redesigning our site.

When the team initially sat down to discuss our site redesign, we all believed the main goal of the new site should be easier navigation. We chose a few core ways to go about this:

1. Simple pages (less is more)
2. Fast load times
3. Improved Header
4. Improved Search

Search is very important because no matter how good we make our user interface for browsing, we have so much content and data on our site that it is impossible to reveal it all just through a browsing interface. Music is classically long-tail and search and long-tail were made for each other.

The most obvious improvement we made was to switch to a more classic layout of results. Our old page presented results grouped by category. While this aided in finding the type of asset you were searching for (song, video, picture, etc,) it did not put the best result up top. If you were searching for a video, you had to scroll past artists, albums and songs to get to videos. The new page displays the best results -- regardless of content type -- descending from the top.

The second improvement we made was to include our editorial and news results on the page. The old page only displayed results from music.aol.com for artists, videos, etc. The new page searches our entire network of sites including Spinner, The Boot, The Boombox and more. This unlocks all the original content we have along side all the results we previously displayed.

The third improvement was speed. Results now display a lot faster than they ever did.

We hope the new search page allows you to quickly and easily find the content you want. We are not done yet improving this page but felt like we reached a level with it that was such an improvement on the previous page that it was worth releasing now. We will continue to tweak the page based on feedback we receive from you. Please let us know what you think.

Not sure what to search for? Here is a search to get you started - http://music.aol.com/search/?query=jack+johnson

Continuing our series of redesign posts, next up are our new artist pages. With these pages, we wanted to accomplish three things - making the site simpler and easier to navigate, highlighting our best experiences and keeping the page fresh and interesting.

On top you will find the new artist navigation bar. This provides quick links to Videos, Pictures, Albums, Bio, Lyrics and Tour Dates. If we have an exclusive performance -- Sessions or The Interface -- you will also find a link to it here.



Below that is the new Real Time News feed for the artist. Like on our new homepage redesign, this brings artist news from 30,000+ trusted news sources across the web and keeps the page fresh with new content every day.



The News feed will also contain photos of the artist.



More and more artists are using Twitter these days to connect with their fans. We've compiled a huge list of official Twitter accounts and put Twitter widgets right on these pages. Now you can find the official accounts of your favorite artists easily.



Like we mentioned in a previous post on our redesign, we have a huge site with many pages. We have chosen to release theses pages as they are ready, as opposed to all at once in the end. As such, some things may seem a little weird to you as you jump from page to page. For the Artist pages, we redesigned the Main page and the Albums page. Videos, Photos and Bio are coming but for now they may look a little out of place. Hold tight, they are coming.



As is the case with all our redesigns, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think about the new pages! And go check out Taylor's new page!

Continuing our series of redesign posts, we are now going to talk about the new header. It could be argued that a header is more important than any single page. The header appears on all pages and is the main way to navigate a site. As was the case with our new homepage (and our overall redesign policy), our goal with the header was to make our site simpler and easier to navigate.

We started the process by asking "what could be removed"? After looking over the click data, we saw that very few people were using the search tabs. People were here for music, and wanted to only search within music results. Since we believe that less is more, we removed all search tabs.

The next issue we tackled was account-based. The old header showed you when you were logged-in by displaying your name with a drop-down to go to your profile and sign-out. It also had links to edit your profile and your profile settings. These were extraneous since people do not edit their profiles very often. It was also slightly hard to find the sign-out link. The new header shows you when you are logged-in with a quick link to your profile, playlists and sign-out. Much cleaner.

The final thing we changed was the biggest. In the past, we had 10 main navigation links. This posed a problem since we have a lot more than 10 pages. We decided to go with drop-downs on the main links to allow for quicker access to more content. We grouped our pages by type (videos, songs, etc) with tool-tip descriptions. We believe this will be a huge help in navigating our site.

Moving forward, we will put the new header across all our sites. We have a lot of work ahead of us, so things might seem a little weird as we continue to push this out. We also hope to add dynamic content to the drop-downs which will personalize the site according to the music you listen to and the news you read. Please let us know what you think. Your feedback is what drives us. Thanks!

When we sat down to redesign our site, the page everyone wanted to do first was the home page. We've felt for a while that our home page doesn't fully reflect all of the content and features that we have. Everyday we receive feedback asking us about particular features and where they can be found. Our main goal with the new home page was to make things simpler so you can find what you want. We also wanted to highlight some of our features and technology that you may not know about.

One of those features is CD Listening Party. Every week we feature 10-20 new albums that you can listen to for free. On our current homepage, this is buried low on the page. Even so, it is one of the most clicked parts of the page. For the redesign, we raised this much higher on the page. We also gave it some more breathing room.



Right below CD Listening Party is our new 'Real Time Music News' module. Here at AOL Music, we write tons of articles every day about artists, songs and everything else in music. Even though we cover a lot, we can't cover it all! There are many music news sources out there -- and since this is the Web -- we figured that linking to them would be pretty easy. The new News module will show the latest music news with up-to-the-minute updates. The best part is that it is customizable. You can now track news just from your favorite artists if you want.



Another new feature is the ability to see what other people on AOL Music are listening to -- in real time! Anyone with a public profile will be visible on this module. It is a great way to see what music is hot and sample it for yourself. You will also be able to see the last three songs you've listened to, plus a link to see more.



If you are logged in, you can also see what other people on your AIM buddy list are listening to now.



As we stated in our previous post about our redesign, our aim was to make our site simpler to navigate while highlighting our best experiences. We feel confident we have done this with the new home page. Look for it in the next few days. Of course our work is never done. We want to hear your thoughts -- tell us what you think.

It has been a couple of years since we last redesigned our site. Back then, things were a lot different. Our site was built for dial-up users with low-resolution monitors. Our goal was to modernize it by expanding the width and adding a bunch of new features, including streaming audio and video. We introduced a lot of things. Some things worked, others did not. Through it all, you responded with invaluable feedback. We have taken all of that feedback and thought hard about how we can take our site to the next level.

First and foremost, we hope the new design allows you to more easily navigate our site. Our main purpose was to showcase our best features -- features that you have told us you enjoy the most. We have done that by adding more prominent placements of key features. We have also done that by removing extraneous features that were not often used. If we removed something you liked, please let us know. While we have tried hard to keep everything, we understand that anything we remove will probably upset some people.

Starting soon, we will roll out the new design, page by page. The first pages to receive a makeover will be the home page, Artist Main, Albums and a new News page. We will also be rolling out a new header across all our pages. Things may seem a little weird as certain pages will look new and others look the same. Please bear with us. We have a large site! In the coming days, we will write about the new pages with screen shots. As always, we would love to hear what you think.

Update - Check out screen-shots of our new homepage.
Update 2 - Check out screen-shots of our new header.

--AOL Music Team

For a while now, Streampad has had an unofficial API. Unofficial in the sense that developers would look at the source code, hack on it, email me, hack some more and then build something cool. Well, the days of unofficial are officially over! I am very proud to unveil the Streampad API.

There are actually two APIs:

Embed API
The first one is the Embed API. You can find it here - http://www.streampad.com/embed-api. This API allows developers to customize the look and feel of Streampad as well as choose which features to include and exclude by setting options.

Javascript API
The second one is the Javascript API. You can find it here - http://www.streampad.com/javascript-api. This API allows developers to control the Streampad player via Javascript. Developers can play and queue songs, play and pause the player, receive events and perform other useful functions.

We would love any and all feedback on these. What works, what doesn't, what else you would like to see. Thanks!

For all you last.fm fans out there, we have some good news! You can now scrobble tracks that you listen to right inside of Streampad. To get started, click on the little person icon on the right side of the player. That will open up the profile drawer. Click on the Last.fm section.



Click on the "Log in to Last.fm" button. This will open up a permissions window on Last.fm.



After clicking "Yes, allow access", close the window. It is important that you close the window as that will notify Streampad to log you in.

Once you are logged in, Streampad will scrobble your tracks and show you your last 10 songs. Please note that tracks will only scrobble if they have artist and song names. So remember to tag your files if you are a publisher.