| But then I started doing Last Plane to Jakarta as a weekly site (the next edition of the actual ink-and-paper ‘zine is due...sometime this year, the editor said, somewhat nervously), and somebody at Audiogalaxy noticed it and put up a link from the “metal” section of their site to Last Plane to Jakarta’s front page, and I started noticing a big increase in the number of visitors to LPTJ each week. A quick scan of the weekly site-traffic reports led me to Audiogalaxy, which works like a somewhat clunkier Napster: the interface is web-based even when you’re using a keen auxiliary like Open AG X (for OS X, which, incidentally, does not crash). You type what you want into the helper application and you hit “return,” but the results come up in a web-browser window. The results themselves come up ten per page, one page at a time, so searches on more popular or prolific artists can leave a person with a lot of slogging to do. When you see a song you want, you click on a little button that bears the image of a satellite, and your download begins not in the browser window but in the window of your helper application, leaving you free to continue poking around and looking for new things. Every time you find something else you want, you click on the satellite button and that song joins your queue. So while Napster’s interface was sexy and sleek, all quick action and immediate connection, Audiogalaxy has a more homey feeling to it: organic, kind of, and loose. |
