I just had the misfortune of trying to listen to a live set posted to the CBC Radio 3 site. You might remember CBCR3’s previous incarnation as a cutting-edge web magazine that delivered interesting content in an innovative format. It won tons of awards, gained a big cult audience, earned lots of praise from the higher-ups, and was finally shut down and rejigged. I haven’t been to the site since the reorganization—until today, that is.

One of the great things about the old CBCR3—indeed, the most surprising thing about the site, if you’re a web veteran—was the interface. Most people’s expectations of Flash are extremely low; it’s not very accessible, it’s generally annoying, and often keeps you from the stuff you want to read. CBCR3, by contrast, was the best example I’ve ever seen of a Flash site done right: for once, the rich media experience actually enhanced the content instead of getting in the way. From the unique playlist feature that would play the weekly issue’s music unobtrusively in the background, to the multitude of ways you could jump from article to article (turn the page? sure! table of contents? right this way! keyboard shortcuts? will page up and page down do?), the old CBCR3 site was a joy to use.

I have spent the last twenty minutes trying to listen to a Cadeaux live set on the new CBCR3 site. I say “try” because I haven’t yet been able to get through one whole song. The idiots that programmed the new Flash interface have apparently decided that the music should pause any time you Alt-tab away from the browser window the site is in. This means you have no choice but to sit there and stare at the CBCR3 site while the twenty-minute set plays, or else you get nothing. Furthermore, this behavior isn’t at all obvious, nor is it explained anywhere on the site. So instead of thinking, “gee, I should stay on the CBCR3 window lest my music get cut off,” I think, “fuck, why the hell is the music cutting out? Maybe it’s a bandwidth issue, I’ll go down to the 56k feed… dammit, that one’s slow too!”

There are a bunch of buttons on the Flash player that aren’t very clear; you literally have to open up the help dialog every time you want to do something. You can’t even mouseover the various buttons for a helpful tooltip, a basic user interface convention that a six year old could understand. The two red buttons you probably don’t understand allow you to open the media stream in an MP3 player of your choice and open the media stream in a seperate browser mini-window. Great, right? Except clicking on either link will start the main CBCR3 stream instead of the live show playlist I really wanted to open. See, CBCR3 has a Radio mode (which plays the weekly podcast) and a Playlist mode (which plays whatever live set, DJ playlist, etc. you’ve selected).

Fine. This means I can’t open up the concert playlist in Winamp, but at least I can still open a seperate player window, right? Once I figured the Radio/Playlist issue out, I clicked on the Playlist Mode button in the pop-up window, hoping to see my Cadeaux show playlist pop up. Nope: a bunch of random playlists I didn’t want, and an invitation to log into the CBCR3 site to display my “favourite playlists.” No Cadeaux show to be seen. Alright, last resort: try the email a friend link and get a direct URL to the show. No dice: that URL just pops you back to the CBCR3 flash site with the Cadeaux show loaded. Back to square one.

I didn’t know there were so many ways to keep someone from listening to the fucking music the came to the site to hear. So many stupid, arrogant design decisions made: we’re only going to let the user listen if our window is selected! we’re only going to let the user save a playlist if they register and log in! we’re going to play only the radio playlist if the user wants to use an external player!

I’ve got an arrogant decision of my own: I’m never going back to the CBC Radio 3 website ever again.

(Definitely check out Cadeaux, though; I wish I’d known enough to see them in Vancouver when… oh, wait, I wrote about them already.)