I’ve read about this service at mandark, and checked it out almost immediately–now after having tried it out, having built a playlist and such, i now write my first impressions. The very first impression was “man, they don’t know of UTF-8?”, because the hungarian interface (to which it automatically switched for me) is a tragedy. The translations are not bad, but the absolutely Flash-based interface simply doesn’t display characters like “ő” or “ű”, and it has problems with the simpler ones too (i know tried out the chinese one too, and that’s even more hopeless: all texts are “undefined”, and no chinese characters show up, though the service remains usable, if you know which button is what). The system was not easy to get used to at first, probably because this language problem–but one i switched to english, it all became a lot easier. Deezer is a community site, so you can add friends and all that stuff, though naturally the main point is not this, at least i have the feeling that nowadays all these sites launch as “community sites” to have some success (understandably).

Once you get used to it, learn where to find music and where to find people, it starts to get interesting. Dive into the search features, and it turn out that if you just type in the name of an artist, then probably in a few seconds you’ll be listening to one of their songs (in my case it’s now The Fratellis–here’s the problem with the Flash interface: you cannot link the pages you want). You can pick just one song, or play all of the search results. I’ve to yet figure out how to play all the songs from an artist without searching, from their page in the alphabetical collection–i very much hope there’s a way, else that collection could only be played album by album, and that’s troublesome. The collection is, on the other hand, very far from complete. When i enter such a music site, my first test is searching for the band Samurai Attack, a japanese punk band (i’ve read about them ages ago in Magyar Taraj, a hungarian punk-zine. That’s really a difficult task for all these music sites, since it’s virtually impossible to find any material of them, even Last.fm only has 12 (!) plays scrobbled… Naturally Deezer failed the test, but it’s even more: not even Paradise Lost songs… That’s a bit too much now, though i should be happy: unlike Last.fm, the songs available here are all complete, whole songs, and i can listen to them for free. (Summary:) It’s a little bittersweet, but this site indeed has huge potential. I don’t know how dared they publish it with such a crap language support, but bear with us.