Once you get inside a Turntable room, everything's peachy: avatars cluster together amiably, chatting and listening to tunes spun by up to 5 DJs, bobbing their heads and giving the DJ points if they like the song. Stepping up to the decks is pretty self-explanatory too -- wait for a slot to open, then hit the "play music" button that appears. Nothing could be simpler.
The problem for new users, as the company has admitted, is getting into a room in the first place. At Turntable.fm, you are presented with a list of dozens of rooms created by users. Prior to the update, the list told you how many listeners and DJs were in each room -- which was meaningless unless you'd already used the service. Now there's a bright purple headphone icon calling out to those eager to get on the decks, signalling which rooms "need DJs".
But the new setup is not without its teething troubles. In our tests, the room list consistently failed to scroll down all the way, hanging at the rooms with 16 users or more -- and thus not typically finding any rooms that needed DJs. Listing by "recent" generally gets you rooms with just one or two users, which aren't likely to be much fun for newbies.