Hacker News Reader

Comment by strgrd | Hacker News Reader

I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have that following, there's no way to communicate to your audience.

In three years, it seems they've just made the UI elements bigger, and added background images for songs and profiles. I was really hoping to see the ability to post text messages into people's timelines. Something to communicate to your followers.

View on HN

I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential.

The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that is worth taking a look at:

https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/redesig...

In addition to showcasing a beautiful, thoughtful redesign, this post makes a series of criticisms that are both justified and still in urgent need of rectification. For example, in the stream:

* It’s hard to discern which song is playing.

* Only three to five songs are visible at once.

* The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll.

* The avatars [of commenters] on the waveform are virtually meaningless.

* Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky.

I would really hate to lose Soundcloud, as a long time fan of electronic music (going on 20 years now!) it's been a big part of my life for years now and I love it.

My biggest complaint about Soundcloud is their lack of pagination, sorting, or shuffling (real shuffling, not just shuffling the 20 tracks that come in with every infinite scroll page). I have well over a thousand likes on my profile and the only way to listen to some of my earlier likes is to sit there like an idiot and scroll through a hundred pages of infinite scroll.

Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.

re pagination/infinite scroll: I had the same problem, it was fucking unbearable to check out peoples' earlier stuff. Luckily, Soundcloud has a very decent public API, which you can use to roll your own narrow client, for whatever you're looking for with the features you want: https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api

----

Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soundcloud User Unpaginator":

Source: https://github.com/gadtfly/Soundcloud-User-Unpaginator/

Running: https://soundcloud-user-unpaginator.herokuapp.com/ (warning: heavy, totally synchronous, server-side blocking, on Heroku free tier)

Could be easily modified to download instead of list, if you want an archive.

I really love Soundcloud but the "Shuffle" is the only thing I don't like. I am actually planning to design a small single-page one-purpose site for exactly that: A real Shuffle for Soundcloud!

Older versions of the Android app allowed for "Stream caching" which you could select up to 100%, allowing you to listen to songs entirely offline if they had been listened to once before and you had not cleared the cache.

Recent versions of the app have removed this setting entirely, and from the behaviour I've noticed indicates that no caching is taking place on the phone.

Which honestly is just really stupid from an operations stand point. Why is there any point to transferring hundreds of megabytes of songs on a playlist over and over? Bandwidth isn't free for users, or SoundCloud's CDN.

This is why I have started to download music from SoundCloud more, and consuming it offline with VLC. It's pretty easy to do, even if SoundCloud doesn't offer the download button.

Reposts? They are currently my #1 annoyance on soundcloud. I'm following 300+ artists and they increased my stream's size by at least 4x.

It's not about "finding, sharing and curating" but to spam your stream with duplicate tracks.

Imagine an artist reposting his own tracks. Then his network does. As does his label. And his friend. And then all of them repost a playlist with this track on it. Yay!

Please give us an option to hide them...

Exactly. And those creating content are the ones who fork out for a paid account. It wasn't designed for 'curators' because they add nothing but noise to the ecosystem.

In one regard, I think it's really cool to be able to follow artists and put together a public playlist for others to be interested in. That's neat. If it's more for recognition and trying to be a sort-of icon for 'picking out great tunes' then I don't think they add much - as in, established music review sites do a pretty good job still of curating and reviewing. SoundCloud isn't really a review platform per se.

Agreed, and the solution is painfully obvious: Show the item once in the feed and just let me know that "DJ Joe Doe, Awesome Records, [guy who is in my network] and 27 other people reposted this."

Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this problem?

That's something I could live with.

But honestly, the complete lack of stream customization is just sad for $1B startup that has been in the game since 2007.

Facebook has been doing this for years and it works great. The duplicated content is shown once, and then the separate comment feeds from the different reposts (if there are any) are put below it. Soundcloud wouldn't even have to innovate here; they just need to copy what's already working elsewhere.

Perhaps they found the duplication better for revenue?

Not having duplication is better for revenue because having duplicate content fill up your feed because lots of your friends re-shared something is bad UI. I'm not really that much more likely to click on something after the first time I'm shown something, and I start to get actively pissed off at it after a few unnecessary repetitions (this was a big complaint about the spam coming from Facebook games in the early days). Spamming up the feed with duplicate content means that for the same time spent browsing, someone sees fewer pieces of original content, meaning their average click rate is less, and yes, that costs revenue.

But fundamentally duplication costs revenue because it's a bad UI and bad UIs piss off users, leading them to use your product less.

I follow 2,000 on soundcloud and wish I could follow more (there is a limit currently). I agree that the way reposts are shared on timelines is annoying in the sense that it is inadequate. Obviously the user needs the ability to filter reposts and just see tracks posted by artists (not currently possible). But I also follow people because I know they repost quality content from obscure artists. That's the main way to discover content on soundcloud right now, and it seems completely broken, both for the person doing the discovering, and the person being discovered.

How do you manage that?

It takes me ~1h to listen trough all of the tracks posted on one day. And I'm not even listening the full length.

Keep in mind I am primarily interested in DJ-oriented music, which is not music designed to be listened to beginning-to-end, but rather mixed and beat-matched with other music. You can often get the gist of a beat and rhythm in a matter of bars. I'll usually click around a track for 5-10s before I repost it, and move on to the next track. When I'm ready to actually listen, I go back to my profile and play back everything I've reposted for the day, and unpost the stuff that doesn't stand for the full length of the track.

Wouldn't it be better to 'like' tracks as a bookmarking mechanism, then repost when you go back to listen. That's how I do it and that way I'm not filling my followers feeds with stuff I haven't even listened to.

Indeed, you can create lists too that are private

Vine seems to have the same problem. Most regular people only occasionally post an original Vine, but if you want to see those, you have to scroll through tons of their reposts first.

there's an extension for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/soundshroud/iiobjl...

Thank you so much!

I personally want it to go back to (or more likely at this point, find a new website dedicated to) being a community for people who make music. It's now more about listening to music together, or broadcasting to an audience, than sharing music creation.

I miss the Friday nights spent working on music in Ableton, rendering a clip and posting to soundcloud, then commenting/giving feedback to friends who had just done the same. I made several friends by searching genre tags I was interested in, and following people who I would also trade feedback with. Soundcloud (or at least the little bubble in which my friends and I used it) used to be much more about the "work in progress" than the finished results.

Now I only post polished mixes of arrangements or melodies I'm proud of. Nothing that I'd like criticism on, because I know some of my family and non-musician friends will see the tracks and say something. I've gone from posting 4 times a day, to once every 4 months. Maybe going back there isn't a good business decision for Soundcloud, but the "magic" is just gone for me with it's current experience.

You sound like a target audience for Blend.io. I don't use the site anymore but you might find it neat.

Thanks for telling me about this, I'm going to give it a try! Now the tough part will be getting my other friends to try it out as well as the same time.

Yeah it's a pretty neat system though using Dropbox and if anything it can give you some tips about sharing just on your own (Save All, Uploading in proper folders). There are lots of remix contests and the like if you feel up for a challenge.

And the annoying bug on the native mobile app where it randomly stops playing, which has been a problem for so long and still hasn't been fixed despite the companies worth...

Disclaimer: I know these guys through TechStars.

I see a lot of complaints about stagnation on SoundCloud, and while I'm not a user, I completely understand the frustration that brings.

There's a new kid on the block with these kind of services, clyp.it. I liken them to imgur for audio, focusing around music for the most part.

They've got strong ties to the community and even have some big names using their tool like Eric Clapton.

The community aspects are still being worked out, but I know they're actively looking for feedback to help build that out to be the best it can be.

If you check them out and have suggestions, I know they'd love to hear it (There's a link to their twitter on their site)

Thanks for the heads-up about the site - honestly I've found a lot of good, new, or developing channels through this site and comments like yours. I've taken a look and joined up, and will be definitely interested to play around with it! This fits perfectly in the discussion in my opinion. Looking forward to exploring more.

> it seems they've just made the UI elements bigger, and added background images for songs and profiles

The last major attempt at "improving" UI/UX that stands out to me was in 2014 when they launched the redesigned iOS app.

That was when I stopped using soundcloud on my iOS devices. Everything became more difficult for me.

> I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience.

Yeah, probably at the point when they started hemorrhaging money. Why do people expect a company that is dying to focus on UI improvements? Like any other business in the world, their focus is on staying alive.

How do developers focus on "staying alive" if not by making the product better (or leaving)? I'd expect that the architecture issues of growing larger have mostly been solved by now.

They probably work on things that help bring in more paying customers. UI tweaks isn't among those things. I'm betting they have a whole analytics team, for example.

By tidying some licensing loose ends with that Big Label agreement they signed a couple of weeks ago it seems to me they're readying themselves to be acquired pretty soon.

Every single time. Some company is having business troubles so let's gripe about their UI.

reposting/finding/sharing/curating content

You mean, stealing content from others, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com