One of the lesser reasons Soundcloud deserved its fate | Hacker News Reader

One of the lesser reasons Soundcloud deserved its fate

soundcloudcommunity.com

83 pointscoldtea60 comments

This breaks the HN guideline against using titles to editorialize. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, or give your interpretation of it, the place to do this is in the comments, on a level playing field with everyone else.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One of my biggest criticisms of most media sites is the lack of audio normalization. It's a bad user experience to be listening to a playlist and then suddenly get blasted with audio at a much higher volume.

I used to just run one on my computer, but it usually involves installing a pretty hacky/custom audio takeover program and isn't really accessible for most people.

Purists will probably complain about the audio being modified. I suppose you could either (optionally) enable it dynamically, or you could store separate tracks for the unchanged and changed audio. But I suspect that most people would prefer their audio to be normalized. I like to throw in a good multiband compressor when I have one too, but that may be a little too opinionated for the general use case.

>I used to just run one on my computer, but it usually involves installing a pretty hacky/custom audio takeover program and isn't really accessible for most people.

If you're on a windows box, most audio drivers (at least in the last few years) have some form of system-wide volume normalization. Of courses it's hidden in some oddly named tab under the audio device properties.

Normalization alone wouldn't always work. Highly compressed songs sound louder than a very dynamic sound. Even with both are normalized.

> Purists will probably complain about the audio being modified.

As a SoundCloud user, I would argue that a great number of the target audience (musicians) would be turned off by having a carefully crafted mix altered. Anyone who has spent large amounts of money on the tools of their trade has an investment in achieving a particular result from their hard work. The listener is (IMO) secondary to the artist in this case.

thats fair but I always found soundcloud's stream compression to be pretty bad. I think maybe it got better recently but there was a long time where it sounded like ~128kbps or less, particularly on stuff with cymbals, etc

The problem is simple enough that it could be solved client side, with some precomputed metadata from the server (an 8-bit integer for e.g. ReplayGain). That could be implemented as a little checkbox that twiddles the volume control from JS

Then give the artist tools to fit a normalized audio experience, or build a business that doesn't need listeners.

"The customer is secondary to the manufacturer".

Good luck with that.

I have always viewed musicians as SoundCloud's primary customers. That's who brings listeners. The site is built first for hosting, second for streaming. The streaming audience is a consequence of artist utilizing the platform.

I would revert to hosting my music only on my own sites if I learned that SC was altering my audio.

Edit: imagine if github altered code when hosting public repositories.

YouTube and Spotify target volume at -14 LUFS and Apple -16 LUFS. They punish audio louder than this by turning it down automatically. This has effectively put an end to loudness wars. https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/76296773-masteri...

This would be very simple for soundcloud to do. Also, I don't bother listening to tracks with soundcloud because its autoplay feature isn't able to understand that if I'm listening to instrumental piano versions of video game music, then please don't blast me with some super loud chiptune music next.

spotify compresses all songs, it's my biggest pain with it.

You can turn off volume normalization. It's under "advanced settings", "playback".

The nail in the coffin for me was when they started wiping out the massive collection of mashups that had been uploaded. Once they got in bed with the record labels and started taking down anything that even remotely resembled another song it all went to hell (things that, mind you, existed just fine on YouTube).

Agreed. This was their bread and butter for a long time. Now it's mostly electronic artists which also cross-post on other sites.

How could they do it without violating copyright? And I wonder if artists would prefer to have control over what mashup's are made with their own music? Not trying to be snarky. These are sincere questions

They could do it by licensing them in a simple process with reasonable and non-discriminatory rates.

I wonder if artists would prefer to have control over what mashup's are made with their own music?

This is called "moral rights" and US copyright law does not have them.

It's too bad this is being framed as a Soundcloud-reaps-what-it-sows/karma thing, because a volume control flaw was meaningless among the factors that threatens Soundcloud's existence, because I'd really like to know what the design justification is for not having a volume control. There wasn't any justification given in the 2-year-old thread as far as I can see:

https://soundcloudcommunity.com/soundcloud-on-your-computer-...

I actually wonder how many people care, and if it wouldn’t be net negative if they did put it in to due conclusion about its volume vs the OS.

To me, the computer sound is really the one that you want to modulate, know how to modulate, and likely have hardware buttons on your keyboard to change. If audio is properly normalied, then in what scenario are you allowing any random computer sound (such as the OS’s beep) to blow away your ears but you selectively want to do extra work to make SoundCloud play lower?

It's useful because I have something important to listen to like Mumble/Discord playing at my system volume setting, and I want the music quieter than that so I can hear people talking.

iTunes 1 (16 years ago) had a volume slider to facilitate this. It seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to include even if some of their users like for music to always be the loudest thing on their computer.

But it’s not an application we’re talking about, but a webpage that’s often embedded in music blogs.

Since when doesn't the web player have a volume control? I'm looking at one right now, it's to the right of the playbar, to the left of the "Now Playing" section, second element from the right. Hover over the speaker icon.

I don't have a Soundcloud account (i.e. I'm not logged in) and don't use it other than seeing it as an embed player, but I don't see a volume control on the embed version. I did just now notice it on the dedicated page (on the very bottom):

http://i.imgur.com/Vj9YKC6.jpg

https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-a-reporter-pierc...

The OP forum post seems to be complaining about the embed version:

> *I'm not sure if this is a bug or just major oversight, but I can't seem to find the volume control on the web player. When I open a site that has your player, I tend to have to close it quickly while I gather myself and turn the volume down on my PC.

Now that I see that the complaint seems to be about the embed version, I can see there's more of a tradeoff due to the embed version's tighter real estate.

Yeah, very little of my SC listening is via embedded players.

Chalk it up to commentator's oversight.

I don't get the complaint over a volume control. I really just want a mute button, but given that in this case it's only audio there should just be a pause because why would I let a non-live sound file play without listening to it? I like all of my sound sources to play at full volume and then I just control the global sound with my system's volume control.

Having a volume control on the soundcloud player doesn't preclude you from playing all sound sources at full volume and controlling the global sound with your system's volume controls.

It does, however, preclude me from turning down the Soundcloud player while keeping something else at a consistent volume.

You can still use the volume mixer on individual tabs, but it is definitely more annoying

If you have two sound sources in the same application you can't do this on Windows. Music from SoundCloud and a video call on appear.in or similar, for example.

If you're using a Mac there isn't a system volume controller with adjustments for each application, only a single global control and software is expected to provide its own local slider. Literally every audio source I've encountered has one except for SoundCloud.

EDIT: Might be a bad example, I'm not sure if appear.in has a sound volume slider. But the point stands for every media player I've ever used, whether online or native.

So you're playing soundcloud while you're on a video call?

yes. or playing a game. or listening to text (book, screenreader, etc). or using any number of programs where sound is part of the ux (like voice navigation, or bash).

Yes. I don't care to stop/restart a background playlist while on a call, I just want to be able to hear the call.

> If you're using a Mac there isn't a system volume controller with adjustments for each application, only a single global control

True, but for those looking for a solution like this there are options. I personally use SoundControl 2[1] ($10) but there is also a free open source app[2] and a few other options out there.

[1]: https://staticz.com/soundcontrol/ [2]: https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic

Why does the Soundcloud iPhone app have ZERO social functionality?

I can't read comments, post comments, see which of my followings liked this track too. I can't even see the date a track was posted, or read its description.

Come on, Soundcloud.

Lesser reasons? Holy crap, an audio player not having a volume control? That screams incompetence.

I thought it was just me being an idiot or some ad blocker screwing with their player. As soon as I saw it (after the first time), I just stopped playing anything from the site. I mean, after play and pause isn't volume the exact next feature?

To me the bigger lesson here is that they have a prewritten reply (by a bot?) asking the feedback giver to e-mail it to somewhere else. How hard could it be to subscribe to the thread with their feedback e-mail? Asking people to do stuff is a bad idea, no one likes more work.

Thus it's not so much about this specific complaint about the volume control [1], but more about the systematic failure to collect user feedback.

[1] The volume control is a bit hidden indeed, although I've always managed to find it myself.

I don't like how they monkey with the "download" button. If you want volume control (among other things), you can just copy the download URL and paste that into your audio player (Quicktime is fine for this), but that's hard to do if they obscure the download link.

In a similar vein, they have had an issue with their 'Spotlight' tool causing crashes in Chrome browsers whenever you try to drag and drop the play order in your profile.

I (and many others) reported this bug almost 2 YEARS AGO, but even as of a month ago, it was never fixed. I have no idea what their front end devs are up to, but when issues like the OP posted, and a simple drag/drop causes your entire browser to permanently lock up, then it doesn't bode well for the reputation of the development team.

EDIT: I believe 'Spotlight' is a paid for feature too (? Not 100% sure, but I have been a paying user of SC for years), so the fact that they may be ignoring bug fix requests for a feature used by revenue generating customers is even more perplexing.

I mean, we are talking about a company that, for some reason, takes over two years (I think) to switch to a new design completely, so I don't see why you are surprised.

In fact, they still haven't done so, and, for example, if you go to Settings -> Connections, an old design page opens in a new tab.

Web-based players are usually garbage, no matter what site hosts them. This is one reason I prefer to just download the media and use dedicated, standalone players instead. They tend to be much more feature rich, stable, and configurable.

Fortunately, youtube-dl can download from Soundcloud, so I just use that.

Soundcloud has a much bigger flaw than its player: Soundcloud's ditching of groups. Without groups their site next to useless for music discovery. This is why I, as a music producer have stopped uploading content there, as it will just sit there with zero plays, compared to when groups were around, when at least some people interested in the genre could discover them. Now Soundcloud is borderline useless, except as a music storage site.

Any way to download from Amazon video? I miss 1.X speed feature of VLC.

Lol, this was so so SO annoying when Soundcloud first started gaining traction. It was an insane pain in the ass to go to Volume Mixer -> Firefox -> Drag down the volume. And then drag it back up when I switched over to Youtube.

It seems like such a common-sense obvious simple-to-implement feature, it blows my mind it took years until we got a volume slider.

Some time back, I remember reading from either a Soundcloud or Bandcamp employee (same issue) that they didn't include volume control because they didn't want users to hang around on their site habitually and treat it as a player. They wanted people to buy the music instead. A little odd, but it's not too far-fetched.

This is only true for the embedded player widget. The regular player on the Soundcloud website has volume control.

You can simply click on the song name to get to the Soundcloud website where there is a volume slider.

>The regular player on the Soundcloud website has volume control.

It does now. My memory isn't perfect, but I'm 90% sure that it didn't always. Note that the post is from 2 years ago.

What is up with this forum? Why is everyone quoting the wrong post?

Yeah that was the weirdest part of this

Please clarify what the right/wrong post is and why it is right/wrong.

Everyone on that page is reacting to the post that says "Yes, we meant that the feature is not available not that it's broken." But they are quoting the post before that one.

I don't care at all about the online music player having its own volume control. I can just turn down the volume for Firefox or Chrome. What's the big deal?

Convenience of functionality? Proper UI? A dozen reasons for why any player should have its own volume control when the application its hosted in can have dozens of other different players at the same time.

I've never run into a case where I want to listen to a song on Soundcloud and use the audio from another tab in Chrome at the same time.

That settle's it then, nobody can have that use case...

I've "rough mixed" two Soundcloud tracks by opening them in different tabs. It was just to get an idea of whether they would complement each other in a mashup but it was useful as a quick POC.

First, there's no built-in way (at least on OS X) to just "turn down the volume for Firefox or Chrome". From a quick search this looks to be a Windows feature.

Second, I don't want to affect the volume for Chrome or Firefox overall (e.g. I might be playing an online game with sounds). I just want the SoundCloud stream to be louder or less loud.

Third, if I run my audio through an audio interface, like lots of musicians (which SoundCloud supposedly caters to) do, there's not even a system volume setting I can apply. I need to use the interface's custom "mix control" application to change the volume, or turn the physical knobs on the interface or mixer or monitors. Again, affecting other sound sources too.

I have no idea about OSX but on both Windows and Linux (KDE), adjusting volume on a per application basis has been part of the system for years.

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/kde-plasma-...

Another basic feature they refuse to implement is sorting search results (e.g. newest first).

player never worked well in opera -- might have also used useragent detection. if so, glad it died.

Their fate being what exactly?

They just laid off half the staff and are going through life-threatening rough times.

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