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Comment by nirajd | Hacker News Reader

i've been a rdio subscriber for a while now.

+ new releases, right on time. + high quality (on wifi)

- terrible to use on my commute 1hr. seems like the app doesn't buffer data properly for low signal scenarios (pandora does!) - when a song doesn't buffer properly, i "pause" the song and play local music. when the song buffers it stops my music and starts playing. this get's ridiculously annoying. - i've noticed my battery life being drained with the rdio app running (not playing or streaming) in the background. this may have been fixed in recent updates.

imo, these guys have a lot to learn from pandora on ux

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I'd add the varying availability of tracks as a major problem. Having some things simply not available is an annoyance, but I can live with that. What's worse is finding some albums I like, adding them to my collection, and then having them disappear later without warning. Almost just as bad is when that happens and they replace it with another copy of the same album, it doesn't get added to your collection.

Posted this on HN last time the Rdio discussion came up when Spotify launched in the US, still relevant:

"I'm in Canada and was disappointed that we were cut out of the stateside Spotify launch, so I went looking and heard a number of recommendations for Rdio. Out of 18,384 tracks it matched 3,142. Considering my tastes are pretty mainstream and my files have very clean tags, it's hardly impressive."

For comparison, iTunes Match launched not long after that. More than half of my library was matched without uploading, and by that point it had grown to 21679 songs. Honestly, since iTunes Match I haven't even considered a cloud music service like Spotify or Rdio again. The way I see it, why pay to access someone else's crappy library missing tons of content when you can just upload your library and cut out the middleman?

I'm also in Canada, and while Rdio does have a lot of the stuff I listen to, maybe I should try iTunes match as well.

I agree, but instead of just calling this ux I'd call it engineering. Pandora has some amazing engineers. I know one of them, Casey, because he lives here in Colorado. He's one of the smartest engineers I've met.

Rdio's great, but in addition to the issue you mentioned, they had an issue with Backbone.js and a Chrome Dev Channel bug, where rather than making some Backbone.js source changes to work around the Chrome bug, they simply waited it out. I doubt Pandora would have taken that approach.

I think Microsoft would make Rdio more technically sound. They might screw up the business, but Skype seems to be doing alright and Yammer keeps plugging along, so I'm optimistic.

I'm a web developer. I have Chrome Canary, WebKit Nightly and Firefox Minefield installed.

I still can't bring myself to prioritize a bug which affects only Chrome Dev channel users – and I don't have access to the log files to prove how little that matters.

As a counterpoint, I've found the iPhone app to be quite adept at handling horrible network conditions. I'm on AT&T – you need a massive buffer to soak up poor network engineering.

I have a fair amount of streaming issues with Spotify as well. UI doesn't indicate any buffering so I'm stuck wondering if the app is having problems playing the song or it is going to play. I often find myself hitting next and then previous to see if the song will play. Sometimes I just flat out kill the app and restart and it'll play. I have no idea if that is actually doing anything, but it seems to work sometimes.

Even offline playlists?

I am also a subscriber...do you use the desktop application or the web app in your browser. I found the desktop application to be terrible (as you described) however have found much much better luck with the browser. Ever since then I only use the web app and maybe have it buffer (stop playing) maybe once or at most twice a day.

i'm using the ios app on a 4S

That might be...I only ever did a trial on a mobile (htc thunderbolt). Guess I can't be any help then.

This is exactly why I stopped paying for (and eventually using) Rdio. Their mobile app (where I used Rdio 80% of the time) was HORRIBLE at keeping the music playing non-stop, without tons of pauses and dropouts.

Pandora, on the other hand, is nearly flawless in the same signal areas.

I have similar troubles with the mobile application when in "low signal" environments. It should decide to swap to local or do a better job buffering, but having 1 bar is not going to sustain a stream.

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