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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

Please buy Soundcloud. They have a great product that hasn't made many improvements in the last couple years. Hopefully an acquisition by Twitter would give them the resources they need to thrive, without too much negative oversight. (Vine is an example of a very successful Twitter acquisition.)

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I hope that will be the case but I'm not holding my breath, they have received over $120M in funding up to this point. They had so much potential when they launched and in the last year or so they have just fell behind. When they moved over to this new look there was so much functionality lost and so many critical bugs introduced that they still haven't fixed.

Infinite scroll on their site is completely unusable, on the desktop and on the iPhone. Try to scroll past page 5 on either device and it will begin to slow to crawl, and then it will just start repeating pages of songs over and over. As you scroll, they load more and more elements until the page is using a ridiculous amount of ram. There is no playlist shuffle capability on the iPhone. The shuffle functionality on the desktop is a joke, it shuffles the current page of songs that have been pulled in via infinite scroll.

The whole site in general is very buggy. Many times I can't scroll through my list of playlists when I try to add a song to a playlist. Sometimes I'll like a song and it won't register. All these things have made it become almost unbearable to use.

So between the non-working scroll and lack of real shuffle, it is impossible for me to access any songs I have liked when I started my account. Which are the main songs I want to access. I was thinking of creating my own client on top of their API but I'm worried it will get pulled off the app store like they did with Soundflake.

Although I agree with most of your assessment I have to disagree with this:

>> They had so much potential when they launched and in the last year or so they have just fell behind.

Fallen behind who or what? They are pretty much the YouTube for audio now. If you browse any of the major music sites of even small blogs they embed SoundCloud. When an artist releases an album stream a week before the release and publishes is on Rolling Stone etc. - it's nearly always with a SoundCloud embed.

I agree they really get to fix the product because it's very buggy and missing features that would make the playback experience better (as someone with music on it the artist side of things is quite good) but I don't see anyone coming and overtaking them anytime soon. There aren't really any viable competitors.

I meant they have fallen behind features/bug fixes. Poor wording on my part.

But yes, I agree. They don't have any real competitors at the moment, so that may be part of the reason they aren't improving their product. Don't get me wrong, I think they have an awesome product, I just thought these UX issues were temporary until they worked out all the bugs in the new site, but it has been a while now.

I'm really interested to find out why they pulled Soundflake off the app store though. Anyone know?

Not sure I agree. I've enjoyed how intentional SoundCloud's updates have been over the last few years without trying to do too much (like every music service ever). The changes have been subtle but useful for both power-users and casual listeners.

I think their approach to discovery needs some attention, but definitely wouldn't expect Twitter to be instrumental in helping with that.

I'm biased, as I'd hate to see anything ruin what I think is one of the best music services right now.

This is exactly how I feel - SoundCloud is one of the best music services out there and I use it to discover the majority of the new artists and music that I enjoy these days. People are also posting awesome mixes and more lengthy content for free. Their mobile app is well thought out, too.

It would be sad to see an acquisition from Twitter, because I think they're going to make it whatever they think they need to compete, which will ruin what SoundCloud is now.

> [SoundCloud hasn't] made many improvements in the last couple years.

What, do you think, needs improvement?

I use the application for recording and storing occasional riffs I come up with as private tracks, and to listen to new music from people I follow occasionally. As far as I've experienced, they need not make a big improvement over the site as it is now, but given that I'm not a power user, I might have missed lots of stuff.

The one that annoys me the most is playback. Songs will often stop playing randomly. It only seems to happen with the web client, not the iOS app, but it happens on a lot of different computers and people I have talked to.

Yeah I've experienced that too, I always assumed it was their equivalent of Pandora's "are you still there?" only without politely asking before shutting it off

Well the sound quality of the streaming service is pretty bad, especially for tracks that aren't professionally produced. I don't think people realize how much effect this has on the listeners.

Unfortunately Twitter haven't seemed to realise the "Facebook" way of making acquisitions — if it's a good product in it's own silo, let it stay the course and then have two silos. Twitter seems to acquire and suck products into it, often destroying it in the process (see: The Echo Nest). Vine was unique because it was dead-simple and was already integrated into the Twitter ecosystem, and required barely any modification.

I love SoundCloud, although it has deteriorated slightly in the past year (even little things, like the site going from truly fluid to having several fixed breakpoints, seem to indicators of them become more risk-adverse or "normal" — IMO). I think a change internally would cause some excitement and innovation within the company, and Twitter coming into it would not bring the right kind of change.

don't get ahead of yourself. remember twitter #music product?

was vine an acquisition or an internal dev project?

Vine was an acquisition. Dorsey found it and convinced the Twitter team to acquire.

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