This is really exciting -- Soundcloud has changed the way I listen to music. Hopefully they will finally bind the spacebar to play/pause!
The Next SoundCloud
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#22I sure hope the scrolling in your new interface is not as laggy as on your pitch page...
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#23You guys seem weirdly resistant on this, but can you please turn off the inline comments? Or at least provide a global option for keeping them off? It makes navigating the songs hard and almost none of the text is ever interesting.
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#24Its really great hearing the Australian accent in the "What have you heard?" audio! :)
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're definitely not alone on that. There's been a lot of work put into a new model for inline comments -- now they're less 'noisy' and definitely create less visual clutter than before. On some tracks, users have completely filled the waveform with comments (looking at you, Skrillex fans...), but we've hopefully come up with something that still won't get in your way even in these extreme cases.
Just add an "off" button. It is beyond me why the current interface still does not have one. I, like many others, have long installed the greasemonkey script to suppress these idiotic popups. They're even worse than youtube comments. At least the youtube drivel doesn't pop up in your face all the time.
> I, like many others, have long installed the greasemonkey script to suppress these idiotic popups. They're even worse than youtube comments. At least the youtube drivel doesn't pop up in your face all the time.
I agree. The comparison to YouTube comments is a good one - and not for the content. YouTube comments are typically below the fold, and therefore don't enter into your head when you're watching (listening to) the content.
I love SoundCloud, but even on some obscure artists, the in-line comments add nothing to the content on the page.
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#26The page structure with the audio timeline serving as a navigation cue to the content below is great. Could someone point me to how to make the audio image waveform reference the on page anchors? I scanned the developer page and couldn't see where to start.
Hey James, there's no pre-packaged system to do this, but you do have some options: you could use the widget API http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/html5-widget There's no special insider trickery happening on that page: it's all using the public API to load the sound and then just listening to 'time' events while the track plays to trigger scroll actions.
gotcha. Thanks Spadgos!
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#27This is really exciting -- Soundcloud has changed the way I listen to music. Hopefully they will finally bind the spacebar to play/pause!
Yup, spacebar toggles play/pause :) ... Plus many more key bindings
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#28Its really great hearing the Australian accent in the "What have you heard?" audio! :)
Heh, I noticed that too. Yay!
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#29I wrote about things that have to change with SoundCloud a couple of months ago [1]
I'm carefully optimistic that an improved interface will help improve how people end up using the site, but the biggest issues for me with SoundCloud are still signal-to-noise rate in community engagement and sound quality.
I will pay close attention to how much behind-the-scenes improvement there is, but none is mentioned in the announcement (the only one that comes close to a point in my list is on search, which I personally never use).
SoundCloud seems to still focus on being a cool site instead of addressing the very basic "data" problems like comment spam [2] (or follow spam) and, in the year 2012, they still stream music at 128kbps, which just does horrible things to your music unless you have professional mastering (even then it's a bit horrible).
What irks me most is that there are very simple solutions to both of those - For comment spam, it seems like they still have no simple "if a user posts the exact same text a number of times, containing a link, that's spam" filters in place. I know that that can be a dirty arms race, but if it remains entirely unfought, the spammers will end up crushing any and all relevance. For the sound quality, even just bumping the bitrate to 192kbps would mean a huge improvement and at a very low cost to data transferred.
In any case - I understand that they have to focus their message and that it's common to show off the more prestigious improvements. But if they have, for instance, an improvement on spam control, this is big enough of an issue for all SC users that they would really enjoy an announcement there.
A community evangelist replied to my post on g+, saying that they would be rolling out improvements throughout the year and I will hold them to that. I must say, though, that I don't get how simple things like that aren't just rolled out in shameful "oh god, you're right, we will do that straight away" fashion, to be honest.
[1] https://plus.google.com/111011776153281260419/posts/KgxmnsMG...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/sr2s5/p...
Re: The Next SoundCloud
#30the "neighbor" site jamendo.com recently switched to a buggy new version without prior notice. with reduced functionality, completely changed focus (single tracks instead of albums) and no community communication features (forums, private messages). instead of announcing it early and working with the community, they had to backpedal and post apologies.