Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

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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

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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.

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