Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

What I do not get about Soundcloud is why they make it impossible to browse the music if you are not a logged-in user. It makes me slap my forehead each time, almost as bad as Jamendo's perpetuum failuri.

Or am I just too dumb to find their "browse" or "search" pages? The link to /explore/ in the linked post just gives me an 404 error page.

edit: wait, what, now it works. I get a cover/graphic heavy browse page.

Hm, pretty much all the titles are cut off. I don't get why music sites feel cover art is so important. It is so generic and interchangeable. Some more tags/genres shown would be much more important to me.

edit2: On second thought, even that /explore/ page is nothing. I guess it changes daily or in realtime. You cannot see a bigger list of tracks for subgenres. You only get one song per subgenre. It is weird how clicking the cover image starts the song instead of taking me to the track page.

edit3: https://soundcloud.com/tags/metal is more like it. That page makes my netbook cry in agony though. Oh god, it has no pagination but infinite scrolling. My navigation keys (arrows, pageup/down, space) do not work.

Soundcloud's strategy is that soundcloud.com should only be for music producers. Consumers are supposed to use other, discovery-specific sites which consume the soundcloud API. This stops the SC devs having to please two conflicting groups of users. I think it's extremely clever.

In that case they might benefit from prominently linking to some good discovery services.

http://soundcloud.com/apps/category/discover-listen

I don't get why music sites feel cover art is so important. It is so generic and interchangeable. Some more tags/genres shown would be much more important to me.

maybe it’s a matter of preference and the way one handles information, but i've always found it extremely important. so important that i never add files into my library unless they're tagged with some form of cover art. being, i'd say, a very active consumer of music (i.e. one who very frequently acquires/adds new music into his collection, on a near-daily basis), i rely heavily on the ability to visually identify a track or album. for me, the absence of cover art would significantly cripple my capacity in discovering, managing, and consuming music (even within my own collection)..

for artists i'm most familiar with its less of an issue (though even then, if they’re active with releases and/or have a large volume of singles/loose tracks, identification by cover art is the quickest way for me to find a track or narrow-in on one within an album).

but for newly-discovered artists and/or recent releases (soundcloud’s primary focus) i find it absolutely crucial as i’ve found artist names and track/album titles to, in fact, be generic, interchangeable, and often forgettable -- at least until some degree of familiarity is formed. filtering by genre and release/acquisition date helps to some degree, but even then you’re left with a lot of names/titles to remember and associations to make; having the visual representation cover art provides makes this all much easier to manage, for me at least.

Heh, it is the other way around for me. The art is often crude and generic and thus forgettable. I mostly listen to free music and I do not use a player where the cover art is prominently taking space so that might play huge roles. The random cover art on Soundcloud did not strike me as unique and rememberable.

i guess it comes down in-part to how you consume music as well. i will agree though that on soundcloud, where much of the music is unofficial releases and remixes, cover art is typically lacking in quality

Re the 404 error: It seems as if you get served the old website unless you've previously navigated to the front page -- and any URLs which didn't exist on the old website gives you 404.

To verify, open [1] in Incognito mode -- you should get the old website. Open [2] in Incognito mode -- you should get 404. Open [3] in Incognito mode, then visit the previous links in the same session. You will get the new webiste.

Edit: It seems to split visitors on the cookie "enablev2=1", which is set on the front page.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/penga-per/foppatoffla

[2] https://soundcloud.com/explore

[3] https://soundcloud.com/

I don't get why music sites feel cover art is so important. It is so generic and interchangeable

Uh, because I want to brand my offerings in a distinctive fashion?

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