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Comment by onedev | Hacker News Reader

Their website and apps are really bad....but what keeps me coming back is the incredible incredible content. I've found so many great remixes as well as obscure but extremely talented musicians on Soundcloud. It's amazing.

The site/apps and just general design really are embarrassing though. I hope they're doing something about it.

I guess this is one case where content really does make up for a shoddy product. I'd be interested to know the story behind their growth and how they managed to create the community of content creators. I'm sure at least a part of it is lack of a better alternative but I'm sure there's some secret sauce in there somewhere.

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I find the site/app/api amazing.

You can navigate while playing a song without interruption, keyboard shortcuts make sense, I can even play from Emacs!

The only thing I regret is the buggy login via facebook (the logo doesn't show, or clicking it doesn't do anything).

Here's a post about the technology behind SoundCloud from a couple of months ago [1]. I agree that this is a great example of a cloud service. While it might not be completely optimized for one particular platform, I am able to hop between IOS, Android, and PC browsers with all my data being updated flawlessly and in realtime.

My biggest peeve with SoundCloud, though, is keeping track of what I have listened to and trying to remember a song that I thought was amazing. I didn't have an account for the first several months I was using it, but I would just remember the Artists I like and listen to their profiles/likes. Not being able to remember songs and artist names motivated me to make an account and start following them, and liking the songs I wanted to hear again, reblogging the ones I want to share with others... In the end, even though it was frustrating for me, I suppose this is good for SoundCloud and getting people to provide feedback.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878433

the getting back to old music that you like is a problem even when you do have an account. Your likes are only stored in the order in which you favorite them, with no real search functionality. I've been trying forever to find an old song that I liked, but searching for it only yields similarly named songs. I wish there was a search within only favorites..

I'm less forgiving...I agree the content is great and when I set my mind to look around, I always find something I really like. But it's a battle. It's slow. It doesn't run well on my laptop, and search and recommendations are pretty useless...I just end up browsing huge lists and hoping.

Maybe part of it is that some of it is so well executed (the content, sure, but things like the comments are great), that it really makes the not-so-great stuff stand out. Still, I'm hopeful they'll keep iterating and improving!

Sometimes, only sometimes, I think badly designed things are better because the lack of superficial (and sometimes even important) quality tends to keep out the crap.

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