
One of the lesser reasons Soundcloud deserved its fate - coldtea
https://soundcloudcommunity.com/soundcloud-on-your-computer-230066/volume-control-6441406
======
dang
This breaks the HN guideline against using titles to editorialize. If you want
to say what you think is important about an article, or give your
interpretation of it, the place to do this is in the comments, on a level
playing field with everyone else.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
kyledrake
One of my biggest criticisms of most media sites is the lack of audio
normalization. It's a bad user experience to be listening to a playlist and
then suddenly get blasted with audio at a much higher volume.

I used to just run one on my computer, but it usually involves installing a
pretty hacky/custom audio takeover program and isn't really accessible for
most people.

Purists will probably complain about the audio being modified. I suppose you
could either (optionally) enable it dynamically, or you could store separate
tracks for the unchanged and changed audio. But I suspect that most people
would prefer their audio to be normalized. I like to throw in a good multiband
compressor when I have one too, but that may be a little too opinionated for
the general use case.

~~~
alsetmusic
> Purists will probably complain about the audio being modified.

As a SoundCloud user, I would argue that a great number of the target audience
(musicians) would be turned off by having a carefully crafted mix altered.
Anyone who has spent large amounts of money on the tools of their trade has an
investment in achieving a particular result from their hard work. The listener
is (IMO) secondary to the artist in this case.

~~~
jacalata
Then give the artist tools to fit a normalized audio experience, or build a
business that doesn't need listeners.

------
dsl
The nail in the coffin for me was when they started wiping out the massive
collection of mashups that had been uploaded. Once they got in bed with the
record labels and started taking down anything that even remotely resembled
another song it all went to hell (things that, mind you, existed just fine on
YouTube).

~~~
tomcam
How could they do it without violating copyright? And I wonder if artists
would prefer to have control over what mashup's are made with their own music?
Not trying to be snarky. These are sincere questions

~~~
rhizome
They could do it by licensing them in a simple process with reasonable and
non-discriminatory rates.

 _I wonder if artists would prefer to have control over what mashup 's are
made with their own music?_

This is called "moral rights" and US copyright law does not have them.

------
danso
It's too bad this is being framed as a Soundcloud-reaps-what-it-sows/karma
thing, because a volume control flaw was meaningless among the factors that
threatens Soundcloud's existence, because I'd really like to know what the
design justification is for not having a volume control. There wasn't any
justification given in the 2-year-old thread as far as I can see:

[https://soundcloudcommunity.com/soundcloud-on-your-
computer-...](https://soundcloudcommunity.com/soundcloud-on-your-
computer-230066/volume-control-6441406#post15034635)

~~~
azinman2
I actually wonder how many people care, and if it wouldn’t be net negative if
they did put it in to due conclusion about its volume vs the OS.

To me, the computer sound is really the one that you want to modulate, know
how to modulate, and likely have hardware buttons on your keyboard to change.
If audio is properly normalied, then in what scenario are you allowing any
random computer sound (such as the OS’s beep) to blow away your ears but you
selectively want to do extra work to make SoundCloud play lower?

~~~
wlesieutre
It's useful because I have something important to listen to like
Mumble/Discord playing at my system volume setting, and I want the music
quieter than that so I can hear people talking.

iTunes 1 (16 years ago) had a volume slider to facilitate this. It seems like
a perfectly reasonable thing to include even if some of their users like for
music to always be the loudest thing on their computer.

~~~
azinman2
But it’s not an application we’re talking about, but a webpage that’s often
embedded in music blogs.

------
dexterdog
I don't get the complaint over a volume control. I really just want a mute
button, but given that in this case it's only audio there should just be a
pause because why would I let a non-live sound file play without listening to
it? I like all of my sound sources to play at full volume and then I just
control the global sound with my system's volume control.

~~~
wlesieutre
If you have two sound sources in the same application you can't do this on
Windows. Music from SoundCloud and a video call on appear.in or similar, for
example.

If you're using a Mac there isn't a system volume controller with adjustments
for each application, only a single global control and software is expected to
provide its own local slider. Literally every audio source I've encountered
has one except for SoundCloud.

EDIT: Might be a bad example, I'm not sure if appear.in has a sound volume
slider. But the point stands for every media player I've ever used, whether
online or native.

~~~
dexterdog
So you're playing soundcloud while you're on a video call?

~~~
djeikyb
yes. or playing a game. or listening to text (book, screenreader, etc). or
using any number of programs where sound is part of the ux (like voice
navigation, or bash).

------
acchow
Why does the Soundcloud iPhone app have ZERO social functionality?

I can't read comments, post comments, see which of my followings liked this
track too. I can't even see the date a track was posted, or read its
description.

Come on, Soundcloud.

------
choward
Lesser reasons? Holy crap, an audio player not having a volume control? That
screams incompetence.

~~~
Strom
To me the bigger lesson here is that they have a prewritten reply (by a bot?)
asking the feedback giver to e-mail it to somewhere else. How hard could it be
to subscribe to the thread with their feedback e-mail? Asking people to do
stuff is a bad idea, no one likes more work.

Thus it's not so much about this specific complaint about the volume control
[1], but more about the systematic failure to collect user feedback.

\--

[1] The volume control is a bit hidden indeed, although I've always managed to
find it myself.

------
whipoodle
I don't like how they monkey with the "download" button. If you want volume
control (among other things), you can just copy the download URL and paste
that into your audio player (Quicktime is fine for this), but that's hard to
do if they obscure the download link.

------
cyberferret
In a similar vein, they have had an issue with their 'Spotlight' tool causing
crashes in Chrome browsers whenever you try to drag and drop the play order in
your profile.

I (and many others) reported this bug almost 2 YEARS AGO, but even as of a
month ago, it was never fixed. I have no idea what their front end devs are up
to, but when issues like the OP posted, and a simple drag/drop causes your
entire browser to permanently lock up, then it doesn't bode well for the
reputation of the development team.

EDIT: I believe 'Spotlight' is a paid for feature too (? Not 100% sure, but I
have been a paying user of SC for years), so the fact that they may be
ignoring bug fix requests for a feature used by revenue generating customers
is even more perplexing.

~~~
r3bl
I mean, we are talking about a company that, for some reason, takes over two
years (I think) to switch to a new design completely, so I don't see why you
are surprised.

In fact, they still haven't done so, and, for example, if you go to Settings
-> Connections, an old design page opens in a new tab.

------
pmoriarty
Web-based players are usually garbage, no matter what site hosts them. This is
one reason I prefer to just download the media and use dedicated, standalone
players instead. They tend to be much more feature rich, stable, and
configurable.

Fortunately, youtube-dl can download from Soundcloud, so I just use that.

Soundcloud has a much bigger flaw than its player: Soundcloud's ditching of
groups. Without groups their site next to useless for music discovery. This is
why I, as a music producer have stopped uploading content there, as it will
just sit there with zero plays, compared to when groups were around, when at
least some people interested in the genre could discover them. Now Soundcloud
is borderline useless, except as a music storage site.

~~~
lostmsu
Any way to download from Amazon video? I miss 1.X speed feature of VLC.

------
dvt
Lol, this was so so _SO_ annoying when Soundcloud first started gaining
traction. It was an insane pain in the ass to go to Volume Mixer -> Firefox ->
Drag down the volume. And then drag it back up when I switched over to
Youtube.

It seems like such a common-sense obvious simple-to-implement feature, it
blows my mind it took _years_ until we got a volume slider.

------
Dirlewanger
Some time back, I remember reading from either a Soundcloud or Bandcamp
employee (same issue) that they didn't include volume control because they
didn't want users to hang around on their site habitually and treat it as a
player. They wanted people to buy the music instead. A little odd, but it's
not too far-fetched.

------
Raphmedia
This is only true for the embedded player widget. The regular player on the
Soundcloud website has volume control.

You can simply click on the song name to get to the Soundcloud website where
there is a volume slider.

~~~
0xffff2
>The regular player on the Soundcloud website has volume control.

It does now. My memory isn't perfect, but I'm 90% sure that it didn't always.
Note that the post is from 2 years ago.

------
bllguo
What is up with this forum? Why is everyone quoting the wrong post?

~~~
bcook
Please clarify what the right/wrong post is and why it is right/wrong.

~~~
Tommah
Everyone on that page is reacting to the post that says "Yes, we meant that
the feature is not available not that it's broken." But they are quoting the
post before that one.

------
rocky1138
I don't care at all about the online music player having its own volume
control. I can just turn down the volume for Firefox or Chrome. What's the big
deal?

~~~
devwastaken
Convenience of functionality? Proper UI? A dozen reasons for why any player
should have its own volume control when the application its hosted in can have
dozens of other different players at the same time.

~~~
rocky1138
I've never run into a case where I want to listen to a song on Soundcloud and
use the audio from another tab in Chrome at the same time.

~~~
coldtea
That settle's it then, nobody can have that use case...

------
chaz6
Another basic feature they refuse to implement is sorting search results (e.g.
newest first).

------
modzu
player never worked well in opera -- might have also used useragent detection.
if so, glad it died.

------
deft
Their fate being what exactly?

~~~
jng
They just laid off half the staff and are going through life-threatening rough
times.

