
The Next SoundCloud Becomes SoundCloud - gulbrandr
http://blog.soundcloud.com/2012/12/04/next-becomes-soundcloud/
======
felixthehat
I love the new design and have been using the beta for ages - the only thing
that irks is that it steals the spacebar key to play/pause rather than scroll
page up/down.

Also, a great bit of UX detail worth noting is that it prepends '▶' to the
page title when audio is playing, so you can see which browser tab sound is
coming from - something all multimedia pages should adopt!

~~~
ash
It would be nice if browsers added '▶' themselves. Or even had "show me pages
that play audio" feature. Are there browser makers planning to implement it?

~~~
nairteashop
I think this is impossible to do if the audio is being played via
java/flash/etc as the plugin bypasses the browser completely. Here's a comment
from the google chrome team from a while back:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thre...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_three_members_of_the_google_chrome/c1mwuaa)

It should however be possible for webpages that use browser APIs to play audio
(e.g. via HTML5).

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bbx
I've always loved SoundCloud.

I remember how it was difficult for people like me to upload their music on
the web in order to share it. The only viable option was the MySpace music
section (which required a different MySpace account). Even renowned artists
used it. But the music player was just a single feature among the whole
MySpace package, and the resulting experience for both the uploader and the
viewer was unconvincing.

SoundCloud filled a need: upload your music easily, and doing just that. The
uploading experience is fluid. The player is great, easy to share, with a nice
sound quality.

This startup idea should have been obvious for some, but the real key was to
implement a perfect UI for a great UX and SoundCloud achieved it for me.

~~~
aw3c2
I am not sure what made them such a success (Soundcloud is awesome, I am just
wondering). I think marketing and then prominent artists played a huge role.
Soundcloud also seems to have a very open policy for mix-sets that use non-
free music (legal "grey" area).

Sites like <http://be.electrobel.org/> , <http://archive.org> have been around
much longer (I do not know how they worked 5 years ago and for some sharing
music might ((have) require approval by mods). And of course more local ones
like
[http://www.dogmazic.net/index.php?op=edito&choice_user_l...](http://www.dogmazic.net/index.php?op=edito&choice_user_language=english)
or <http://www.myownmusic.de>

~~~
mehulkar
Not sure about traction/usage of either, but Bandcamp shows up over and over
as the other big contender. ReverbNation sometimes, but ReverbNation is too
much clutter for me.

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aw3c2
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.

~~~
JonnieCache
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.

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

~~~
JonnieCache
<http://soundcloud.com/apps/category/discover-listen>

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rwhitman
I switched to the new design beta the other day and I think I've been visiting
soundcloud as a destination about 10x more than before.

Its probably one of the most effective redesigns / UX overhauls I've seen in a
while

Though I do think they missed an opportunity to put more persistent player
controls in the top nav - play pause, next track, scrub etc are missing unless
you visit a song. Kind of wish it worked a little more like Hype Machine in
this regard

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shaydoc
I love soundcloud, been using it for ages, HOWEVER, I am hating the redesign
completely. I am coming from the perspective of being on it everyday for that
past two years, and being happy with what it gives me as someone who stores
music on it.

People can say UX this and UX that, I was more than comfortable with the
previous incarnation, if ain't broke... ..just my 5 cents worth as a
disenfranchised user!

..and so I will get used to it eventually!

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mikegioia
This just borked Chrome in Ubuntu 12.04 on a desktop. I could see the memory
increasing by 20MB a second in the mem util and the Chrome tab locked
completely. This is with 8GB of ram...

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andor
They implemented keyboard shortcuts to switch between pages like your profile,
the "Stream" and "Explore". That's a nice touch, but _please don't use ALT+
<0-9> for anything in your web application_. These are _universal_
combinations in Linux to switch between tabs. Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird,
and all Gnome and LXDE apps work this way.

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tiredoffps
A lot of new people might be wondering, "What's difference between SoundCloud
and Pandora/Spotify?". SoundCloud focuses only on indie music. Tracks that get
more comments, listens, get on the Hottest Track List. There are a ton of gems
that aren't played on the radio that can be found on Sound Cloud. Now you can
be a hipster too.

~~~
kitsune_
This is SO not what the old SoundCloud was about. I've been using this site,
as a musician, since 2008 or so. One of its founders, Forss, was part of the
same scene (dnb) that I was in.

SoundCloud was a site by music creators for music creators.

Those early days were AWESOME. Then venture capitalism entered the scene. It
was a nice way to host your tracks and get some feedback of like-minded
individuals. In the process you got to know new and relatively unknown music.

Now it slowly built up a massive base of passive listeners. And of course
their founders and investors now smell the big all mighty dollar. It has to be
social. And cool. And uber.

This redesign is hated by almost every paying customer (the musicians!) I
know. The reactions on most music production forums are awful.

I pay for their service, if they don't change, I'll cancel my subscription.

I'm getting a distinct DIGG V4, MySpace vibe about this redesign...

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ragmondo
Disclaimer: Self Plug. I wrote an app on Android that allows you to set your
and other people's ringtones from your phone via searching soundcloud CC0
music ( ie almost no-rights-reserved). I'm demoing it tonight at "techhub" for
anybody reading this in London. Oh it's called TonePush btw.

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tiredoffps
How do I look at the most popular recent tracks like in the old version?

EDIT: I guess it's now Explore > "Your genre". Not liking this UX. Before you
could usually measure the quality of a track by the number of visible
comments. With the new UI you can't do that.

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milkmiruku
I'm still seeing the old site after demoing the new and switching back as
there's no user script to scrobble to Last.fm yet. Fingers crossed that sticks
for a while, I like being able to track my listening habbits!

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hamoid
Why is Flash still a requirement?

~~~
pwenzel
IIRC, Flash is not required, but provides a fallback for those browsers and
devices that do not fully support HTML5 audio.

~~~
hamoid
Trying to find out which browsers support what audio features I found this
site: <http://caniuse.com/audio>

It links to a sound file-format test, where I see Firefox plays only ogg and
wav. That made me wonder if one could do mp3 decoding on the browser. It's
possible: <http://labs.official.fm/codecs/> but it sounds totally broken on
Firefox on my Ubuntu.

So no Flashless SoundCloud on my Firefox yet, but it may soon change:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=799318>

~~~
dpetrov
The playback problems with the JS decoder are due to bugs in some versions of
Firefox for Linux. Those have been recently fixed (as of 19.02a as far as I
can tell). See: <https://github.com/ofmlabs/aurora.js/issues/13>

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kitsune_
This is the worst redesign in history, Digg V4 in the making...

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paromi
a simple music site : <http://www.cloud-vibe.com>

