
The Next SoundCloud - duggan
http://next.soundcloud.com
======
iskander
You guys seem weirdly resistant on this, but can you please turn off the
inline comments? Or at least provide a global option for keeping them off? It
makes navigating the songs hard and almost none of the text is ever
interesting.

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xpose2000
Perhaps I am alone in this, but when I play a song I don't like the inline
social comments that popup in their player. I wish I could create a cookie
that disables them by default.

~~~
spadgos
You're definitely not alone on that. There's been a lot of work put into a new
model for inline comments -- now they're less 'noisy' and definitely create
less visual clutter than before. On some tracks, users have completely filled
the waveform with comments (looking at you, Skrillex fans...), but we've
hopefully come up with something that still won't get in your way even in
these extreme cases.

~~~
moe
Just add an "off" button.

It is beyond me why the current interface still does not have one.

I, like many others, have long installed the greasemonkey script to suppress
these idiotic popups. They're even worse than youtube comments. At least the
youtube drivel doesn't pop up in your face all the time.

~~~
elithrar
> I, like many others, have long installed the greasemonkey script to suppress
> these idiotic popups. They're even worse than youtube comments. At least the
> youtube drivel doesn't pop up in your face all the time.

I agree. The comparison to YouTube comments is a good one - and not for the
content. YouTube comments are typically below the fold, and therefore don't
enter into your head when you're watching (listening to) the content.

I love SoundCloud, but even on some obscure artists, the in-line comments add
nothing to the content on the page.

~~~
adamaltman
next SoundCloud comments solve this for me quite well.

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rhizome
This is excellent news! As someone working on a project in this space, it's a
HUGE relief to see that they aren't planning (or publicizing, at least) any of
the features I think are missing from the landscape.

Seriously, for the last 6mos or so I've really been second-guessing whether I
can solo something that sites like this won't come out with before I have a
chance to finish, which slows down development, so to see that they're going
in a different direction is a great thing.

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skore
I wrote about things that have to change with SoundCloud a couple of months
ago [1]

I'm carefully optimistic that an improved interface will help improve how
people end up using the site, but the biggest issues for me with SoundCloud
are still signal-to-noise rate in community engagement and sound quality.

I will pay close attention to how much behind-the-scenes improvement there is,
but none is mentioned in the announcement (the only one that comes close to a
point in my list is on search, which I personally never use).

SoundCloud seems to still focus on being a cool site instead of addressing the
very basic "data" problems like comment spam [2] (or follow spam) and, in the
year 2012, they still stream music at 128kbps, which just does horrible things
to your music unless you have professional mastering (even then it's a bit
horrible).

What irks me most is that there are very simple solutions to both of those -
For comment spam, it seems like they still have no simple "if a user posts the
exact same text a number of times, containing a link, that's spam" filters in
place. I know that that can be a dirty arms race, but if it remains entirely
unfought, the spammers will end up crushing any and all relevance. For the
sound quality, even just bumping the bitrate to 192kbps would mean a _huge_
improvement and at a very low cost to data transferred.

In any case - I understand that they have to focus their message and that it's
common to show off the more prestigious improvements. But if they have, for
instance, an improvement on spam control, this is big enough of an issue for
all SC users that they would really enjoy an announcement there.

A community evangelist replied to my post on g+, saying that they would be
rolling out improvements throughout the year and I will hold them to that. I
must say, though, that I don't get how simple things like that aren't just
rolled out in shameful "oh god, you're right, we will do that straight away"
fashion, to be honest.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/111011776153281260419/posts/KgxmnsMG...](https://plus.google.com/111011776153281260419/posts/KgxmnsMGZPZ)

[2]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/sr2s5/p...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/sr2s5/people_who_spam_on_soundcloud_are_the_scum_of_the/)

~~~
asymmetric
_> in the year 2012, they still stream music at 128kbps_

I guess one reason for that is that artists themselves don't want their tracks
to be streamed at a higher quality for free.

I've personally heard this more than once from musician friends.

~~~
skore
Sure, that's possible. But still - why not at least give artists that choice?

------
toemetoch
suggestion: frequency domain instead of time domain. The waveform in time-
domain doesn't really contain info, with a spectrum you can see lots of
patterns, scroll to the section where the beat kicks in, look for vocals, ...

~~~
minitrollster
I fail to see how that makes sense. How would a spectrum enable you to skip to
specific parts of a song? It only lets you see the frequency breakdown, and
offers no benefits (that I can see) from a navigation standpoint.

~~~
toemetoch
If done properly (linear vs log scale, well-chosen cut-off frequency,
thresholding values and discrete colors) you get a representation of the
patterns in the song. With electronic/techno music you see where the
intro/beats are. With other music you can see where the intro ends, the chorus
repeats, instrumental solo, ...

The way it's done now you see a bunch of peaks/vertical bars. Unless there's a
change in the power of the song the bars stay pretty much at the same level.
It's a lot of real-estate that can be put to good use.

~~~
minitrollster
>With electronic/techno music you see where the intro/beats are. With other
music you can see where the intro ends, the chorus repeats, instrumental solo,
...

Absolutely not you don't see that, how can you see where anything starts or
ends, when it's not a temporal representation? The only thing it represents is
the presence (or lack thereof) of frequencies in a song. For example, what
does this <http://i.imgur.com/QRka5.png> tell you about the song? Can you tell
where the intro or chorus or whatever else begins or ends? A temporal
representation works way better because you can skip to parts of a song. A
spectrum can't let you skip to anything, nor can it give you any information
that the general population would like to know about a track.

------
fruchtose
Nice preview, but their JavaScript is messed up. I attempted to connect to
beta in the Sign Up tab of their pop-up, but the error message for already
having an account says, "Sorry, [object Object] is already registered with
another account".

~~~
spadgos
I just reported the bug with the appropriate team - should be an easy fix and
resolved shortly. (In theory) it would only show if you already have an
account though, so perhaps just try signing in instead of signing up?

~~~
pje
This message should be less javascripty now.

------
kreek
I was hoping for news on reducing comment spam. Repost looks cool but I fear
"plz repost me" will be the new "hey, I love (but didn't actually listen to)
your track, plz follow me and like me on facebook".

------
joejohnson
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SoundCloud_infoModel.jpg>

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kabir_h
I connected my account and it said the party was full and they weren't letting
more people in. I'm not sure what the point of that was.

~~~
spadgos
Hey Kabir, you're in the queue for a beta invite now.

~~~
bvi
Could I get in on the beta as well? Thanks.

~~~
spadgos
Just sign in on next.soundcloud.com and that'll add you to our list.

~~~
igorgue
Me too?

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jamesshamenski
The page structure with the audio timeline serving as a navigation cue to the
content below is great.

Could someone point me to how to make the audio image waveform reference the
on page anchors? I scanned the developer page and couldn't see where to start.

~~~
spadgos
Hey James, there's no pre-packaged system to do this, but you do have some
options: you could use the widget API
<http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/html5-widget>

There's no special insider trickery happening on that page: it's all using the
public API to load the sound and then just listening to 'time' events while
the track plays to trigger scroll actions.

~~~
jamesshamenski
gotcha. Thanks Spadgos!

------
moe
I sure hope the scrolling in your new interface is not as laggy as on your
pitch page...

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jordanfb
This is really exciting -- Soundcloud has changed the way I listen to music.
Hopefully they will finally bind the spacebar to play/pause!

~~~
kesselborn
Yup, spacebar toggles play/pause :) ... Plus many more key bindings

------
aw3c2
the "neighbor" site jamendo.com recently switched to a buggy new version
without prior notice. with reduced functionality, completely changed focus
(single tracks instead of albums) and no community communication features
(forums, private messages). instead of announcing it early and working with
the community, they had to backpedal and post apologies.

------
i386
Its really great hearing the Australian accent in the "What have you heard?"
audio! :)

~~~
organico
Heh, I noticed that too. Yay!

------
rafamvc
It is just like Ruby 5!

<http://ruby5.envylabs.com/>

------
peterwiese
in my opinion soundcloud is one of the hottest most amazing startups out
there. they reached a critical mass of important artists already a while ago.
the fact that they're located in the epicenter of electronic music is just the
icing on the cake. recently i had a complete harddrive failure and lost 500gig
of music. since i couldn't access my backup for 2 months i was limited to
streaming music. after a short while i realized that i needed nothing else
than soundcloud to completely satisfy my daily need for good music.

the update seems to bring soundcloud closer to twitter's model of 'social'. i
think this is a perfect fit for the site. i sorely miss an equivalent to
twitter's lists feature, however. further more i'd like to create playlists in
the browser and not just in the macstore app.

/edit: about the 'list' feature i mentioned: it'd be awesome to create lists
of artists within which i'd be able to switch between recently liked tracks of
these artists (with full waveform-player display) and recently self-released
tracks.

~~~
adamaltman
> further more i'd like to create playlists in the browser and not just in the
> macstore app.

... you can in next.soundcloud.com, but only when you get access. and we call
em sets.

