Post was updated (bumping)
@auggod Cool, so exciting! Q re playlists - are these still work in progress? I can add tracks to playlists when logged in as Kat Five, but on my profile it says I have 0 playlists. Is it made complicated by it being an artist account?
It’s still beta, so yes it’s not a stable release.
If your playlist is public, it should appear on your profile.
But… there’s a new caching system on the API backend side. I should disable it for the user playlists or reduce caching max age to a minimum.
You can edit your playlist privacy setting to public if you click on the ‘edit’ button from your playlist page. You can access your private playlists from your library.
Thanks, that’s all working great!
Oh playlists, yeah! Instant fan so far, although I have not explored much yet. If later on I have a more detailed analysis to share, I’ll post it. So far, to reiterate: thanks so much for the playlists!
We have collaboratively chosen 15 releases to appear on the player as ‘featured’. Ideally the featured releases should be updated regularly but it takes a lot of time.
Not sure where the best place to add this is, but for those looking for a “mobile app” for Resonate, it isn’t exactly the same, but I believe you can actually install Resonate from your mobile browser as a web app on your phone. Is that right @auggod?
See screenshot from my Chrome Browser on an Android Phone:
See screenshot of the installed app home screen:
For what it’s worth, I think it does a pretty good job of showcasing Resonate on a mobile device, and I love that it allows me to quickly listen to music on Resonate while on the go!
Just thought I would throw this out there if this is an option for everyone that maybe people just haven’t heard of yet.
Thanks!
Seems like I forgot to mention that. Thank you!
I really recommend to install the PWA for a more distraction free experience.
I plan to add an in app button to install the PWA.
It’s also possible to install the app on desktop using chrome or brave.
Note that if you keep the old pwa (beta.resonate.is) you will have 2 apps with the same icon.
Awesome! That desktop player looks really nice too!
I know that in a previous player update from 2018 (Updates to our beta player - Resonate) it was mentioned that the mobile web app is only stable on Android devices?
Not sure if this is still the case, but as you mention in the original post, any testing and feedback from anyone on this forum with iOS devices would be very helpful.
Thank you!
Depending on the iOS version, playback is still an issue on iOS, especially for older uploads.
Thanks for making these updates Auggod! Genre tagging is super helpful!
Edit: doing some exploring;
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It would be nice to be able to edit and add to the playlist directly from the tag page. So for example, if I click on #electronic - and hover over an artist, a “…” button would appear and allow me to add to playlist, rather than clicking into a new page.
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Additionally, a great feature would be to have a shuffle playlist based on Tags. So for example if I click on #punk - at the top of the page there would be a play button that would randomly play all the songs tagged with #punk
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Further, this is a long term feature, but being able to say “I like this song” and “I don’t like this song”, so the song doesn’t appear in my playlist, or is tagged that I didn’t like the song so I remember not to play it in the future.
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Another cool feature would be the ability to crowdsource tagging. So for example, if 100 people tagged a track as #acoustic, I would understand that the song was an acoustic song. 1) it would save time from artists/moderators having to tag tracks, and 2) provides a crowdsourced interpretation of a song. I raise this because I was just listening to a song with the tag acoustic but had synth in the background and personally wouldn’t classify this as acoustic and I don’t think many others would either. In order to avoid mis-tagging there could be a filter limit, or just show the top 3 tags, or something to that effect. So if someone was abusing the tagging system the majority of users would win out over the troll.
I have been bugged by this for a couple of days, thinking both about featured releases and staff picks. What do you all think about the mechanisms for Wikipedia’s “Pictured of the day” and “Today’s featured article”?
The details would surely change in our case, but we would basically need
- a digital space where, as a crowd, resonate users can suggest tracks/releases and revise each other’s suggestions
- a (simple, reasonable, loose) set of guidelines on how to do that
- the technical work (every week?) of taking the first block of 15 tracks/releases and using them as ‘featured/picked’ on the player
I’m not sure the forum would be the best space to do this; wikis, pads or shared documents seem better tools for collaboration. However, if we really want to go this way for the sake of simplicity (asking users to be in too many different environments is effectively setting up barriers), there could be a person in charge of each (weekly?) update, and then this person would prepare an opening post and then just edit their post, e.g. incorporating suggestions made as answers to their post.
The low-stress version of this is working in advance, which is also what happens at Wikipedia. We could achieve this by making an initial effort to be at least a couple of updates in advance, e.g. via a shout-out for people to suggest their favorite tracks, and then just slowly keep adding updates.
Bump!
Hello all,
As I share office/studio work with @LLK on a regular basis, I’ve been keeping myself up to date through him on the latest progress of Resonate and tried to follow what happened on this forum as much as possible in the past few weeks. He just recently sent me the link to the new beta player, so I’ve decided to dedicate a bit of time trying it out, seeing how it feels to use it and what about it immediately striked me as useful or problematic, so that I could try to help shape it to the best of my abilities.
After a first session trying to use it for discovering music (or relistening to a few artists I already knew and enjoyed) here are my first remarks :
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I know that it’s already a much discussed topic but I’m really not into the “featured artist” being put first and foremost in the landing page. This feels like a completely arbitrary and very “Spotify-like” inherited behavior. I get the desire to put some things forwards but I would also urge to reconsider that impulse and try to only act on it once we’ve managed to find a proper way to implement it. I see above that @auggod recommended a Wiki-like approach similar to their POTD the day. Even though that seems already better, I still think there’s a big difference between pushing a picture or a wiki article everyday and putting an artist upfront on the landing page of a streaming platform (which has repercutions on immediate payments, which means it instantly becomes a covetted position with all the pitfalls this implies). Either way, wether we decide to keep that banner or not, I’m still against the idea that it’s at the top of the page, and I would like it much better if the page started with “Discover new sounds and genres. New releases added daily.” followed by the albums thumbnails, and the featured artist banner appeared later on in the page. It would also look nicer, fuller, and feel more like “an ecosystem” which I think is something Resonate is more about. (Also, another loose remark is that in Dark Mode, there’s no background color separation between the Featured artist banner and the secion underneath which breaks the overall balance of the page).
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Similarly, I’m not a fan of the “featured” list of album being the default, and having to click on “new releases” only to be moved to another page. If anything, it even makes the landing page look a little stale, always the same whenever I refresh it, and I would like “new releases” to be displayed as a default. While curation on the platform is essential, it shouldn’t be the first thing we present to people either, curation should come as a secondary proposition. First > this is what we have, who we are, untampered. Second > if you’re looking for specific outlooks and curated point of views, check how these people (emphasis on people, it’s not “the platform’s” unipolar decision based on who knows what) view the art made on the platform.
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While having tags is handy and useful, I find their current place in the interface rather unnecessarily large and kinda “floating” in the middle of the interface. I think something less eye-catching and intrusive could help them blend better within the interface, again, with the principle to be both easy to find and easy to ignore. As is, they’re more proeminent than the albums from the first outlook. Maybe they’d belong more in a stripe somewhere or without the huge rounded padding (especially in dark mode which I’ll probably only use) while everything else is very straight line oriented.
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I’m assuming there’s no way yet to update/edit your profile from your personnal account yet and it’s still in the works? I couldn’t find any edit button.
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How are label’s order sorted in the browse section? I thought it would be nice to have them sorted by latest release so that it’s constantly shifting. I don’t know if that’s the case currently I couldn’t tell, but it didn’t seem so since their latest release was in 2020.
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I found it quite confusing that in the “release sections” there were also single tracks, which makes the section look very similar to “tracks” underneath it but with a different sorting layout. It might be more meaningful to : 1/ either switch track to “all releases” and have an unsorted list of tracks the way it is right now undifferientiating albums and tracks, and a “LP/EP releases” tab where you get all the full multi-track releases. or 2/ just have a “LP/EP” tab where you only have multi-track releases and a “Tracks” tab where you only have single track, and artists can choose when they upload their album which track from their album/EP should appear in this list (which would avoid having a 29 tracks album monopolizing a big chunk of the list as it could happen in the current setting). As is, I find the “tracks” section a bit weirdly redundant and unclear.
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Same thing as for the frontpage, on albums page, the tags are way too proeminent in the overall UI design, makes it seem like a huge deal when… if I’m there, I’d rather make my own opinion on what the genre is and since the tag in terms of usefulness in that particular space is just a way out of the page (and not a sorting tool), let’s not push people this loudly to get out when they’re on an album page. (Actually it also begs the question of “user created tags” so that I could create my own sort of categories but that’s a digression for later times)
A desire I have as someone used to spend a substential amount of my time listening to and discovering music on the internet, is to have a better sorting system where I can follow artists (have an “add to watchlist / timeline” button or something near every artist name?) that I like. I think it would be critical to the experience of the platform to have an “artist” tab in the library where I can easily add artists as I go. It could also be nice that this section is either sorted alphabetically (if all I want is to find one of them easily), or by newest release order (so that I can check if any of them released something new recently) displaying under their thumbnail their most recent track.
Similarly we should be able to favorite albums separately from tracks. It is my understanding that resonate tries to move away from the hyper-valorisation of singles and allow for all sorts of formats to live, so any body of work that contains several songs should be able to be bookmarked/favorited easily.
This is all from the top of my head after a first few hours of use and I hope it can be a useful contribution to the devteam. However if anything this first session sparked a lot of very strong reflexions on my end about the current nature/form of the S2O model and its immediate flaws, which I will probably go discuss elsewhere in the forum if I find a topic that’s more appropriate.
In the meantime I wish nothing but the best to the devteam for the new player and I’ll keep an eye on it, I think it’s already much improved compared to the previous beta player which was really hard to grasp and felt clunky in comparaison, so I’m really thankful for all the hard work that has evidently been poured into this new itteration. This makes me hopeful we’re able to move together in the right direction.
In order to create more space for conversation around the new Player, I’ve set up a new forum category after discussing the idea with @richjensen @Nick_M @sganesh @nphilmasiakowski @auggod at the Monday operations meeting.
You’re invited to kick off conversations and share ideas and feedback in this new category. With a dedicated category for the new player (and one for the old player too), I believe it will be much easier for folks to have their ideas heard and for the co-op to prioritize features and changes for launch.
Thank you for sharing your experience here, and for some of the very valid and important points that you bring up.
I appreciate the time you took to test and write up a review of everything, and although I think the devs are working on a few other things right now, just know that your wonderful analysis won’t go unnoticed! Thank you!
