i'm writing this because of what sparked up on the board today, which I won't get into. however, it did inspire me on writing my own board post and gain actual views on the whole situation objectively at Audiotool, and y'alls two cents on it.
this post is NOT meant to downplay Audiotool and leave no valuable criticism whatsoever, this is purely meant to gather views, ideas and everyone else's perspective on it on what Audiotool may lack and what it can improve in.
my two cents
i'll start off by saying that Audiotool is a platform I will NEVER leave. it has started my whole musical journey, it taught me so many things and I'm forever thankful for the community behind it. with that said, the issues I have with Audiotool are mostly the actual product itself rather the community; hear me out:
issues I see with the site as of now
user interface
UI can be difficult to deal with for the main site. throughout the years I have encountered several visual bugs (small i.e, notifications not disappearing unless you refresh), especially on mobile. certain elements within the site are too small, i.e: favourite buttons. i am a bit of a clumsy chicken myself but I can't count the amount of missclicks I did trying to favourite something or interact with any of the array of the small buttons.
the way the home page is laid out is a bit cluttered. there are MASSIVE cards taking space for activity. there's also the spacious top part of the page that just says "Welcome back, [user]" which practically covers the whole viewport until you scroll.
there also seems to be a fat color palette throughout the whole site; blue-grey, darker-blue-grey, lighter-blue-grey, blue, orange, white, grey; it doesn't feel concise. especially when you then look at the studio, which is it's own entity at this point in terms of colors.
templates, fans, asset deletion & drafts
the feature to create templates was gone circa 2017 (from what I heard, I wasn't here back then), which does leave it a dated feature with very limited use; you can only use templates that were made prior.
the fans feature only seems to work within the first year, I'm not sure what is the point of it; it's an additional section in my profile page that doesn't feel like it has a use there. plus I've been stuck with only 2 fans ever since I've joined and that hurts my feelings lol 🥲 (/j)
asset deletion is finicky. deleting samples wouldn't actually remove it from the sample list, it would just grey out and get crossed, which is cluttering. not only that, you can't delete presets, which I have a lot of presets that I grew to dislike them. as for drafts, going on the drafts page, there shouldn't be a play button considering the draft isn't rendered. it can be a misleading for new users, and may question if something is wrong on their end or something
efficiency playing songs
I have my fairshare of getting curious on what's new from different genres sometimes, however if I hop on from one song to another, it does randomly stop working which leads to me having to refresh, close tab or close my browser all together to continue browsing; which then demotivates me from browsing and possibly stops from finding some gems. i can't be bothered having to refresh just to play songs.
charts algorithm
this one I feel like is a bit of a controversial one. from what I understand, the charts work by the amount of favourites a song gets, or how much attention it gets generally. that's all fine and dandy until you realize that it's always the same people getting charted; either they're very well-loved within the community or they do crap-posting. i have nothing against them, don't get me wrong, but undeniably I do get a bit salty about the fact that smaller producers who may not be well-known, don't get any chance to be on the charts.
one might argue it doesn't matter, but I'll be honest, it does matter to me more than i'd like it to.
Comments (7)
i won't mention the studio's performance because that has been already confirmed that they're working on it, and hopefully a new studio is released soon (i'm excited!)
but now onto the possible improvements on my aforementioned points:
UI
increase the button sizes; can't add more to that lol. I'd also remove the activity cards altogether, there's the notifications to show you activity. I'd also decrease the size of that ginormous padding to say "Welcome back, [user]", across all pages that utilize it. it will save valuable space and will show content without having to scroll. as for the bugs, I can't think of a list of them right now, however, I recommend you (the reader) report any bugs and they'll handle it accordingly lol.
templates, fans, asset deletion & drafts
for templates, I don't recommend deleting them. From what I've heard there are still people who use them, which makes me believe that bringing back the ability to create templates would give the feature a new spotlight; especially amongst new users.
for fans, honestly, I think it's a useless feature, and I can't think of anything more than deleting them. however, I'm not sure how the system works exactly, so, I'm a bit indecisive.
asset deletion, remove the deleted samples from being shown instead of being crossed out. and allow the ability to delete presets. I'm not sure how Audiotool handles presets, but from my understanding, presets themselves wouldn't affect any project if deleted. they're simply templates that people can build on, and rendered (finished) songs wouldn't be affected either because well.. it's rendered LOL.
for drafts, i'd remove the play button until it's rendered (published) OR allow to render songs before publishing.
i'm not that smart at creating algorithms, however, to throw a few ideas: create a voting system where a user gets to choose one song that they want to chart for the week, do not measure new accounts (1-2 weeks old)'s favourites for charts, give some type of cooldown for a week for people who got charted before they can chart again. those are the few I could think of.
with all that said, I think those would be my main issues. i don't have many points for the community itself, they've been helpful and I enjoy being here! my only real complaint is there isn't much genuine help as of recently, and that Audiotool is being treated more as a toy than as a DAW.
that sucks, and when people play the narrative of "oh Audiotool is so small, you can never do anything with it blah blah blah", it's just disregarding the essence of Audiotool and it's capabilities; overlooking it because there are bigger, more mainstream DAWs like Ableton and FL Studio. sure, Audiotool may not be so straightforward with many things, but there is a team behind it, hard at work. i don't expect them to go faster, development takes time. especially now that they're building the studio from the ground up as from what I've seen.
truthfully I wish there were more events, more challenges, more people taking Audiotool seriously and reviving the charts and whatnot!
anyway, I yapped a lot, I hope what I said makes sense and isn't of offence. i'd love to know what you guys think about Audiotool, your own version of how it can be improved and so forth! thanks for reading this mega-post LOL
also forgot to mention, a concise color scheme will help! limit yourself to for example: 5 colors, then you can take different shades out of it accordingly.
I agree 😎
Developer here, I will try to succintly address all your points.
We are in the process of re-building the whole platform, this means the website will be replaced in its entirety. We have an awesome design team who will deliver a fresh and modern look to the site, which I guarantee will be a massive improvement on the current one.
We are also re-building it with the latest web standards, so expect it to be much snappier, more responsive and functional.
We decided to do this a couple years ago, and to freeze any changes to the existing platform except for critical issues. We actually didn't have much of a choice as the tech stack of Audiotool is so old and difficult to maintain. Making even the smallest of changes is very tedious, lengthy and carries a lot of risk due to it being legacy technology.
I won't get into technical details, but we have been hard at work migrating all the data from this 15-year-old behemoth to new servers and web technology. This takes time and care, and we are still only a small team.
As for features, we will keep the most essential ones when we re-launch, and will cull ones we feel no longer offer much value. After laying this new foundation, we will take into account the community's feedback when deciding which ones to add going forward.
I agree the charts do not necessarily reflect the rich variety of music produced by all the talented artists here. Unfortunately solving this algorithmically is difficult due to the lopsidedness of the current userbase's activity and the genres which are most published and favorited. We will probably put more emphasis on curation and the personalised feed for better music discoverability on the platform and re-visit charts in the future.
thanks for giving us some insights!
I'm stoked about the whole redesign and the work you guys are doing. hopefully, all that I've said isn't putting pressure on you, it's to bring some attention to it and get both the community and devs in touch with what's going on; do keep us up-to-date if it's possible! :)
No problem!
I'm all for us devs connecting more with the community, and if there's a better place to do so such as Discord, I'd be happy to do a Q&A or something similar if the mods of that server are open to the idea.