The capability of the studio has long surpassed the quality of listening experience that should compliment it. I feel like there's far less listening than producing among users because the site does not perform to standard as a streaming platform, which is a detriment to the community imo. In no particular order, I have some recommendations for features that I believe the site should have that would incentivize more people to listen to eachother's music and improve their experience doing so:
Quality of Life
- A distinction between albums and playlists - People would create far more playlists, causing more engagement with the tracks within, if users weren't worried about clogging their albums list with personal playlists
=== === - Shuffle - The ability to shuffle albums, playlists, entire artists' pages, your own favorites, other artists' favorites, suggestions, and genres would be super convenient. Not only would the randomization make finding new music easier, but it would also make listening to Audiotool music on-the-go way better
=== === - Listening queue - The option to add tracks to a listening queue would also be convenient for on-the-go listening. Would be a nice ease-of-use alternative to constantly adding and removing tracks from a playlist
=== === - "Sort by Favorited" - Lumped in with the "Date" and "Popular" filters, sorting should have a "Favorited" filter, so you can see all your favorites in one place according to a certain category
=== === - "Sort by Genre" - Specifically on artists' pages, it would be convenient to sort by genre since so many artists on Audiotool are multigenre. If you're looking for a certain genre, done by a specific artist whose style you like, this would make the search easier
Recommendation Algorithm
I think something incredibly beneficial to the site would be some kind of recommendation algorithm. Different music is hard to search for despite the site's current efforts, so this would help a ton
=== ===
- To start, improving the infrastructure of the Similar Artists tab to be more accurate and change more frequently would be nice. I'm not sure what it's based off currently, but it should consider shared genres / tags posted in and shared followers / following
=== === - Bringing back Similar Tracks would be really convenient. I'm also not sure what it was based off of when it worked, but it should consider tracks with the same tags / genre and tracks that have the most overlap between people who favorited them.
=== === - More genres would help the algorithm produce more specific results. Noise, Garage, and Jazz are the most important ones that Audiotool still needs imo
=== === - Finally, I think the Suggestions tab on the Music page should be improved. Currently it only shows unfavorited tracks from people you follow, which is helpful, but could be better. I think it should recommend random tracks from an artist you might like, tracks with genres / tags you frequently favorite, tracks that many users you follow have favorited, tracks similar to those you've put in your playlists, and tracks similar to those within playlists or albums you've favorited
=== ===
I'm sure these are all features that require lots of work to implement, but it would benefit the site so much. So much more engagement between artists and their music would be inspired out of the newfound convenience of finding and listening to eachother!!
Comments (11)
What stops me personally from using audiotool as my daily listening platform anymore is that the tracks just take forever to load. The player on mobile is also just really finicky. I'm not sure if these are just me problems and everyone else is fine though.
yeah the player isnt the best, thats another thing. especially on mobile, sometimes tracks will just stop randomly LMAO
What angers me about albums is that you only play through them once. It'll be a huge help if albums can be repeated. Also that thing about shuffle, I believe there should be two types of shuffle: "careless" and "repeat-once". "Careless" would just play every song at complete random with no regard of what the previously chosen song was. "Repeat-once" would gather a separate playlist that is composed randomly of every song in the chosen album and ensure there are no duplicates, then would play them sequentially. "Careless" is for if you really don't care, "repeat-once" is for if you don't want the album to play the same song twice (or thrice) in a row.
i feel like "repeat-once" is the assumed function for shuffle, otherwise it wouldn't be as valuable of a feature as it is. this comment does help make the distinction though: if shuffle is added i dont think it should be able to repeat tracks because thats annoying LMAO
i really think a recommendation system is the #1 thing audiotool needs. imo right now a lot of hidden gems on audiotool are going under the radar because discoverability is just so low with the current system - it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
i believe it is possible to implement a good enough system without too much work by using a matrix factorization algorithm - there is a solid amount of literature available on the internet on how to do this. essentially you put all user-track favorite pairs into a sparse matrix and then use sparse SVD to compute a low-rank approximation of this matrix (there are libraries that do this, or you can write a gradient descent algorithm for this in ~20 lines of code). if you choose the rank for this matrix correctly (this is generally done empirically), you then get predictions for all user/track pairs neatly stored in this matrix (obviously you can't compute the full matrix directly - in practice you would compute the entries on demand). actually implementing the full system is probably not trivial but i do think it would be well worth it
AT get on it we need this pronto
Who has time to put an album on repeat nowadays? Like, I'm sorry, but it's difficult enough to sit through an LP by itself nowadays, because we're all brain-rotted scroll addicts (praise be tho the exceptions.) I'm also sad that the album format is dying, but where would the use of this function be when 3 people on AT put on an album on repeat.
its a feature on literally any other streaming service
It ain't gonna be 3 people, perhaps it'll be 30 at minimum. This feature wouldn't be pointless @yit0 because there'll be plenty of people who'll use it. Although it's only useful for small albums, not the massive catalogs I compile every once in a while such as the >24h playlist by the name of "PrimaStar: Best of the Best" (which you should probably check out at some point).
Wait I was thinking of the wrong thing, I thought of looping albums, I forgot for a second while writing. Correction: this'll get increasingly useful the longer albums get. So of course there's a lot of potential for this feature.
I put albums on repeat on other platforms all the time, I don't know what makes yito think it's a useless feature.