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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

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!

p4bl0 14y ago
Ah ok, I didn't remember opting-in for the beta but I must have done it, because that's what SoundCloud looked like since a long time ago for me and I couldn't understand what were the changes in the design.
simba-hiiipower 14y ago
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! totally agree. and, in general, love little details like this. it’s probably something that the vast majority of users wouldn’t notice (or really care about, if they did), and it certainly isn’t a make-or-break feature/differentiator for them, but it shows they know their product and are focused on improving it, rather than adding features or integrating with other shit just for the sake of doing so. nice work
azar1 14y ago
Another cool thing about ▶ and browser tabs happens when you open up Soundcloud in a tab and start playing, then open up another Soundcloud tab and hit play. The other tab stops!
ash 14y ago
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?
- coroxout 14y ago
  I've often thought that it would be good if the (otherwise excellent) Chrome task manager included an indication of which tabs were currently generating sound. It's very annoying when an advert or a forgotten youtube embed suddenly starts making noises on a tab I'm not looking at and I end up hunting through several tabs and closing innocent unread tabs trying to stop the noise. (I noticed the ▶ in the title bar a while ago and like it a lot. Mixcloud.com also does a nice thing where the favicon shows you how far through a mix you are and whether it's playing or paused.)
- nairteashop 14y ago
  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_three_members_of_the_google_chrome/c1mwuaa http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thre... It should however be possible for webpages that use browser APIs to play audio (e.g. via HTML5).
coroxout 14y ago
I love the new interface but the infinite scroll made me a bit nervous - I didn't expect my computer to be able to handle hundreds of multimedia canvas tags on the page at once. But I just scrolled through several months (200+ mixes) of the excellent Boiler Room mix archive - recommended to anyone who likes techno or other electronic music, btw: soundcloud.com/platform - and didn't notice any sluggishness or other problems. (I'd still probably prefer to view a user's mixes page by page, but I understand that I come from the pre-infinite-scroll generation and a good chunk of Soundcloud's target audience does not.)
rxdazn 14y ago
Actually, Mixcloud's UX is even better on the audio playing thing. They just change their favicon so it displays the play button instead of the regular cloud icon. It even has the progress bar! http://i.imgur.com/VyGVX.png http://i.imgur.com/VyGVX.png

p4bl0 14y ago

Ah ok, I didn't remember opting-in for the beta but I must have done it, because that's what SoundCloud looked like since a long time ago for me and I couldn't understand what were the changes in the design.

simba-hiiipower 14y ago

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! totally agree. and, in general, love little details like this. it’s probably something that the vast majority of users wouldn’t notice (or really care about, if they did), and it certainly isn’t a make-or-break feature/differentiator for them, but it shows they know their product and are focused on improving it, rather than adding features or integrating with other shit just for the sake of doing so. nice work

azar1 14y ago

Another cool thing about ▶ and browser tabs happens when you open up Soundcloud in a tab and start playing, then open up another Soundcloud tab and hit play. The other tab stops!

ash 14y ago

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?

coroxout 14y ago
I've often thought that it would be good if the (otherwise excellent) Chrome task manager included an indication of which tabs were currently generating sound. It's very annoying when an advert or a forgotten youtube embed suddenly starts making noises on a tab I'm not looking at and I end up hunting through several tabs and closing innocent unread tabs trying to stop the noise. (I noticed the ▶ in the title bar a while ago and like it a lot. Mixcloud.com also does a nice thing where the favicon shows you how far through a mix you are and whether it's playing or paused.)
nairteashop 14y ago
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_three_members_of_the_google_chrome/c1mwuaa http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thre... It should however be possible for webpages that use browser APIs to play audio (e.g. via HTML5).

coroxout 14y ago

I love the new interface but the infinite scroll made me a bit nervous - I didn't expect my computer to be able to handle hundreds of multimedia canvas tags on the page at once. But I just scrolled through several months (200+ mixes) of the excellent Boiler Room mix archive - recommended to anyone who likes techno or other electronic music, btw: soundcloud.com/platform - and didn't notice any sluggishness or other problems. (I'd still probably prefer to view a user's mixes page by page, but I understand that I come from the pre-infinite-scroll generation and a good chunk of Soundcloud's target audience does not.)

rxdazn 14y ago

Actually, Mixcloud's UX is even better on the audio playing thing. They just change their favicon so it displays the play button instead of the regular cloud icon. It even has the progress bar! http://i.imgur.com/VyGVX.png http://i.imgur.com/VyGVX.png