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pixfabrik / fathom

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By Song vs By Album #6

Closed johnjbarton closed 8 years ago

johnjbarton commented 13 years ago

Based on Pandora etc I was surprised that the whole album is queued. Now it's nice I have to say, but picking one song and moving on would give a different user experience, better for sampling a related set. An option perhaps...

johnjbarton commented 13 years ago

More reasons for "by song": the natural speed of your UI is to popup a suggestion every 10s or so. After the albums fill in we are up around 18*10s so about the length of a song. But then we hear another song on the same album showing while suggestions are falling out of view.

Perhaps the selection from the tableau should play by song and then the queue can play by album.

austegard commented 13 years ago

Agreed - there should at least be an option to play by song... But then again, maybe it then just becomes Pandora and we all end up listening to Coldplay...

iangilman commented 13 years ago

Another vote for this from elsewhere:

Now, my only other need: an option to just play one song from an album. I'd want to queue up the albums exactly like it does now, but have a choice of playing just one random track from each instead of the full record.

Maybe it will make it too much like competing radio services (and I don't know if that's your goal) but I certainly like checking out many bands in succession so it would be awesome for me. That feature would make Fathom my number one resource for exploring new artists.

austegard commented 13 years ago

So starting with someone entering an artist, you could pick a random top track, and then start using getSimilar on the track api from there, perhaps? Seems like a very similar flow, but should probably be switchable. I know there are many folks who LIKE listening to entire albums (I'm not one of them, though...), so having the option either way would be good.

iangilman commented 13 years ago

I'm pretty sold on the primacy of the album (rather than track), partially because of my own personal preference, and partially to differentiate from all the other offerings out there. That said, I'd love to support a wide range of experiences, so I'd like to understand the track-based proposal better.

I assume this relates to just letting it play, rather than actively clicking around; if you are actively clicking around then there's nothing stopping you from leaving an album after a single track (or half track or two and a half tracks). In that way, having the full album available allows you to sample as much or as little as you want of each album.

In terms of just letting it play, if it goes to a new album every track, how is it any different from Pandora or Last.fm's radio?

johnjbarton commented 13 years ago

The UI has three areas: 1) selection (large album in the middle) 2) suggestions (thumb nails around) 3) Queue For me, the suggestions are for exploration: active (as you say, click to move on) or passive (as pandora), while the queue is for depth.

Currently I can add to the Queue but honestly I don't know how to start it playing through the queue. In my imagination the explore phase would pick form the suggestion area, I add to the queue, then I select the queue and it plays albums out of the queue. The UI could guide me by highlight the suggestion zone while in explore mode and the queue while playing albums.

Unlike pandora, I control the queue and I get to hear full albums from it. That's awesome! Unlike pandora, I have control to pick suggestions based on album/artist name in the suggestion area, also cool.

So the only thing like pandora is the explore mode, and frankly that part of pandora is great so why not!

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 2:50 PM, iangilman reply@reply.github.com wrote:

I'm pretty sold on the primacy of the album (rather than track), partially because of my own personal preference, and partially to differentiate from all the other offerings out there. That said, I'd love to support a wide range of experiences, so I'd like to understand the track-based proposal better.

I assume this relates to just letting it play, rather than actively clicking around; if you are actively clicking around then there's nothing stopping you from leaving an album after a single track (or half track or two and a half tracks). In that way, having the full album available allows you to sample as much or as little as you want of each album.

In terms of just letting it play, if it goes to a new album every track, how is it any different from Pandora or Last.fm's radio?

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/pixfabrik/fathom/issues/6#issuecomment-1722183

iangilman commented 13 years ago

Makes sense; I think I'll add a "one track per album from suggestions" check box and see how that goes.

For what it's worth, albums play from the queue first, and from suggestions when the queue runs out.

iangilman commented 11 years ago

My friend Craig suggests more of a sliding scale: "option to play top N songs from an album before moving on to a new one".

I think either way, this feature would benefit from playing the most popular track on the album, rather than just the first track.

iangilman commented 8 years ago

We won't be doing as much playback with Spotify, so this may be moot. Beyond that, I'm still sold on Fathom being oriented around albums, as this is a big differentiator against the other entries in the market.