Lots of lost potential wrt Stations

[mrmaffen]

In my opinion the Stations feature in Tomahawk is the most compelling and technically feasible feature by far. But it could be soooo much better. We have all the tools to be just as good and popular as Pandora!

Why my friends don't use Tomahawk Most of the people I know don't spend much time on organizing playlists and libraries. They simply want to click a button and start listening. So they start up Tomahawk for the first time and start listening to their favorite artist/album without actually caring about which specific track they are listening to. But unfortunately only some tracks can be resolved, some are remixes, some just have bad quality etc. So they go back to Spotify free and just accept the annoying ads inbetween songs.

Why are Stations so perfectly suited for Tomahawk? Tomahawk will always have its problem when it comes to finding the perfect source for every track. If you don't use Spotify, chances are you'll only be able to find 75% of the tracks you want to listen to (including remix cover mashup versions sung into an iPhone through a pillow by an up-and-coming 12 year old singer songwriter). But the cool thing is, with Stations we could resolve this problem almost entirely. You'd obviously only ever get the best tracks we can find a decent source for. We can simply hide every bad result without the user even noticing.

What's wrong with the current implementation? Tomahawk treats Stations like a secondary feature. Sure you can create and configure your own Station, but the process could be easier and more inviting to the user. The Station view feels dated and doesn't fit in with the rest of the UI (obviously because it hasn't yet received the UI/UX overhaul the rest of Tomahawk has gotten). Another big problem is that Tomahawk doesn't suggest Stations to the user. The user has to actively decide that he now wants to create a Station for a specific artist/album rather than Tomahawk inviting him to listen to a variety of Stations with one simple click. For that Tomahawk could take all the valuable information we have on the user (his entire listening history, his playlists, favorite tracks etc.) into account.

Let's fix it! Jordi's Magic:

1. First off all the Stations view needs a clean and simple new look.
2. Pre-fill the view with some default Stations: User radio, 20 popular genres, 20 common moods, 20 popular artists. One horizontal scrolling view per category could be an option here to avoid UI cluttering.
3. To separate these default stations from the user's custom ones one could section up the view into "My stations" and "Popular stations" or something. With "My stations" always being on top.
4. Clicking "new station" should bring up a simple dialog with a search field (similar to how it's done in the Spotify desktop player). Typing into the search field will then display all available results (sectioned up into parameter options).
5. The parameter options should be shrunk down to the essentials: Artist, Album, Song, Genre, Mood.
6. Listening to a station should no longer bring up a listview but rather just play the station (as can be seen in Jordi's design screenshot). Maybe some sort of indicator that shows the upcoming track in the bottom player panel would be nice.
7. Stations everywhere. On every artist/album/playlist/collection page there should be a "start station"-button. One click should always be enough to find more similar and relevant tracks to what you're currently listening to.
8. Advertise the feature on Tomahawk's start page. Rather than simply showing the "Feed", an overview page would be much better. This overview could show one line of recently played tracks (grid style), one line of recently played playlists and one line of recently played stations (or default ones if none have been played yet)

All of this is simply meant as a way of starting a debate on the topic. Please let me hear your thoughts :)

[nhtua]

I love you suggest but I think It's a big deal for every free and open source application. Now, Even selected box to config for the station is disabled. Anyone want to use old station feature have to download from a nightly build on [Feb 12th, 2016] or older!

[mrmaffen]

@nhtua I'm not sure that we are both talking about the same thing. I am talking about the stations feature in Tomahawk desktop. There is no old stations feature. And you can't disable stations either. Not even sure what disabling is supposed to mean when we're talking about stations.

[gordielachance]

This is quite interesting and I also think Stations is one of the most compelling feature of Tomahawk — behind Dynamic Playlists which is my favorite (and currently under developed) one !

In the old bug tracker, I had that idea that a station could be generated based on a playlist. Usually, I have playlists based on "moods"; but those moods are more sophisticated than only "jazz" or "soft", or similar things. Having stations suggesting tracks based on a existing playlist would maybe bring some good surprises to your ears. I don't know if this is doable either, but it would be really nice !