I am mostly concered about not being able to see a full tracklist of an album without scrolling?. Artist pick their track titles vary carefully. I think it’s a bit of an insult to them not showing it as intented, in one view.
…as were many hundreds of people outside the company in our prerelease programs, over half of them not in the US… Sometimes it takes scale to find combinations that lead to bugs. The iPad crash affected about a hundred people… That’s less than a tenth of a percent of people who had upgraded at that point.
If we had 1000 testers, statistically that’d be less than 1 person to experience that one language settings ipad bug.
I’d settle for more tracks. In 1.7 the banner text at the top of the album page was variably spaced not fixed. It was usually possible to reduce the banner to two lines and move the whole album view up to get a few extra tracks that way. Now its fixed so that’s not possible. Shame. I don’t know why there is all that white space around the play button. Maybe its easier on a phone?
I agree @danny - less than a thousandth is not easy to catch.
As you probably have device usage statistics, would it be possible to structure your beta tester group representatively with say 2 users per device/server combination?
You could include a rating feedback feature in the beta test like the one you have for new users that indicates what the GUI elements are about and how to use them. Something like this could be used to get granular feedback on GUI changes. Still, most of the grievances about “opinionated GUI changes” would not occur with a few customization options.
It’s still a small number but you meant more right?
I would say, if people are hoping for more caution / conservatism from a software company, they should expect innovation to slow substantially.
Instead - I’d personally be arguing for & asking for more risk-taking. Make my music player non-functional a few more days a year - I have substitutes after all - if you can get velocity and innovation faster. I’m not sure how Roon instruments and measures defects / bad experiences, but I bet that forum outrage / new feature drops is not the right KPI to get the outcome we all want.
Now, I also get that there are a substantial group of folks who don’t want innovation… but I fear that that way lies obsolescence and a company that doesn’t function.
Excelsior.
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I am all for innovation and I like the ways of handling metadata but going for less information on one screen for the sake of design which leads to a worse overview and the uneccesay need to scroll up and down way too much. Nah, call me a conservative then but in my view that’s not innovation, that’s degradation.
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Agree completely!
What’s so intriguing to me is that I must be a person who loves scrolling. I started noticing how I use Flipboard, NYT, Google results, etc. I have become completely touch-screened. I scroll up and down constantly. Prefer reading this way now, in a fairly fluid way that has resulted in me getting a trackball for my desktop so I can do the same. I love more white space… I’m going to scroll anyways, so I might as well reduce the information density a bit so I can consume it more efficiently. I totally understand not everyone is doing that - and many never will. But many many apps are headed more in this direction - infinite scroll on e-commerce, flip on social media, etc. And so the move is actually completely consistent with all the other content I consume. I’m not apologetic - just realizing the challenge for those who want to please both me and the desktop user/curator who wants to maximize information density / reduce scrolling. Good luck doing that within a single interface (though you can obviously allow some customization as 1.7 did, it gets really hard the more user options are allowed and if I was product owner I’d do everything I could to avoid too much customization).
Dear @danny
Sorry, to say but I do not believe it would have taken ‘huge scale’ at all to discover 80% of the issues we are facing. Many are just smashing in your face on first use.
If you give it to hundred Journo’s for a casual browse to write a snippet for their papers / blogs / instagram channels. then this may not give you the depth of feedback that a bunch of users could provide, having deep knowledge of the software from many hours of daily use.
I guess the feedback from that “minimalist” “beta” program tells you that.
All the best
It’s not that I don’t want to do any scrolling at all, but come on, not being able to view a full tracklist of an album in one view without the need to scroll up and down, that’s just plain silly.
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@Nyquist Only for me it’s better this way. Seriously. I get that for you it’s just silly. But for me, I don’t even notice the information getting spread, because I scroll so naturally now. I think that the “put everything that’s related on one screen” paradigm is an artifact from before the touchscreen scroll gesture. Watch your kids / grandkids / some kids sometime.
I have ZERO idea how many there are in which “love / like / dislike / hate scrolling” group, but I’d ask you to consider that there are some with other preferences. Not saying it has to be like it is currently in 1.8, just that Roon has to accommodate all these groups. And surveys / asking for feedback only tells part of the story, because expressed preference is way more telling than what people say. If you’d asked me, I would have told you I hated scrolling through a list. But then I ‘watched myself’. And I actually think I absorb information faster this way.
So, I get the “just plain silly” seems at first glance obvious to you. I agree with you on a lot of things you’ve said. But Roon has to figure out a way to keep all of us happy enough with the trade-offs in the product. (Note I didn’t say just plain ‘happy’). I think the museum curator / visitor thread is dead-on. But there’s a bunch of other axes on which we as users divide to some degree.
To me it has got everything to do with remembering. There used to be a time I knew around 30 to 40 phone numbers out of my head because I had to dial them. Later you could dial people by choosing there name in an adress book but the numbers where still visible and I was able to call many of them when I didn’t have my adressbook at hand. With the smartphone the numbers have dissapearednand now I don’t even no the phone number of my own wife anymore (seriously) With music it works the same for me. I remember album by the tracklist. When I view a complete tracklist, I can hear the album playing in my head. With Roon this is lost, there is no overview anymore. I used to find a song ofnwhich I forgot the title by scanning the tracklists and find it in a split second. The same search is not possible in Roon, yes I can search by all metadata on the planet but not on remembrance or like the germans say so beautifully an Aha-erlebniss. All I ask for is being able to view the complete tracklist in one view, no scrolling, no clicking, one view, that simple. I really think it is silly having to scroll for an average of only 10!! lines of text. In my view that is a terrible overview.
no. within a couple of days we were over 100k 1.8 updates.
Then you’d be wrong.
The program involves mostly people from the community, and they’ve also been using it for months. There is a huge section in this forum for them to discuss. It’s a very busy place.
There were 100s of people who had problems on first run. There were 100k+ that didn’t.
There are 100 foreign language ipad users in the total roon user base?
Thats the very (nasty) nature of many bugs, isnt it? I still think a more balanced user group would have spotted many more of the obvious errors. Particular in the Classical Music area, which according to your marketing claims apparently was a key focus point of this release?
The combination of settings required to crash didn’t affect everyone. Even in my own household we have iPad in a non-English language and it didn’t affect us.
more balanced, even larger, yes of course.
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Going from horizontal page by page scrolling to vertical smooth scrolling has made my experience with Roon much more difficult. Using my tablet in landscape mode and browsing my albums page by page worked so well.
Why is it not possible to offer both horizontal and vertical scrolling? In my Kindle app on the same tablet you can select either and avoid all the troubles and heartache.
The amount of listening I have done since the update to 1.8 has reduced dramatically due to my frustration with the scrolling.
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Just wanted to add from an enjoyment point of view, I feel there is something more emotive about horizontal scrolling/paging. Its the feeling of flicking through the book/artwork/cd multi-disc cases that roon was originally striving for that resonates with the senses. Everything else feels like it was designed for efficiency and computers, which shares connotation with work rather than enjoyment.
Personally, I purchased roon because I want to be overly-engaged, I want to be purposefully delayed, I want that original feeling and goal roon was striving for in recreating and enjoying the beautiful CD and Vinyl artwork within an interface that felt as far apart from a computer as it was possible to be. I still want that and it greatly saddens me each step roon takes in pivoting towards the larger mass-market while leaving behind those that truly love the art.
If vertical remains on the phone, I could care less as I would never personally wish to use a device that ruins my enjoyment of music with email notifications every 5 minutes as a remote. Similarly, the same applies to a desktop/laptop (which I do use with roon while working.). However, when I’m just relaxing in my living room, doing nothing other than listening to music, and using roon on my ipad, I want to feel as far away from a computer, and as close to the feeling of flicking through the pages of the original cd and art as possible. If that creates additional development time, sell it to me, as I’d pay for it if that’s what’s holding this back.
Lastly, I wish I understood why you guys took away one of my most loved features of roon for seemingly no reason besides efficiency - again. I LOVED the quotes when opening roon, and wished they stayed on screen longer to fully read and think about them. Surely that adds zero complication from a design point of view with an optional on/off switch.
The art, and roons mission is being lost and this saddens me a great deal.
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Amen Micheal, you have brilliantly put in words that feeling of discovery and and elegance that is now missing from Roon since vertical has replaced horizontal scrolling. Using Roon used to be a different experience than web browsing, I am certain that allowing user preference on this would make the world a better place without too much effort.
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