jamieu
Prominent Member
At the weekend, locked down and growing a bit bored of listening to the same Albums/Tracks on heavy rotation I decided to write some scripts to grab the playlists from my favourite shows on my local radio station and create Tidal playlists from them.
In the end it turned out to be easier than expected and I now have a bunch of new playlists of music in Tidal…Yaaah! Although the ‘match rate’ against Tidal was somewhat disappointing, in some cases below 50%. So next I’m thinking of refactoring the code to also perform lookups against Spotify, Google Music and MusicBrainz API’s to see how they perform in comparison. With MusicBrainz being the baseline.
But it got me thinking, how do people ‘automatically’ discover new music, above the basic ‘New Albums’ and ‘Recommended features’ of your chosen streaming service.
I’m particularly thinking of services that come to you/are built into your player/streaming service rather than manually adding or favouriting tracks you discovered manually elsewhere.
Are people happy to use a poor interface if it offers possible better SQ? At which point does usability win out? Surely when is all is said and done it’s the music that matters most. Or do people just playback the same dozen albums, change some interconnects or a DAC in the hope of an upgrade in SQ and then replay those same dozen albums again ;-)
Not saying you can’t have both, just interested in where users fall on this and at which point does usability / discoverability influence your decision re. services / software?
In the end it turned out to be easier than expected and I now have a bunch of new playlists of music in Tidal…Yaaah! Although the ‘match rate’ against Tidal was somewhat disappointing, in some cases below 50%. So next I’m thinking of refactoring the code to also perform lookups against Spotify, Google Music and MusicBrainz API’s to see how they perform in comparison. With MusicBrainz being the baseline.
But it got me thinking, how do people ‘automatically’ discover new music, above the basic ‘New Albums’ and ‘Recommended features’ of your chosen streaming service.
I’m particularly thinking of services that come to you/are built into your player/streaming service rather than manually adding or favouriting tracks you discovered manually elsewhere.
- Does the completeness of catalogue influence your choice of streaming service? At what point does completeness of catalogue override sound quality?
- Do you find streaming services online catalogues overwhelming? If so, how do you make it more manageable? ie. manually creating playlists, filtering, favouriting, star'ing, rating, adding an alias to your local collection. What other techniques do you use?
- Does a particular streaming services ‘recommendation engine’ influence your choice? ie. “New for you” or “Recommended for you” features.
- If you’re using a streaming service’s app (or even a 3rd party app) how important is the UI (User Interface) in terms of ‘discovery’ (ie. finding music to play) to you?
- Do you use ‘scrobble’ type features, to help ‘train’ your service/player to your tastes? Is this important to you?
- Do you use an ‘infinite playlist’ feature (ie. continue playback of similar music after the last track ends like LMS's 'Don't Stop the Music' or RoonRadio) on your player/streaming service? How important is it that this accurately reflects your taste and isn’t ‘gamed’ by the streaming service to promote certain tracks/labels? Do you give thought to how a particular services wider user base may influence those recommendations. Are you happy with the recommendations it gives? Do you train it with up/down votes, or just leave it be?
- How important are ‘public’ sources of playlists to you? I know playlists can be imported/transferred across platforms. But is it important to have a good selection ready to go in your chosen player/streaming service?
- How concerned about 'lock in' in are you if you have invested time on 'moulding' a particular music service or platform to your tastes?
Are people happy to use a poor interface if it offers possible better SQ? At which point does usability win out? Surely when is all is said and done it’s the music that matters most. Or do people just playback the same dozen albums, change some interconnects or a DAC in the hope of an upgrade in SQ and then replay those same dozen albums again ;-)
Not saying you can’t have both, just interested in where users fall on this and at which point does usability / discoverability influence your decision re. services / software?
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