ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 
Easier now than it used to be. If you mouse-hover over the 'when posted' info on the upper left of the post in question, the url can be copied. Paste that into YOUR post and wa-LAH.


Edit - thusly...  https://radioparadise.com/comm...

 BillG wrote:
 

:cheers: ;-) 
 
 
I confess I never did learn HOW to link to an old post, but others did it often. Maybe someone can give me a tutorial.

Most of the missing features mentioned in this thread — user search, display of all posts by a user, ability to link to specific posts, and a few others — should now be operational. You might have to reload this tab to have them show up.

If you're still using the forum on the legacy site for any of those reasons, I encourage you to give the new site a try.

Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed reply. 

I recall now you mentioning Airplay2. I had gone back to try and find your original reply, but couldn't. I'll have a go with 320k caching instead, since it's only for in the car. If you haven't already, please bring back the Rock Mix. I was enjoying that before it disappeared.

I'm happy to hear about the Favourites export function. The rest of the web player I like (I'm using it now) so if I get any weird behaviour, I'll see if I can't extract an error message.

The inability to link to old posts is a real problem. Finding what people said, especially you, is important.  I used to admin a huge forum where we'd get a LOT of repeat questions, and members had bookmarked relevant posts, so you'd get either a link to the answer, or a "search the thread for X and Y" and they'd be able to find it easily.

"he whole universe has moved to endless scrolling" — No, that's just not true. Most significantly, no major forum has it that I know of. Many news sites use it because it keeps people reading, which is better for web metrics, which are important for selling advertising. The longer someone is on your site, the more ads you can sell for more money. Ditto why Youtube and Facebook have autoplay on videos.  It is completely useless for a forum where interaction is rarely continuous. It only ends up inhibiting interaction, not enhancing it.

If it's feasible, you should seriously consider moving to modern forum software like XenForo. The improvement in functionality would make people very happy I reckon.

Thanks for your thoughts.

First, on the iOS app. The change to the current version was necessary in order to accommodate changes Apple made to Airplay2. The previous app version was completely incompatible with Airplay2, which is a very popular (and all-around excellent) addition to the iOS universe.

Apple's support for the FLAC format is iffy, at best. The changes we made to the way the app plays audio — necessary for Airplay2 support — create some major challenges re: FLAC. It appears that the only truly workable fix for those problems is to switch to using ALAC rather than FLAC on iOS. That requires a bunch of work on the back end that is currently in progress. For now, the best solution is to use the 'Ultra' bitrate (320k AAC — a very, very small step down in quality) and the 'precise' skip setting. That will eliminate the issues you describe.

I know that there have been a number of issues with the iOS app. Keep in mind that the incompatibility with Airplay2 is not something we anticipated or were warned about. Suddenly our existing app was severely broken for large numbers of users, and we had to fast-track the development of a completely different version. That sort of thing rarely goes smoothly, but we're doing the best we can.


The changes to the website were not made capriciously or in the name of form over function. They were made to address three issues:

1. 'Skip' functionality was not possible using the previous player format

2. The previous site could not support flexible layouts — adapting gracefully to different screen sizes.

3. The previous site was hand-coded by me. I needed to transition our website into something that was built on a standardized framework (in our case Angular) that could be handed off to a developer.

We also had a number of improvements to the site that we wanted to add — improvements that have been positively received by most listeners.

As for linking to old posts, why would you need/want to do that? Scroll down to the post in question, reply to it, and it goes to the top of the topic. We certainly wouldn't be inclined to retain pagination — when the whole online universe has moved to endless scrolling — just to retain the ability to link to a particular range of posts. On the song comments, pagination was removed several years ago.

As for the player tab crashing, that's not at all a common occurrence. No recent other complaints about that, and I haven't personally experience it for a long, long time.

We'll be adding a 'favorites export' function, which should work much better than trying to copy/paste stuff from our site.

I check in once in a great while but don't listen anymore. No computer problems, it's just that I can't stand the sound of The Who, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel & R.E.M anymore. I used to be able to tolerate it but it just keeps getting worse.
Oh and there's that Cloud Cult problem too, uh oh...I see up on top that The National is playing now
Bye-bye 

For some time now I have been using, and championing Radio Paradise, recommending to many people as a great means to discover new music. Unfortunately, I will be doing so no longer. 

 BillG wrote:
 
It's sometimes nice to be able to refer to an individual post as  a way to point to a conversation that took place. We tend to recycle old threads rather than start a new one every damn time an idea pops into our heads, but maybe we should get over that.

  

For some time now I have been using, and championing Radio Paradise, recommending to many people as a great means to discover new music. Unfortunately, I will be doing so no longer. The changes to the site, and the mobile app have so fundamentally broken what was great that it no longer functionally useful beyond being a background radio player (which it just failed at, as the tab I was using for playback crashed).

I recently posted detailed feedback about major caching issues with the iOS app in the feedback thread, and while the person who appears to be the developer replied in kind, I was rather disheartened by Bill's reply which seems to prioritise form over function — in fact, the very function he has been promoting for what is now probably years.

As I cannot link to that post due to both the new and old sites being functionally broken, I realised what the problem was, unfortunately one that has overtaken many sites and businesses. Since Bill just announced that he has made his funding goal for the year, maybe he'll just see this as griping and ignore what I have to say, though I hope not. 

If you talk to web site designers, you'll often hear the complaint that a customer wants some or other functionality that they have seen elsewhere, even though that would make the site hard to use, hard to navigate, or break it under certain conditions.  This is essentially what has happened to Radio Paradise, with the move to fancy formatting destroying critical functionality.

The start of this was introducing endlessly scrolling thread and ratings views. By removing pagination in the forums, it is impossible to find and link to an individual post (and thus, the replies) with no indication where you are in a thread. Now the one means to get around the issues - the link to the legacy site — is gone (and, I don't doubt, the legacy site itself will be removed eventually), we are essentially stuck with this mess.  Even using Google, the links to individual posts on the legacy site no longer work.

Likewise, the list of rated tracks, because it is endlessly scrolling, you can no longer cut-and-paste the list to put into other services, such as TIDAL, Qobuz or similar. This was one of the most handy features of the site for me, because then I could use the rating system to create playlists of newly discovered music in these services. 

While I can ignore the forums, it is difficult to ignore version 3 of the app, which has almost completely broken cache functionality if you attempt to cache FLAC. Blocks either don't load or take a very long time to load, and the skip function ends up playing between a few seconds and half the song before the switch. To fix this, I'm supposed to restart my device. Really? While driving? Yesterday was the final straw, the listed track being completely different to what was being played.  

The post Bill made in reply to mine (again, I can't find it) was about everything being focussed around playlists these days that doesn't work with his (?) idea of having the smooth flow of one song into another. However, this breaks the very user functionality (caching and skipping songs) that he had focussed on for the past few years. I don't see why the RP app shouldn't be playlist-focussed, since that would enable the very functionality that kept me listening and using the app.  

I'm very sad to see that this great online radio station has gone the way it has.  One could very well argue that hey, you aren't paying for anything here, why complain? But the point is, I really have been hoping for the success of this station, and it is my hope that Bill thinks more carefully about the choices he makes and whether they actually make the station and site greater in the long run, or just feel aesthetically pleasing.