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by tailspin2019 1790 days ago

This looks awesome.

I'm a fan of electronic music (house, trance, drum and bass, EDM...) and consume the majority of my music these days via podcasts put out by various DJs/producers.

I've often felt that people like me are not catered for very well with the current crop of apps. There are no "music focussed" podcast apps (at least that I'm aware of) and since Apple pulled podcasts out of iTunes back in the day, my music listening experience feels very siloed. I go to Apple Music for albums, and go to whatever my current flavour of podcast app is for the latest DJ mixes.

So... question to the developer - have you considered incorporating podcasts into this app? Specifically music-focussed ones... I'd love to have an alternative to Apple's Podcasts apps (which I dislike, but haven't found anything better at least on Mac).

On my iPhone I used Overcast specifically to organise and listen to my music/mix podcasts, and PocketCasts for all other non-music based podcasts. (I listen to a LOT of podcasts, so putting all the music ones in a separate app helps me keep things organised).

4 comments

edwellbrook 1790 days ago

Thanks!

Can relate to feeling like there aren't apps out there that really focus on this specific problem. Happy to see Doppler resonate with a lot of people today.

I've thought about incorporating music-focused podcasts into Doppler. There's a lot of really high quality ones out there (e.g. Resident Advisor). It's not something planned for the short term, but it's definitely on my radar.

Good to know I'm not alone in thinking it would be useful!

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dangravell 1789 days ago

But wait - as soon as you start adding audio podcasts, that's a different use case, and the original UX that it looks like the Doppler author concentrated on and refined for people that buy music is compromised.

And then we add this, and then we add that...

And there's iTunes.

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tailspin2019 1789 days ago

I definitely see your point.

However, the abstraction level I’m thinking about in terms of use-case is “listening to music” it’s not “listening to these specific file types, obtained via this specific method”.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if I want to listen to an album from (for example) Above and Beyond, or I want to listen to their latest DJ mix podcast episode, as a music listener, I’d love to have a single app for that.

At the moment this experience is very disjointed and you’re forced to have different apps for this experience.

Its a bit like in the old days you’d have a combination stereo system with various different “sources”, (turntable, CD, radio etc) but these audio sources would be presented to you in one unified “interface”. (Eg shared EQ settings, single remote etc)

Sure some people liked to have “hifi separates” but the most popular stereo systems were the ones that unified a bunch of audio sources into one package. They were a one stop shop for music listening and essentially “format agnostic”.

For all that was bad about iTunes, I loved it when it used to combine all my digital music sources into one place. As a music listener this was intuitive and nice. (Notwithstanding that iTunes itself could have done with a bit of re-engineering).

However, getting back to your point, perhaps you’re right in some ways - since music based podcasts might not be that widely listened to (outside of the world of DJ mixes?) - so perhaps it would indeed be feature bloat for a lot of users.

Perhaps what I’m after is a more niche music player centered around electronic music/mixes.

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dangravell 1786 days ago

Yeah, I see your point. I was making an assumption that audio podcasts have a different... usage profile? or user flow?... to album listening. I might have been distracted by "podcast" which I tend to associate with the spoken word, and episodic, time centered updates.

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bredren 1790 days ago

SoundCloud is good for sets still as far as I can tell.

Daftcloud is an indie dev paid MacOS app that wraps SoundCloud without the high resource overhead found in soundcleod.

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tailspin2019 1790 days ago

Daftcloud looks v interesting. I've also experimented with DI.FM recently too.

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bredren 1790 days ago

The dev is pretty chill and does answer email. A nice product to support.

Had not heard of di.fm, will have a look.

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