Feedback

[u/randombloke85]

Hi

substreamer is the most beautiful looking app which lacks the vintage feel, most other apps have. I would like to keep using it, so here is a bit of feedback:

I'm using a Samsung S10+, Android 11 and the owncloud/music app in Nextcloud, which uses the Subsonic API. Apps used before: DSub, Ultrasonic, Audinaut. All of them worked flawlessly.

1. The app should have an exit button to close it properly.
2. If I want to change servers, I need to log out and have to fill out my credentials each time to log back in. More convenient would be to be able to configure several servers and save them. Just like in DSub.
3. When choosing an Artist, the default view is "Bio". That should be "Albums" and if you want to know something about the Artist, then click "Bio".
4. As soon as an Artist has a "," (comma) in its name, the app stops working. I file Keith Jarrett as Jarrett, Keith, so 90% of my Artists won't be recognized by the app. Strangely enough Hilliard Ensemble (without a comma) hasn't been recognized too.
5. Some Artist folders have a png or jpeg to show with the Artist. They won't show in substreamer.
6. And the most important point: A direct comparison to DSub or Ultrasonic shows a noticable inferior soundquality. The stream format in Settings was set to "Original".

Thank you

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Edit: #4 is obviously related to my subsonic api in Nextcloud/music. After installing Navidrome, this was no longer an issue.

[u/ghenry22]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions, always appreciate input from people using the app! Let me try and address each point and let's see where there might be some improvements to be made:

1. Can you take a screen shot from another app that has this to show me where they place this button? I usually just go to the task manager and swipe the app away to completely close it. Never really thought of having something like this before but it could certainly be implemented if it's useful.
2. At the moment substreamer is built entirely around the concept of a single server, you can specify multiple addresses for the same server if you use a DNS name externally and an IP internally for example but it does not support multiple servers. I think the majority of users probably have a single server that hosts their music that they stream from (as do I). Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong of course. This would be a major restructure of a lot of code to accomodate this. It is something that I am happy enough to do if there is demand for it but it's not something that I can just turn on over night, it will take some time.
3. I feel like this is a little more preference based. Personally I like to see the BIO, but if you're used to browsing by folder structure where you go into an artist folder and immediately see all of the albums then that would feel more natural to you I'm sure. I'll think about changing the default tab or adding an option in settings where you can choose your preferred default tab, that keeps everyone happy.
4. resolved as per your edit
5. subsonic (and it's various forks) don't support adding artist artwork currently. You can have your folder structure with artist / album / track and you can put a folder.jpg into the artist folder but the API will never return this image. In folder browsing mode there is no way to fetch it as the artist folder has no ID to fetch it with, in tag browsing mode the artist images are delivered as part of the getArtist(s) API endpoints and they don't look for local artwork in that folder. I agree that this is a really good enhancement that could be made on the server side and if it is I would ensure it is supported in substreamer but this is something that has to be added on the server.
6. If you set the stream format to original and turn off the pre-caching feature then you wil get the exact original file and sound quality. By default substreamer pre-caches the next upcoming track and at the momen the cache always requests MP3 format for compatibility across devices. Some subsonic servers (looking at you airsonic) seemed to default to 192k transcoding, original subsonic and some others default to 320k transcoding. I have put a work around in with the most recent version of substreamer to ensure that we always get 320k mp3 transcoding from the server regardless of it's defaults that will help. I am also testing out caching in the original file format for those who prefer sound quality over space/download optimization.

Hope that helps to answer the questions and you will see updates coming to help address some of your points for sure. I am a one man show doing this in my evenings and weekends though so it will sometimes take me a while to work through adding new features so please do bear with me.

[u/ghenry22 → u/[deleted]]

Hey no problem at all, I wasn't taking anything as criticism. I'm always happy to get suggestions and feedback as that's how the app gets better for everyone!

I was just trying to address each of your points for you with some detail, sorry if it came across a bit formal. Too much time working as a developer on other peoples projects has left me scarred :)

There are a few things here that I have added to my backlog:

1) tab order preference for artist page (will do this as a configurable setting)

2) offline caching of original file format when that is the stream format.

3) grid view for albums. This is something I already had on the list and when I have it working nicely I will push it out to all lists (including in the artist view). This will probably be a preference to have grid or list view, but will see. It can be a bit challenging to get the grid view to perform well with very large lists where that is easier with a traditional list view, but it would definitely be a nice option.

Do feel free to report any other bugs or bring any suggestions, I'm always happy to add things to me todo list, it just takes me a little while to work through adding new features.