Problems

It’s hard to discern which song is playing. Other than the small play/pause buttons, there’s no styling, highlighting or emphasis to distinguish the current song from the others. Tracks that have been skipped maintain the orange progress indicators in their waveforms, which is misleading.

Only three to five songs are visible at once. A site for streaming music should be able to display more than this in a single page.

The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll. I regularly leave the Stream open in my browser to play songs while I’m doing other stuff. When I come back to the page I have to scroll down and scan the waveforms to pick out the current song. I usually resort to reading the song name from the player widget and performing a page search (Cmd + F) to find my spot. This flow is inefficient and hacky.

The avatars on the waveform are virtually meaningless. They’re too small to visually identify anyone who’s commented. Their only value is to let a user know there are comments on the track, the number of which is already indicated next to a comment icon below the waveform.

Did anyone you know comment on this song?

What users can expect when they navigate away from the Stream and come back

Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky. When I navigate away from the Stream and then return to it, SoundCloud tries to present me with the song that was playing, which is nice, but it doesn’t work every time. When it does, it achieves this by rendering every single track that came before it, which uses a lot of memory and takes way longer than a normal page load (and it looks bad). There is definitely a software solution for this.

Solution concept