[FEEDBACK] What do you think of "Flow"?

Hey@LerinaH92

Thanks for the suggestions and input. We'll be passing this to our Flow teams  in the meantime, please check our ideas forum for related feedback so that you can vote and support them!

Hi there@khaled mostafa @Kovács Dávid 

Thank you for your feedback. The good news is that we're currently working hard on taking Flow to a level above. Please bear with us and stay tuned 

Recently, the Flow algorithm just changed, and now every other song is something I'd NEVER listen to, it's just soooo far from everything I've liked or listened to, ever. Basically, it rendered Flow useless to me, as I need to go back to Deezer every 4 minutes (ie. after each track).
Previously, I had no such issue, it was working as it would need to work.

Anybody else experienced something like this?

I really like it but geez it needs the ability to queue a "next track" so bad.

@Rudi
Thanks for getting back to me.
I noticed that some time ago with a previous app version - 6.1.9.78.
Meanwhile I updated the app to the latest version but haven't used the search function since then. 😬

I recently discovered that the flow algorithm uses terms used in the deezer search.

I was looking for a song title just to get some information about it and its artist - I did not play that song and that song has nothing to do with any music I listen to.
After starting deezer and flow the next time one of the first songs played was this particular song.

This makes the search useless as I have to be afraid that my flow will be ruined just by searching for music - even without playing it.

my problem with Flow: I have rock music and classical music. It ain't possible to choose between those in Flow

My flow experience has been iffy, sometimes it nails the exact song that I had been searching for and sometimes it doesn't. Flow has been playing 90s/20 rock all the time that I don't necessarily want to listen to, it has also been suggesting almost all Mexican music which I don't want. When I press the don't suggest again button, most of the time it will come back anyway and play the exact songs I said no for. I feel as if they should have a clear cache button for the Deezer flow feature and have it so you can delete the artist you want to hear from there as well as the genre.

@Rudi yeah, I do that when songs are repeating too much, not sure if it helps or it's just placebo.

It seems that Deezer prefers fetching a song from a server near me, which makes sense from an efficiency point of view, but that leads to some songs never being played.

Because this is all subjective, you could add stats to show how many times each song was played, unless of course you don't want to release such info (*cough* money from labels *cough*)

By the way, as I was writing this, Deezer played a live version of a song and then the studio version of the very same song. That's so much what I wanted, maybe Deezer could play the soundtrack version of the same song next?

Adding a sponsored track to your favorites will play it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over

My favorites list has 1k songs btw

If I add 3 tracks from an album to my favorites, Deezeer will suggest all the other tracks I DID NOT ADD because I don't f enjoy them. It will also suggest the remastered version, the 30th anniversary edition, the best of edition, the collector's edition, wtf???

Flow and poor random in general is making me consider going back to putting songs on my phone/computer and using a proper unbiased player.

So, apparently, a music app that allows you to never have to suffer live albums is the holy grail or something. I'm about to add a suggestion for that, but in the meantime, I have a question about Flow.

Let's say flow starts playing an egregious unplugged version of Back in Black by AC/DC. If I click on "don't play this again", does that mean it won't play this version of the song, or am I completely removing the song from my Flow? Because if it's the latter, I'm gonna need instructions on how to reset my dislikes, because half my favorite songs are now banned from my flow then.H there, when you click once to do not play that track again, this track won't play on that day. If you click again another day to do not play the same track, it won't be playing for a while. If you click another time, the song will be banned. Also, see here how to ban artist from your flow. ;)

Sorry, but I fail to see how any of that helps. In fact, it's the complete opposite of what I need! I don't want to ban an artist, I don't want to ban a song. I want to ban live versions of songs I like by artists that I love. What I take from your response then is that there's absolutely no way whatsoever to tell the app not to play a live/unplugged version of a song without losing the song completely, even if I manually remove every live version. This is the worst case scenario I could think of, is it really so uncommon for people to hate live/unplugged versions of songs?

Edit: just noticed my question was merged with the Flow Feedback topic, weird decision, but OK

Flow is the best thing in the market and I moved over from Spotify specifically because of it. However, it's only the best thing in the market because everything else sucks, not because it's excellent. I'm generally satisfied with it and I'm not pointing out any positives, because they've already been mentioned on other posts. So here's my two cents on how it could be better:

• Option to ban live albums completely. Especially unplugged ones. If I wanted a live performance, I'd go to a concert. Maybe the option to ban tags would be an even better idea (e.g. don't play music tagged with: live, reggae, Spanish)
• Set how many songs have to play before a given song repeats (I'd put at least 500 in mine given the option to do so). I really like Nothing Else Matters by Metallica, but I've ended up banning it from my flow because it played every 10 songs or so.
• This has already been pointed out, but it's an excellent idea, so I'm seconding it. The ability to choose % of unknown music that plays, e.g. I'd like at least 50% of songs that play to be outside of my favorites. I want to listen to new stuff, otherwise I'd just put a whole album from my favorites instead of flow. Since each person feels different about this, a slider would be optimal. The situation got so bad that I ended up removing all tracks from my favorites and just favored artists, because I'd keep listening to the same songs again and again and again and again.
• Even better, but that's something outside the scope of flow, would be a "SURPRISE ME" button that played a random (and by that I mean random) song from your whole database. Not something hard to do, just generate a random float (a Casio calculator can do that in microseconds) inside the scope of your index and play whatever is indexed at that number. Some of my favorite artists I've discovered by sheer luck, in a way that would be impossible the way Flow works (e.g. I'm usually a metal kind of guy, but fell in love with Infected Mushroom even though I generally dislike electronic music).
• Last but not least, I'd like the option to default to Flow, or to add a "play next" without leaving it. Sometimes I'm listening to Flow, and decide "know what? I could go for some Eminence Front by The Who right now". I'd like to tell Deezer to play that song, and return to my Flow right afterwards. Instead, I have to manually return to Flow, as choosing a song from the search function makes a playlist with all existent versions of that song, which is a behavior I'd wager a very small percentage of listeners would prefer.

All in all, I'm willing to bet your designers and programmers follow the golden rule of modern internet of "less is more". I know that having a lot of options and sliders and buttons can scare some people off from your service, but having a single button in the options menu called "advanced options" that opened a whole plethora of extra customization options, or adding more stuff to the Deezer Labs, would allow you to get ahead of the competition by bringing power users and music aficionados something they can't find anywhere else.