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

HI
New user here (still in the free trial period) and still getting accustomed to the idea of not having a "library" outside of a Favourites playlist.
I've always used a library, since the days of WinAmp, then iTunes, and got very used to 5-star rating systems. I regularly jump ship between Apple, Google, Spotify and Tidal. Streaming services are, by necessity, very basic and linear in their approach to liking music - while I'm disinclined to "favourite" every song I don't hate. It would be nice to have at least a 2-stage approval system (as well as the Dislike option), so users can confirm "yes, you're on the right track with this music" without adding it to a very limited 'Favourite" selection.

The repetition everyone mentions is very real. Just certain tracks.

Definitely feels like I'm being pushed to like some songs i normally wouldn't. Is the algorithm biased toward some better paying labels?

Flow could be good but it's

• unpredictable (can't know what genre it's going to pick next)
• uncontrollable (I may not want loud music in the evenings for example)
• basically the only way to discover new music which makes people upset since everyone would expect Flow to do everything.

I personally would like Deezer to seriously expand on recommendations and at least get up to par with Spotify in that regard which has multitude of various options. At the moment those recommendations are non-existent, we basically have to hunt for new music elsewhere. After we're finished with exploring recommended albums, playlists, etc, we can let Flow do its thing, but not before.

No it doesn't need to be unpredictable. It must "flow" though, so if it absolutely must go from Chihei Hatakeyama to Krewella, it must take at least 15 tracks, not in an instant.

But the point was that it must flow with my current mood, not the other way around.

The mixes are all premixed and I don't want to listen to somebody else's idea of 'quiet music' which only rarely changes.

Thanks @Noam Asulin
I've passed your feedback to the Flow team 🙂

Hey @Razorblade

Thank you for your support and feedback. I've passed this on to our Flow team 😉

Hi there @rickvm

Thank you very much for your feedback - our Flow team is already working on this. I've passed the information on as well.

Hey @ranck.oner

Thank you for your feedback and support. I've passed it to our Flow team :)
Have you tried clearing the app's cache to see if there's any improvement?

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.

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

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.

@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?