A Possibly Stellar Application Ruined By Fatal Flaws
This is a stylish, well made (in the core features) application for listening to music save but a couple things that utterly ruin it as an application.
Plays flac files (and other formats like mp3 files), this is great, and was my key need for a player on my iPod, to save time loading it up.
Whats horrible about this app and breaks it:
1. Random playback is utterly broken. It randomly plays a song alright, song to song, yet somehow, shockingly, bafflingly, instead of using Apples own inbuilt player
mechanism (I would think they could do, I may be wrong), or coding a decent one of their own, the Golden Ear developers have coded a random/shuffle song
option where it does not remember what songs have been played before it in a collection/playlist.
So you have say, 50 songs, play a song, randomly shuffles to the next new song, and then after that song, the player will not remember that the 2 previous songs have
already been played and should therefore be excluded from the random songs selection going forward, and may well play either of them again.
This is shockingly and bafflingly broken. I cant understand how other people havent mentioned it yet, maybe they just havent noticed it yet, it took me awhile to notice it.
Im not just whining, scenario where this annoys me in my life:
I take my ipod with playlist and plug it in to my work radio, I keep most of my files at home stored as flacs, so I was happy to have this solution instead of constantly converting files for my ipod, but its no solution at all since when I try to put on a "playlist for the day" half the songs keep coming up again and again. Thanks for making me
waste my money on your app Golden Ear devs.
2. The 2nd glaring issue, as if the first one wasnt bad enough, is that the app will randomly cut off some songs early in the last 10 seconds or so to jump to the next song.
Im not imagining that, it can sometimes take awhile to notice, perhaps an hour or more of listening (as it doesnt happen with every song, or most, fortunately), but it absolutely does happen, Ive verified it multiple times with multiple identical files between my PC player (Winamp) and different sessions with Golden Ear on my iPod.
So, other than these 2 issues, there are a lot of amazing features, Id say a darn near perfect, slick looking music app. So close to perfection, but so drastically ruined by
bad coding and testing that the app is unusable for me in the (very normal) context Id expect to use it in, which forces me to give it a 1 star review.
If both of these issues are fixed in a future update, I will gladly update my review to a 5 star review, or a 4 star review if they simply fixed the random playback memory issue,
as the app is now though it is just a waste of money.
JMSNorthern about
Golden Ear, v2.6