What does everyone think about the new Update?

[Guest]

I bloody wish smule would have a beta testing version for changes and new features and stop releasing bad ideas to the release build that folks are paying a service for!.. I spent many a happy year singing on this app even on android,  even back in the early days when us users were always out of sync. Now those joyful days are back since  the introduction of a new sound engine and them adding the skip forward and rewind function.😔🤬

[realyquick]

5 minutes ago, mj_obr said:

I bloody wish smule would have a beta testing version for changes and new features and stop releasing bad ideas to the release build that folks are paying a service for!.. I spent many a happy year singing on this app even on android,  even back in the early days when us users were always out of sync. Now those joyful days are back since  the introduction of a new sound engine and them adding the skip forward and rewind function.😔🤬

Absolutely, a test version would help. In fact they used to do this a couple years back.. smule offered free subscriptions to people who volunteered to test each release and log issues. But from what I heard from one of those testers, they ignored all the issues reported by the testers, making it meaningless.

Ever since they introduced the much-hyped but underwhelming "Styles" feature, Smule has gone downhill. I suspect that's when the new team was brought in, removing features and re-writing code that was already working, and put the ugly picture gallery in place of the original super-efficient list view. The real problem is the coders aren't using the app nor are the designers (who are supposed to tell them what to code) which is why it has become so difficult to use.

[realyquick]

Just for grins, here's a few new reviews since just yesterday in Smule's App Store page.

These guys are getting the same feedback from everyone.. and simply ignoring it all!

Btw, anyone else run into this issue where the Feed tab automatically starts playing a song, instead of showing all recent activity among the people you follow, like it used to?

 

Review: "Bring Back Old Feed and Layout ASAP"

This new update is not user friendly. I
never look at my feed anymore because of
auto play. Not everyone wants to listen
automatically and the feed no longer gives
me the information I want quickly. This is
the most annoying change!!! Also the large
square layout is not necessary and you
have taken away some of the information
like who joined the song!!!

Review:  "New Layout"

This new layout has taken away the
customized experiences of someone's
personal space. The pinned song is not
that important it looks like any other duet,
there is no color anymore except for what
appears to be a faded shade on top of the
screen and for us who get over 50 joins in
our OC, it has never been more
dificultades to like and comment those
joins. I really hope you reconsider give us
back the customized experiences we used
to have. Thank you. Other than that I love
Smule

Developer Response:
Hey,
Thank you very much for the review and
the feedback.
We will definitely take it into consideration,
and we hope you will continue enjoying our
app.
Also, in case you need any further
assistance, you may contact from the
below link:
https://smule.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/
requests/new
We are always here for our users

Review: "Hate the new interface!"

I have been enjoying Smule for over 5
years now and love this app until you guys
changed the interface! I hate the new look
and feel and having to scroll through the
large thumbnails. I prefer the list, the way
it was before! Is there any way to go back
to classic look? Give users options to use
new or classic look please.

Review: "The recent update is bad"

A fav app is now painful and cumbersome
to use, please bring back the previous
layout of the start page!! Don't need those
large thumbnails, it is not user friendly at
all!!

[realyquick]

Adding another issue I've bumped into. Let's use this as the thread to record all the problems we find in the new layout. With any luck, the smule guys will find it and maybe even attempt to fix them😀

You can "bookmark" up to 100 tracks which you want to open invites for sometime in the future (this is different from bookmarking an invite you want to join). They've moved this from the very easy-to-find place it used to be, to About->Bookmarks->View All-> Songs. But even after you've found this area with a lot more navigation than you used to, you'll find it's useless, because all you'll see is a bunch of big pictures filling up the screen: another dreaded picture gallery. If you're lucky you might find a small part of the name of the song below the pic, but there's so little room for it that this screen is effectively unreadable and hence useless. You'll have to click on a pic and listen to the song, to find what song it is! The people who made this change obviously aren't using this feature.

While I'm at it, here's more valid input from the App Store reviews.

___

Review: Updates making the app worse

There are so many things
about the most recent update that I do not
like!
Favorite recordings auto arrange now by
date. I like to put them in the order I prefer,
not the order Smule thinks I should have
them in, thanks!
The number of days ago the recording was
made no longer shows under the cover on
the channel page. When I'm trying to see if
someone is still singing on Smule or has
abandoned it (which seems to happen
more frequently with every useless
update), I have to play the most recent
recording to see the date.
Everything you do to "improve the
experience" seems to make it worse.
Please stop fixing things that are fine in
the first place, and take into account
feedback from your dedicated users. Make
your app fun again like it used to be a few

Review:The new update is horrible!

There is no tab
for invites. They are hidden amongst the
recordings on my channel, with only a little
gray icon in the bottom corner to
differentiate from the rest of my
recordings. For someone like me Who
actually listens to my joins, this will make it
easy to miss them. Also, the favorites are
now tucked away in the "about" tab. I can't
even tell you how much I preferred seeing
my recordings in list form. It's like you're
trying to copy off of Starmaker. In case you
didn't already know, Starmaker is not a
good app. It's populated mostly by bots
and few real users. And their vip is
ridiculously expensive. So stop trying to
copy them! You once had a superior
product at a better price. Do you or your
employees actually use your app? Do you
consult with app users before you make
these kinds of changes? I don't think so.
Please Smule, for the love of music, stop
making unnecessary changes to the layout
of your app!

[realyquick]

Looks like the list view might make a comeback soon.. see smule's response to the feedback from a user below,

Review: Please bring back the previous
interface

The new interface is hard to use, previous
layout gave info on date of recording, no of
joins, etc at a glance - now it doesn't and
it's painful having to click through the
thumbnails to see all that into;
Also when going to feed page it auto plays,
we dont need that, I would like to choose
which collab to listen to, and not have
some crap collab auto play;
Please bring back the previous layout!
A fav app is now painful and cumbersome
to use, please bring back the previous
layout of the start page!! Don't need those
large thumbnails, it is not user friendly at
all!!

Developer Response

Hi, thank you very much for sharing your
thoughts with us! We are currently working
on some new updates raised by our
community, relating to the recent profile
layout change - stay tuned for news on
that.

[BWFan16]

Here are a few more annoying things about this change.

Can't see whose bookmark it is in the bookmarks view, nor whether it is a video

What is with the huge Edit Profile button. The new layout really takes away real estate for the background pic.

Hope they reverse some of these changes.

Also from my invites, I should have the number of joins and be able to go to the joins

 

Overall they took away a lot of good functionality in my opinion

[Guest]

You are totally correct the old profile looked great, it was all about your page. Now they all look the same and changing the colour alters  the buttons total rubbish 🗑.  I've got around it those, turned off android auto updates and installed old version via . Uptodown.com. I'm back to the wonderful look again installed 777. On the new version even the quality of the limited background picture is degraded.

[realyquick]

8 hours ago, mj_obr said:

You are totally correct the old profile looked great, it was all about your page. Now they all look the same and changing the colour alters  the buttons total rubbish 🗑.  I've got around it those, turned off android auto updates and installed old version via . Uptodown.com. I'm back to the wonderful look again installed 777. On the new version even the quality of the limited background picture is degraded.

Right and the background profile pic has shrunk quite a bit too.. just a sliver at the top. Speaking of which, a pinned collab used to dominate your profile page magnificently.. now it's just the first pic in that gallery, without even the name of the singers or any other info about it. Just a joke how they've gone through all the features and messed them up. If you're gonna reinvent the wheel, at least make it better! They replaced the wheel with a flat tire😂 As one of the reviewers said, the subscription has gone up too and he has no desire to pay for all their crazy experiments with the layouts, so he unsubscribed.

I would try the uptodown.com older version, but there's security issues with picking up apps from anywhere other than the official store (Apple App Store in my case). Plus, you'll likely need to update eventually anyway when they make some change on the server side which doesn't work with the old app.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, realyquick said:

Right and the background profile pic has shrunk quite a bit too.. just a sliver at the top. Speaking of which, a pinned collab used to dominate your profile page magnificently.. now it's just the first pic in that gallery, without even the name of the singers or any other info about it. Just a joke how they've gone through all the features and messed them up. If you're gonna reinvent the wheel, at least make it better! They replaced the wheel with a flat tire😂 As one of the reviewers said, the subscription has gone up too and he has no desire to pay for all their crazy experiments with the layouts, so he unsubscribed.

I would try the uptodown.com older version, but there's security issues with picking up apps from anywhere other than the official store (Apple App Store in my case). Plus, you'll likely need to update eventually anyway when they make some change on the server side which doesn't work with the old app.

I've had to revert to an older version as I am having the same crappy out of sync issues on my Samsung A70 like I had years ago on my S6.   It's all because they have introduced that jump to your parts only feature like on the Iphone (Which works really well).  I was hoping they were not going to implement that change on android as it's impossible to balance on so many model types and Android OS versions.

[realyquick]

1 hour ago, mj_obr said:

It's all because they have introduced that jump to your parts only feature like on the Iphone (Which works really well).  I was hoping they were not going to implement that change on android as it's impossible to balance on so many model types and Android OS versions.

That skipping around while recording is the only useful feature that's been added in maybe the last 3 years, but it was done before this new smule team came in with their "Styles" and all the messing around with the layout and other features. And yes it does work well on iPhone.. one of the advantages of hardware and software from a single vendor😁

By the way, clearing cache from Smule settings will usually fix out-of-sync issues. You may have to do it periodically, after every few collabs.

[Rita]

On 2/24/2022 at 12:08 PM, LovingMusic said:

Has anyone tried a website called Uptodown.com? Apparently they have the old version of Smule available to download but I’m not sure if it is safe. I really don’t like this new version as it is very messy and confusing and you can’t even see who are the two singers in a duet unless you play the song. None of these changes make any sense to me.

I'd like to know the answer to this question, I'd love to get my old version back.  Cannot stand this new version, my mentions are all text links instead of clickable pics.  One of my friends is missing and I cannot play her video's either. No she didn't block me we are good friends.  That's just the tip of the iceberg on my complaints about this new version...

[Isa_Bella]

11 hours ago, Rita said:

  Cannot stand this new version, my mentions are all text links instead of clickable pics.  

The picture is still showing in the Mentions from my end and not text link. Below (_____louisV) also my other account.

[realyquick]

The mentions are just text links on the main profile page... but if you go to the "About" tab you'll see the picture links there😀 Yet another completely baffling and unnecessary change that makes the app worse. What's with all these meaningless changes.. honestly never seen any team work so hard on turning a good, solid app into a sucky one.

If they just roll it back to the version of 2 years back, that would be the best update they can possibly provide.

[sdr]

2 hours ago, realyquick said:

If they just roll it back to the version of 2 years back, that would be the best update they can possibly provide

👍😁😂

[DuetWithAlli]

Ha, one of the reviews quoted above was mine. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Smule has already made it clear that they are sticking with the new format. Now, I’m not saying they won’t take feedback into account if you have a minor complaint ... they’ve already fixed the issue with favorites being automatically put in date order. But if you don’t like the picture tile look ... sorry, it’s here to stay. I’m going to attach the response I received from Smule on this matter.

Edited March 10, 2022 by DuetWithAlli
Small change to uploaded image

[realyquick]

36 minutes ago, DuetWithAlli said:

Ha, one of the reviews quoted above was mine. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Smule has already made it clear that they are sticking with the new format. Now, I’m not saying they won’t take feedback into account if you have a minor complaint ... they’ve already fixed the issue with favorites being automatically put in date order. But if you don’t like the picture tile look ... sorry, it’s here to stay. I’m going to attach the response I received from Smule on this matter.

I see that response to you was in Sep 2021, but this message from them was sent a couple days back "We are currently working on some new updates raised by our community, relating to the recent profile layout change - stay tuned for news on that." So I'm keeping my hopes up.. tho you never can be sure 😄

[DuetWithAlli]

That’s true, this exchange happened when my channel first changed over to the new look. At this point, it doesn’t really matter to me. I can take the new look or leave it. It’s the constant minor tweaks that make features stop working properly or remove important info about the recordings that get to me. If Smule is trying to update the app to fit with the attention spans of today’s youth (yeah I’m a geezer), they’ve done it. I don’t think I ever really even liked singing, it was more that I liked the people. Most of them are gone or rarely sing now, and even if Smule changed back, it won’t bring them back. I keep Smule for the few friends who are still there, and also because the resulting recordings are still pretty awesome even if the packaging you have to go through to get to them is super annoying. Sorry I’m so wordy haha.

[realyquick]

7 minutes ago, DuetWithAlli said:

That’s true, this exchange happened when my channel first changed over to the new look. At this point, it doesn’t really matter to me. I can take the new look or leave it. It’s the constant minor tweaks that make features stop working properly or remove important info about the recordings that get to me. If Smule is trying to update the app to fit with the attention spans of today’s youth (yeah I’m a geezer), they’ve done it. I don’t think I ever really even liked singing, it was more that I liked the people. Most of them are gone or rarely sing now, and even if Smule changed back, it won’t bring them back. I keep Smule for the few friends who are still there, and also because the resulting recordings are still pretty awesome even if the packaging you have to go through to get to them is super annoying. Sorry I’m so wordy haha.

They changed over to the new look last year, but very recently they've made changes that made even old versions show an incomplete version of the new look - forcing those of us who had a working older version go through with the update so the app was usable. This is why you're seeing a new wave of complaints against the new layout 😄

Everyone I know, young and old, hates the new layout and all the other changes that broke stuff that used to work well before.

I think the problem is that these changes are being designed by someone who's a musician but doesn't sing, and is being coded by a team that are neither musicians nor singers - they're just programmers doing what they think they were told to do. This disconnect results in all the bizarre updates over the last year or so which makes the app progressively worse while steeply raising subscription fees. Many smule users have quit rather than pay this new team to break their favorite app.

[smrenwick1]

On 2/25/2022 at 2:41 AM, Joshua96813 said:

On your profile page in Smule's Android app, tap the menu icon in the upper right corner, then select "Help." When the Help page opens, near the top right of the page, tap on "Submit a request." When that page opens, there's a drop-down box to choose a category, and one of them is "Feature Requests / Product Feedback." A form will then appear where you can enter your user information and your feedback.

But what if you have an IPhone app? Does that have that help button too? 🤔

[opentype]

9 minutes ago, smrenwick1 said:

But what if you have an IPhone app? Does that have that help button too? 🤔

Yes. It’s actually just loading this page https://smule.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

[Kayjan]

It would be so wonderful if they could roll it back. It do not understand why they would want to make some of the changes they have made? The one part of SMULE that really needs some work is the Messages section which appears to have not been updated for many moons. My MOTTO has always been “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It!” I miss the old interface and set-up that loaded quickly and was “comfortable” to the eye. It was easy to find things, especially for new users (who we train on SMULE APP when they join our Group). Now, for Iphone/iOS, it is much more difficult to explain the three horizontal lines rather than a cogwheel? Everything is cumbersome and time-consuming. I do not like to complain, and I am trying to make the best of it, but all of the constant major changes to SMULE needs to stop. SMULE’S decrease in usage and popularity are evident evidence of this being so. 

[Rita]

6 minutes ago, Kayjan said:

It would be so wonderful if they could roll it back. It do not understand why they would want to make some of the changes they have made? The one part of SMULE that really needs some work is the Messages section which appears to have not been updated for many moons. My MOTTO has always been “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It!” I miss the old interface and set-up that loaded quickly and was “comfortable” to the eye. It was easy to find things, especially for new users (who we train on SMULE APP when they join our Group). Now, for Iphone/iOS, it is much more difficult to explain the three horizontal lines rather than a cogwheel? Everything is cumbersome and time-consuming. I do not like to complain, and I am trying to make the best of it, but all of the constant major changes to SMULE needs to stop. SMULE’S decrease in usage and popularity are evident evidence of this being so. 

I totally agree. The old version was much better. 

[Joshua96813]

3 hours ago, realyquick said:

I think the problem is that these changes are being designed by someone who's a musician but doesn't sing, and is being coded by a team that are neither musicians nor singers - they're just programmers doing what they think they were told to do.

I totally agree. If the people who are designing and programming the Smule app actually had to use it like their paying VIP subscribers use it, they'd probably be so ashamed of themselves they'd run and hide in a dark closet somewhere.

[Joshua96813]

IMO, a large part of the problem with the design of the Smule app is that they are putting FORM OVER FUNCTION. "By definition, putting form over function means you sacrifice function--you make it harder to perform whatever task is supposed to be performed. You give up ease of use or simplicity in order to make it look nicer. Basically, you wind up with a lot of icing and no cake."
Source: https://ims21.net/web_form_function.htm#:~:text=By definition%2C putting form over function means you,with a lot of icing and no cake.

[realyquick]

2 hours ago, Joshua96813 said:

IMO, a large part of the problem with the design of the Smule app is that they are putting FORM OVER FUNCTION. "By definition, putting form over function means you sacrifice function--you make it harder to perform whatever task is supposed to be performed. You give up ease of use or simplicity in order to make it look nicer. Basically, you wind up with a lot of icing and no cake."

True, you cannot put form over function. The new team probably decided they wanted a picture-filled look like FB or StarMaker, then set about hacking the working app to get that look, not caring that they ruined most of the functionality in the process.

The new team must not have used smule much at all, and still don't use it, or they would realize how superior the original layout was to what's there now. That original layout was designed, programmed, and optimized by someone who used smule a lot, unlike this team of hackers who've messed it up and still don't get it.