The issues with soundtrap. Much needed additions and changes.
Hello all. I have been involved with the SoundTrap community for over 4 years. Within that allotted time, I have witnessed a once great and striving community fall to pieces.
As I am sure many can relate, I do have a fairly busy life, so I will highlight the biggest issues, and mention a few things that should be added.
-Changes
1. 99% of all soundtrap features are blocked by a pay wall. For example, the only non-electric guitar I can use is the basic acoustic guitar. I can't even use a Ukulele. This means I have to record instruments on another site, import those into Soundtrap, then rinse and repeat. This practically makes Soundtrap useless for producers. If I really wanted to pay for something then I'd pay the $100 to get FL studio. Want to know something great about FL? You only ever have to pay ONCE! Whereas, with Soundtrap, you have to pay every month. That means with the cheapest package, you'd be paying $120 dollars a year, where with FL you'd be paying $100 for a lifetime DAW. AND you get more features than you could imagine.
2. Bring back the community. Honestly, I gained most of my growth over Soundtrap's community. When that shut down, me and my friends on Soundtrap either lost touch or migrated to Spotify and YouTube. Growth on Soundtrap was so easy, all you had to do was make some sort of joke or inspirational message on the wall and you'd get about 50 followers in a week. Now, the issue was that there were a multitude of people just asking for boyfriends and girlfriends, but that's an easy fix. You just make a few rules that pop up above the wall and anyone caught breaking those rules will get their wall privileges suspended or banned.
Some of my best days were on the Soundtrap wall. I met so many great collaborators through that, and nowadays, it's super hard to find any collaborators who don't cost an astronomical amount of money.
Those are the main changes needed to be made. Now, for what needs to be added.
-Additions
1. Sidechain compressions. Someone posted this over a year ago, so I'm going to copy and paste the persons post here. Sidechain Compression is a compressor that lowers the volume of any audio by using a certain sound as its activator (kick or snare) Usually this effect is used in Electronic Music like Trap, Rap and EDM or House, but is also used for other cool stuff like ducking the volume. Fakie, on the other hand is just a volume duck for any audio that is usually in the time signature. If you are using a 4/4 Kick beat this can actually work, but sidechain is usually needed for more advanced kick patterns.
2. Add better AutoTune. The one currently makes it either sound like you're on a bounce house from a three year old's birthday party, or sounds exactly the same as you recorded it.
3. Add melodyne or something similar. This would help for when you need to tune your vocals or instruments, but need a better visual understanding of what key the vocals/instrument is in, and makes it easier to move that note to the right key. Many DAWs are adding this, but Soundtrap seems to be lacking with adding new stuff such as that.
4. Honestly, some of the guitars sound like someone threw a trombone into a meat grinder. I'd personally remake all the guitar sounds with REAL guitars, but that's just me.
Thank you all for letting me rant about this. I am going to also email this to Soundtrap, because chances are they will not listen to this post.
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Absolute w post. I agree with everything in here, however I have a few more ideas for features that should be added:
1. A better live volume meter of some sort. The current volume meter is a very simple purple line that becomes difficult to follow especially in dark mode. It's also very basic without any change in color or shape when the audio is clipping. Almost all DAWs that I know of have a volume meter that allows people to accurately see how loud things are.
2. **I DO REALIZE THE LIMITATIONS OF A BROWSER DAW**...but...I think that adding automation for every effect would make Soundtrap a genuine competitor for music production software. Even if there was simply automation available for the mix of an effect, it would be much better.
3. I have mixed feeling about this one. The ability to shift the octave of an audio sample is great, but the output is almost always very strange and certainly unique compared to similar functions in other DAWs. I personally find a lot of the outputs to be cool, adding a sort of glitchy sound to your audio. However, this is not the desired result most of the time. I can suggest keeping the cool glitchy output but naming it something else, and then adding a genuine octave shifter.
4. Time based effect settings. I try to use the Tremolo effect as a makeshift sidechain at times. Not only does this barely work because the Tremolo is always different depending on where the sample is on the grid, but there is no time based rate for the Tremolo. I can only set it to a decimal number which instead of a rate of 1/2 for example. The timing works in 120 bpm of course, because the decimals correspond to that tempo, and a value of 0.50 for example would equate to something like 1/2, but with a tempo like 106 bpm, it is impossible to time it correctly. I feel like time based rates are sort of a standard when it comes to DAWs, but Soundtrap's system is sort of an outlier.
5. Here's a rather nit-picky one. Having a number length marked besides each free sound or loop. A lot of times when I want to preview a sample from the list on the side, the sound file is much longer than the sound itself. It would be nice to be able to gauge how long you should expect to wait for the sample to play when they aren't cropped properly, at the very least based on the type of sound you're expecting. I can suggest adding a small pie chart timer for each sound on the side as well, which fills up as the sound is closer to being finished playing.
There are many other smaller gimmicks I could come up with that might optimize Soundtrap, but these are in my opinion, (besides what @10tativeforce wrote), some of the more important ones.
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I agree 100%. They really need to add new features and fix the old problems. As well as new ones. The new autosave feature keeps saving empty projects and corrupting my audio files. Soundtrap really needs to step up their game. To be completely honest, I'm really thinking about switching over to FL because of all of these problems not getting fixed.
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@d1ll I suppose you're right. I'm putting all my hope into Soundtrap that it can truly be better. I've only been using it for three years, but I've seen it change a whole lot. I have also watched its downfall, much like @10ativeforce. I hope the Soundtrap team does actually read these suggestions, because if these came true, Soundtrap would truly be a geunine competitor to other softwares. And both of your ideas are great! I hope they impliment them into Soundtrap in a future update. I think I especially agree with the time based effect settings and the octave shift, and I'm pretty sure we all know about the 'wonderful' autosave feature. (I know I already said something about that, but it just annoys me so much that I added it again.) But what REALLY bothers me, is the fact that we have an autosave feature, yet no way to switch it back to manual save if we prefer it. They should impliment that as well as everything else you guys said. Okay, now I'm just rambling so I'm going to stop... :l
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Hello everyone,
Wow, firstly, thank you for such a passionate conversation + thought-out recommendations on how we can improve Soundtrap. I loved reading all of your suggestions. My name's Kish, I'm a part of a wider team that influences our products development + launches new features.
Many of us who work at Soundtrap are music-makers too so are actively aware of a lot of the suggestions you've highlighted... but we love hearing it from passionate creators like yourselves too as you all are our most valuable asset.
d1ll as you mentioned, we are a web-based DAW so face a few different challenges than some of the other softwares out there but we are working hard each day to make Soundtrap the best music making tool for you!
As some of you who have been with us for a while have seen, we do make updates + changes regularly and rest-assured we've heard your requests on this thread too.
Please do keep sharing your thoughts + suggestions as I'll be reading and popping in from time to time!
Happy music making and catch you soon.
Kish
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This mostly a coding gui error I noticed while trying something very complex.
In the effects gui interface for 3D, Above/Far/Near - Starts at 360 Degrees and all numbers sans 258 so goes from 1- to 360 but missing the value 258
Below on the other hand has 0 to 360 with no missing values just the value zero being added to the mix.
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@Dusti Fox I'm happy to tell you (if you haven't discovered already) that they added somewhat of an autosave feature!! You kind of have to way for the export to process for a while but hey at least you don't have to remember to save!
@Kish thank you so, so much for reading all of our suggestions. Don't feel too pressured by the things we say as we are well aware of the limits that Soundtrap most certainly has compared to other DAWs, but we are super grateful for the recognition. I actually didn't even connect the dots the first time I realized you guys added an autosave feature. I noticed the UI change and everything and just thought "huh, neat", but I see now that you read our suggestions and then added it. Your work and effort is very much appreciated and we hope to see more awesome additions and changes soon :V
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