It's been a great 5 years, but I need to move on. And I'm not on my way with you


#1

I used the VOX for 5 or 6 years. I used it on Mac and iOS, I was ready to pay for a good product and it seemed like I was in the target group of this product. I didn’t need a Windows app and I was ready to edit file tags locally. Actually I didn’t have any serious problems with the app. There were some minor issues that I thought the developers could fix quickly.

For example, when deleting and reloading the same file with different tags, the app still displayed the old tags. I don’t know what the problem is - I tried everything: renaming the file, changing the name of the track and album, but it didn’t help. When I contacted support, they told me that this was the known problem and suggested to delete the track manually on the server. For me as a develoepr this solution doesn’t looks great. It is not scaled for big amount of users, it is not reliable, and it requires human participation. But I decided that the support wants to solve my problem until a fix is released. However, six months later, I was again in the same situation and my files were again handled manually by support. And then again a couple of months later. By this time, I have found a workaround - I converted a file to a different bitrate and then re-uploaded it. This was not very convenient, but I didn’t want to wait for help from support a significant time.

There was also a problem with album covers and artist art. Sometimes they disappeared on iOS, sometimes - on Mac, and sometimes on both of them. Generally the problem was with new files. But one day the covers disappeared from all the files at once.

And sometimes the server retruns 500 (server error) and it was impossible to download or upload files. Sometimes even the site and forum didn’t work at such moments. And the only way to tell the developers about it was Twitter.

Guys, where is your monitoring? If the server is unreachable you need to get alerts in the messenger within 5 minutes. When there were problems with VOX servers, the problem was solved for days. Once they didn’t work for a week. Sometimes I think if we didn’t reportabout it, dev team wouldn’t even know about it.

You guys are selling your app for money. Moreover, you are using a subscription model. Each of us pays you our own money every month. We do not delay payments. We don’t tell that we have found a job and will pay later. We pay you money every f**king month. In this case users have an expectations. They believe that if there is a problem, it will be solved as soon as possible. They expect to receive answers to the questions. They expect the fixes for errors. This is why we use the subscription model: we pay and you can develop the product and release new features. I haven’t seen it for years.

Our problems do not seem to be impossible to solve. The company have released a great product. It remains to fix a few annoying bugs. This doesn’t look like a task that takes years to complete. During this time it was possible to release a completely new product.

I tried to find the reason of such situation. And the only reason I can see is that the company has stopped developing the product. This is the Vox team (https://vox.rocks/coppertino-team). Here are people created a great product. I belive they could solve our problems. But they won’t. Because most of them have been working for other companies for a long time. I found it easily using LinkedIn and Google. I don’t believe this company can surprise us any more.

Now I am using Plex Media Server and Plexamp (https://plexamp.com). It cross platform, it allows edit tags, it allows edit cover and artist art. It works with FLAC. It looks like the application that VOX team promised to develop for us. It have a subscription model, but it has one-time payment option.


#2

I did not realize the album artwork bugs until you mentioned it but you are correct.

I really just want an app/service that allows me to put my content on it.

I looked into plex and all the other stuff that comes with it is just to much to handle. I don’t want all their free movies and stuff. I just want a service that lets me upload my content. Stream my content to as many devices as I want and let’s me organize it how I want.

Vox is my best option at this point. If something else comes out or I can figure out how to program my own app and do it myself I will move on.

My issues right now with vox are:

1: artwork. I want to control all aspects of the artwork. I do not need vox giving me artists artwork that never matches. Let me put the artist artwork I want.
2: sorting. I want to sort by genre>artist>album then show me the songs. To give me sorting done by artist but not give me artworks for the artist is confusing. Plus when using artist sorting, when you click on an artist, to display the album and songs in a huge lists is a pain. And if a artist has a lot of albums I have to scroll though every album And song to find the one I want. Why not show The artists then when clicking on the artist you want, it show the albums for that artist in the album view like it shows when you change to sorting by album. Then if I click on that album show me the songs for it. I don’t want to scroll through a huge list of songs to find an album. Just list the albums and then I’ll click on the album and then the song. Giving me the option to sort by genre first, and then show me the artist list for that genre. Then when I click on an artist show me the album list for that artist. I’ll find the right album and it shows me the songs in that album. That would be perfect.
3: music management. This whole process of not being able to change a songs information once uploaded is the biggest pain. To have to delete artists and songs just because you misspelled something or didn’t fix a date or artwork is wrong is stupid. There really needs to be a way to edit metadata of my music while it’s uploaded so that I don’t have to delete and reupload every time.

I’m off my part of the rant for now. But to be honest otherwise I like vox. It’s my best option so far. Things need to be fixed. But otherwise I like the app.


#3

It’s not about bugs or missing features. Any program has bugs. If developers fix bugs, that’s great. If they try to do it, but they don’t always succeed, I can understand it. At least they are trying to help me. But I’m not ready to put up with the fact that developers ignore users who bring them money every month. The point is in attitude to users.

Here is the last problem I have - I cannot download songs (And one more bug - cannot download songs on iOS device). I found the root cause of the problem and described it to the developers. I have been waiting for a solution for 5 days and I have no information when the problem will be solved and whether it will be solved at all. To be honest, I don’t think it will be solved.

I look at the posts in this forum where people are complaining about their problems and I see that none of these problems have been resolved. Even such simple questions (ReVox dev status) are ignored by the support. After all, do you really believe that there will be a new version of the product where all these features will be implemented ?

This is just my guess and I can’t be sure, but I believe that Vox team no longer exists. There is one person who comes to the forum once every 2-3 days and there are a couple of people who get the money we pay every month. Nothing else happens. In this case, the invitation to invest that we saw a couple of years ago looks like a fraud. At least, it is very ugly. In some countries it can be reason for a case in court.

p.s.

I just want a service that lets me upload my content. Stream my content to as many devices as I want and let’s me organize it how I want.

Yes, it is my scenario of using Plex.


#4

I understand. I did have a bug sometime back and they were pretty quick to help me turn it around. I do not really know what is going on with the dev team as I understand they are in the Ukraine.

I would love to try out Plex I just don’t understand how to use it and I just want simple. No hassle stuff.


#5

I know this is an older post, but thought I’d add my two-cents since this is still an on-going issue…

I feel like what might be going on here is that when a song (file) is uploaded, VOX Cloud will tag each file with its own UUID-type of identifier, so that it can reference this file for playlists and other uses – while saving data use. This is just an assumption based on the fact that it retains old metadata from deleted files (even when re-uploading a new version). Facebook and other media servers use ID tags for similar reasons.