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.