B&O App … what happened to volume control?

[Severed_hand_of_skywalker]

I don’t mean it’s laggy controlling the products. More that the interface and interaction with the halo is a bit choppy.  But since its just a glorified volume control it doesn’t matter much.

[Beofile7]

The one I was playing with yesterday was not at all laggy. It seemed very responsive so perhaps later ones are better? It seems to control anything connected on your network and possibly bluetooth products so that’s most of my products excluding I/R products. It has to be an improvement over that app. I have gone grey and must have lost 10 years dealing with that the last few years!

[Stephen]

Severed_hand_of_skywalker wrote:

I don’t mean it’s laggy controlling the products. More that the interface and interaction with the halo is a bit choppy. But since it’s just a glorified volume control it doesn’t matter much.

Agreed. If I had paid the full price for my Halo, it would have been exchanged the following day for a full refund. I was lucky to get a great trade-in deal of a Core and Halo for my old Moment, with the Core being essentially free of charge. I think that the Halo while pretty, is pointless and overpriced.

[Yossi]

Still no volume control for the BL50. I guess it came back on some kind of beta test app ? I use my BL50 with an external streamer connected by RCA. It’s a nightmare to use without volume control, perhaps the interface designers of the B&O app should know that BL50 volume can’t be controlled by beoremote one …

[Sandyb]

It’s back on the beta though. While not ideal, I wouldn’t be scared of the new beta – you get volume control back, and its not especially different in other respects from the main / non-beat release.

 

[Yossi]

Thank you Sandyb ! Your contributions are always useful, thanks to your advice I now have an external streamer with my BL50 and it brought them at another level ?

[Beofile7]

What? Do you know what you are saying?

Spend 40,000 euros on speakers and you can only control them through an experimental unproven app? And you think that is OK?

It is very very far from OK!

Get real!

[Sandyb]

I agree its not ideal.

But the beta app is fine, you’re acting as if its some completely different animal than the regular / non-beta, which it isn’t.

 

[Yossi]

everyone seems to agree that the b&o app is mediocre , rather inquiring for a premium brand…

it is high time for b&o to recruit interface designers and developers at the heights.

the bullshit has lasted long enough

[andy_js]

I’m not fortunate enough to own a pair of Beolab 50 but I have seen a number of bugs in the non-Beta app recently, such as:

– After beginning playback on a speaker the volume bar is empty.  Changing the volume on the device itself causes the app to update.

– The playback controls for a device (usually my BeoSound stage) don’t work so I have to use the remote.

The app is certainly better than some of them, but it does not make me feel good as a customer to be finding issues that should have been caught by QA.

[trackbeo]

@Sandyb, Is there some way to get the “tap the top of your Beosound 1[2][A9] to start/re-start playback” with Roon?  I.e. can one make a queue (own music) or playlist (Tidal) that gets auto-continued by the output device rather than by the Roon Controller?  That’s principally what I use the BeocrApp for.

[Sandyb]

Well I agree that the workflow of the app (at least this app type that we’ve had for the last 4-5 years) isn’t the most obvious.  The landing / opening page of a product selector does just introduce more taps to get to actually starting music / controlling your device.

But plenty of us have raised this issue years ago, with zero sign of a rethink.

** All this is one of the reasons I dont use the app for music at all, and switched to a Roon setup. The music experience (selecting / browsing) is just too basic in the B&O app, though I can see why for casual users its perfectly live-able.

 

[matteventu]

The issue is that the app now doesn’t look like what it did 4-5 yeas ago.

Several major parts of the app UI/UX have been changed in the last few months, and they objectively made the experience much much worse.

3 years ago the app was almost perfect.

As someone who has worked in Fortune 500 software companies, I fully understand that the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” doesn’t really work. There need to be continuous updates, refreshes of the UI, and so on.

But the way B&O has done it… Is absolutely disgusting and shows complete lack of any software development and user research (they are two very different and very separate things) capability. The app design (of the parts they have recently updated) is very bad (and I’m not talking about subjective aesthetic tastes). And the app coding is even worse, at a purely technical level.

The situation with the app now genuinely is utter shit compared to what it was a few years ago (B&O’s own app), and compared to major other companies in the same segment (Bose, B&W, Sonos, JBL – I won’t call them “competitors” as they arguably don’t target Super Duper Ultra Extremely Very High Net Worth Individuals).

That’s why I’d pay for a third party alternative app (obviously referring to the other thread). Out of desperation and disbelief.

[Author]

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