Astiga roadmap - 2023

gravelldgravelld Administrator
edited February 9 in General

In the recent pricing thread, it was brought up by a few Astiga users that there wasn't much clarity or idea of what features are in development for Astiga, and what you can expect to look forward to in the future.

I understand that confusion, so I'm writing up this note to give some indication as to where Astiga is going over the short/medium term (i.e. this year-and-a-bit).

At the same time, following almost thirty years in the software industry I know plans are worthless, but planning is essential. While I will list, below, areas we are looking to develop in Astiga those specific changes will not be documented in a detailed way, and no dates will be committed to. Things change, crises emerge and sometimes I realise priorities must change. Nevertheless, I hope the vague roadmap below gives some indication as to the current direction. Even the order of the items in the roadmap do not imply ordering or prioritisation.

Also, this roadmap only covers the service as it is used; marketing, operations and other things are not covered by this roadmap and will be proceeding in parallel.

How this roadmap is formed

The inputs are various:

  • This community forum
  • Responses to the 'active user' survey
  • Emails we receive to support
  • Analysis of feature use by looking at our server logs, database etc

From these, the main areas we are going to concentrate on are:

  • Basic UI restructure
  • Library browsing improvements
  • Playlists!
  • The Android app

Basic UI restructure

This is quite simple - we're going to restructure some of the pages in the web app to make music browsing and day-to-day use of the service easier. That means moving the storage management stuff into the "settings" area, and promoting the content of "Overview" as the main home page to the app. Done!

Library browsing improvements

Improving finding music to play:

  • Showing (Done!) and editing ratings (Done! And Done!).
  • Filtering tracks (Done!) and sorting them (Done!); filtering albums (Done!) and sorting albums lists.

Note that playlists are covered separately below.

Improving the experience of using Astiga:

  • Adding artist, album etc info that otherwise isn't present in the library.

Improving management of your use of the Astiga service:

  • Astiga level tagging (to e.g. make filtering, playlisting easier).

Playlists!

By far the most feedback we receive is around playlists. To that end...

Make playlists a first-class entity.

  • List playlists and display them without adding them to play queues. Done!
  • Support re-ordering, renaming etc. outside of the play queue. Done!

Add tracks/albums et al directly to playlists from library browsing. Done!

Make it more obvious that tracks can be re-ordered in the play queue (we're missing affordances). Done!

Self-service fixing of playlists that have become broken due to moving/renaming file locations.

Fixing playlist re-ordering in the Android app.

Exporting playlists

  • First track/filenames
  • Then the actual audio

The Android app

I don't have much specific to mention on this, other than I find the current app to have a clunky UX and I feel the whole thing needs an overhaul, both in terms of the attractiveness of the app and also the flow through the app.

An iOS version would be good too.


So those are the broad areas we are concentrating on in the short term! Feel free to feed-back.

Post edited by gravelld on

Comments

  • buppibuppi Member

    Thanks for this! It's nice to see some development forecasting; won't get my hopes pinned on any specifics since I understand priorities change, but it's nice to have some features to look forward to.

  • way_way_uptownway_way_uptown Member

    As a niche user (I listen to full albums in my very large library), I want to be able to control the categories on my home screen. Instead of "most played" or "recently added", I want to create my own categories and tag an album to them.

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    You're not niche @way_way_uptown ... or at least if you are that makes two of us 😃

    Can you create a separate feature request for this idea? It's easier to keep individual ideas separate like this - it makes them more measurable and trackable.

  • way_way_uptownway_way_uptown Member

    absolutely -- how do I do that? Is there a link to a jira somewhere?

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    New Discussion -> change "Category" to Feature requests and get writing 👍

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