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Show HN: Discover new music through an infinite suggestion graph (React/Redux)

panther.audio

108 pointsjoshwcomeau39 comments

My friends and I occasionally play "the spotify game" at bbqs. We pick two songs that we imagine are really really far apart. We play one on spotify, and then take turns to click on the "similar artists" tab to move closer and closer to the destination song. The winner is the player to play the destination song. The Art is to move closer to the target but not so close that the other player(s) can reach the destination...

I'm sure with the Spotify API someone could wrap this up in a killer game :)

That's an amazing idea! Wish I had the spare time to dedicate to it D:

For sure, although you can't use the free API for making games unfortunately:

https://developer.spotify.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ans...

I've been curious how difficult or burdensome getting permission for a game would be.

Lame!

You could use last.fm, maybe? I think there are a few providers that have this kind of info.

Cool! Sounds like a wikirace for music. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikirace

I used to run a similar service called Audio Vine.

You'd start by picking one song. Then you were given 4 choices for the next song, which were derived from Last.fm's "similar song" API. If you didn't make a selection by the end of the song, one of the four options were chosen at random.

It ended up being a very pleasant experience, a semi-randomized radio that gave the user the ability to steer the direction. The service also ended up producing this neat tree graph (done in D3) in which you could go back and traverse unexplored nodes.

We had an agreement with Grooveshark to stream from their music database, so unfortunately, when they went down, so did Audio Vine. But man, that was a fun project.

Looks nice! Just two things:

1. Where did you get the data from? I saw the Github link but, at least to me, it's not clear where the artist links come from.

2. Clicking two artists does not seem to improve the matches. I would like to select an artist, then click another one I like, and another, and get better and better matches to my music taste. It currently seems to be a simple visual representation of a single author and three related ones; showing the previous artist is just eye candy.

Thank you!

1. The data is from Spotify's API. I use 3 endpoints (artist info, artist top tracks, related artists). Really this is just a shiny interface over their API.

2. Yeah. The previous artist is meant as a way to go back in time (if you wanted to explore multiple "branches"). But yeah it's very "dumb" in this regard :)

That explains, thanks :)

> Copyright Date.now(). All rights, wrongs, and grey areas reserved.

I don't know if that's a bug or a very clever joke. :)

It is indeed a joke! One that is too subtle, though; half a dozen people have told me about this "bug" :)

Here's an academic paper that investigates this approach (screenshots towards the end), along with end-user experiments: https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/101186/0009...

Cool! At a glance, it looks similar to my approach. Different tools, but same rough architecture.

I tried it with "Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds" and got some pretty useless results:

  Nick Cave, which he's done some solo work as
  Mick Harvey, one of the members of the band
  Grinderman, one of Nick Cave's side projects

The second time was a little better. I used NC&TBS again and got

  PJ Harvey, Nick's old girlfriend
  Tom Waits, very similar stylistically
  Tindersticks, a more recent similar artist.

Third time it actually gave me an artist I had never heard of (Kristin Hersh) and I like what I'm hearing. So, I guess, play around with it a bit before you judge it.

Grinderman is a useless result? Come on!

Only useless from the perspective that I was provided no new information.

Thanks for this, I enjoyed the Readme and I'm working in something similar for myself, so having your code available will probably help me a lot.

Might be useful for anyone who doesn't have Spotify. The information is similar to (some omissions, maybe a max of 3 recommended?) what Spotify recommends in the "related artists" panel.

By the way, the footer says "Copyright Date.now()"

You are exactly right; this is really just an alternate Spotify interface :)

I think there's value in extracting a single feature out of a larger system and making a custom interface around it.

And yeah, the footer is a joke :)

Very bottom of the page

> Copyright Date.now()

Looking at the source code, it's purposefully written in a monospaced font, so I assume it's on purpose.

It is indeed a joke :)

I realize that this probably renders the copyright void, but I don't particularly care. Infringe all you like!

Pretty cool. i knew people at a startup called gigabeat (web 1.0 !) that did a affinity spiral. (they folded and even the domain name has gone to someone else). Back then it was a whole startup. Now its a side project :-)

Those circles seem to be problematic for long artist titles, which don't wrap.[0]

You might want to try dynamically splitting into tspans every word or phrase of sufficient individual or combined length.

Apart from that, really nice.

[0] : Chrome 50 (1366x768)

Indeed. I looked briefly into how multi-line SVG text elements work and it was not encouraging, so I let it be. I'll look into tspans though, thanks!

This is great! As a spotify junkie (and since you're using the spotify api), it would be great if there were links from the artist/album/tracks directly to spotify.

Yeah, I almost did this. What stopped me is that I assume most people using it do not have spotify accounts, and it seemed lame to link to (what would become) a signup page.

Agree that it needs _some_ kind of call-to-action though. There's nothing to do when you find an artist you like!

To be honest, I don't have Spotify and I'd still probably use it for that. Perhaps link to searches on multiple services? Youtube/SoundCloud/Amazon/iTunes maybe? With referral links you might even be able to make a few quid to cover the hosting at least.

Interface looks great! Really cool project. The Spotify API is one of my favorites to work with for small projects. I just wish I could stream full songs using it.

Looks like we had a similar idea :D http://bandmap.me/

Hahahahaha wow! Yours definitely wins in terms of # of results :D

Very cool.

Maybe, but your interface is smooth and slick! It was a weekend project for me, so didn't have time to refine it too much, and it does what I use it to do, but it definitely looks like I could learn a lot in design from you :D

Too effective for me. Now I'm listening to the first artist it recommended instead of exploring the site more.

very cool UI and concept. I love it. I think it would be cool to show the entire history of your selections to see where you start and where you finish. Nevertheless awesome work!

Curious regarding the basis for the artist graph.

Outsourced to the Spotify API. Would have loved to take a crack at solving that problem, but limited time for side projects :)

This is very, very cool. Nice work guys.

pretty dope

Thanks :)

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