The Feel Good Initiative. Discover new music daily. | Hacker News Reader

The Feel Good Initiative. Discover new music daily.

thefeelgood.com

27 pointsandr35 comments

I love the "instant on" feel of this app. Just press play. Very cool.

The fact that you don't instantly force a registration page on a potential user will help attract the BugMeNot types who would otherwise move on.

Yes, that was one of our key goals. You can even tag music and organize playlists without registering. You only need to register if you want to post music or save your favorites/tags (they are stored in cookies for guests).

The result of about 20 days of exploratory programming. We didn't really know where we were going in the beginning. Things to check out: tagging (I like this song), posting your own music, the podcast (my favorite), other tidbits.

Note: I submitted The Feel Good back in February but it was a totally different site, so this is not a dupe.

How about an embeddable mini-player? The src could be per-song, per-channel, or just "Featured Music."

I bet a lot of people (myself included) would love this for their blogs. Then it becomes a functional ad for your site.

We are actually working on this feature right now :)

Another idea: A narrow, vertical interface for loading in Firefox's sidebar. Makes it easier to keep the player open while you browse elsewhere.

Finally, a You Tube for audio. I've been waiting for something like this for some time -- sites like http://virb.com/ are nice, but revolve around the album, which isn't usually how an indie artist really writes.

Now I can put things up as I work on them, which'll be cool.

-- http://thefeelgood.com/blinks

Yes, a YouTube for audio. I was waiting for it for ages... why didn't anybody did it before? I think this idea & implementation has magic; in other words, it's a winner.

Reminds me of Pandora.

I don't like the fact that the music stops when I click to go into comments

Sorry... however, I do like it, and everything seems nicely executed

That's high on the todo list. Look for it today or tomorrow.

Awesome. Well, it's bookmarked. I'll visit again in a month or so

It’s hard to figure out how to follow a channel vs. how to favorite a song. I notice that if I favorite a song I start to follow the channel automatically.

Also, I’ve mentioned it before, but I would like affiliate links. I’d like to buy music from some of the new artists I’ve found through the site, but I am too lazy to look them up on Amazon/ iTunes

Affiliate links are now live on the comments page. 6 minutes turnaround :)

The philosophy of following vs favorites is that we automatically pick the channels you follow based on which ones you like the most songs from. It will work for the majority of the users. More "likes" = stronger relationship. However, the podcast is only limited to 20 songs per day for the channels with the strongest relationship, so only the minority of power users that have more than 20 songs a day will need to explicitly follow a channel or another to keep it in the podcast. But you are right, we need to communicate this better.

Could you add iTunes links? I've got music in iTunes, but not on Amazon. (CDBaby only does the former.)

Oh I see what you mean, electric sheep is in iTunes. (i really like it) We'll try to do that soon.

I love these guys. They think of everything and they make a great product. I loved the original feel good, and I love the new one too. Congrats on the [re]launch!

How does this site not violate copyright law? I love the idea, but as it is, I feel like a nasty letter from the RIAA is being carried by a postman still wet from the tongue of some RIAA lawyer.

Anyway, don't let that set you back. It seems great.

Liked it straight away. Long time last.fm user and yet have never used their site to listen to music in the way I used this. Do you host the music shared via the share good music feature? What on earth is going on copyright wise?

Suggestion: On your sign up page, I think you should make it simple by just asking username and password. Since you are just launching, your sign up page should be very simple. See http://anywhere.fm

What are the copyright issues you're dealing with?

Nice, easy-to-use website, but what awful music. I'll stick to the classics, thanks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Tf2lQvDz0

lol, well that's the idea. post the music you like

Blocked by my IT department already...

Ya'll may be on to something. ;)

Making your logo a bit prominent will make your brand more easily identifiable. As it is right now, I searched the page but couldn't really determine what was the logo.

I actually like the way you've done the logo - meshing it with the slogan and all. You've given it a very upstream look - the logo, like the site itself, is laid out quite unconventionally. Now, I hope this was on purpose, yes? ;D

Can I play a continuous stream of music from just the channels I follow, preferably with forward/back/pause options?

Yes, in your Podcast page. Currently it goes 3 days back, but we are thinking about expanding that or turning it into a river.

What language did you make it in?

my homegrown PHP framework

Well now I have a counterexample for when people say PHP sucks :). I think your site looks and works great and it just goes to show that great hackers can always do great things.

The advantage of writing your own framework:

  $ ab -c 5 -n 5000 http://thefeelgood.com/explore
  [...]
  Requests per second:    784.50 [#/sec] (mean)
  [...]

  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%      4
    66%      4
    75%      4
    80%      5
    90%     12
    95%     13
    98%     22
    99%     40
   100%     40 (longest request)

That's running on a 1/2GB Joyent accelerator.

Where is all of the music from?

other users

nice, I love last.fm for this exact reason. I use that site the way you guys are promoting this one. Skip a song or say you like it and eventually it learns what to recommend. I will keep my eye on this one

A volume control and/or some type of compression/limiting would be useful.

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