Please review the iSound.com beta - (Pandora for new music) | Hacker News Reader

Please review the iSound.com beta - (Pandora for new music)

beta.isound.com

27 pointsbandhunt47 comments

Tried "the wombats." Artist not found. "Clutch" found results, but the first three songs were pretty painful. "Mos Def" and I'm happy.

What's behind the recommendations? Is it manual (like Pandora)?

How are you approving music? There's a reason some new music never gets heard. I'd be really interested in hearing how you solved the quality control challenge.

At some point, an artist is going to stop being "up & coming."

Why not use Open Graph and Connect for likes and logins?

I think I've been listening for about 25 minutes. I like listening to it, but visual seems pretty disconnected. I really like the way rdio is doing their playlist and controls.

Thanks for the feedback! We'll be importing a bunch more artists in the near future so "the wombats" etc will give results. The recs are more "digg like" so there's a bit of a cold-start problem with some of quality. Once we see how people are using it we'll tweak the algo. We'll be adding Connect soon and are looking into who we can leverage the FB likes but there are limitation with the callbacks.

"visual seems pretty disconnected" can you give me some more specifics. That'd be really helpful!

this could be tough to translate in written form. the visual design of the playback screen (http://beta.isound.com/#/artists?search=outkast) is confusing and unbalanced.

maybe it's the repetitive use of the play button (search, similar songs). maybe it's each song being in its own container. maybe it's the lack of visual emphasis on any one area (the shared white between the header, player, and playlist).

ultimately, i like this (http://grab.by/5f07) over this (http://grab.by/5f04). sorry i can't be more specific.

It's a nice idea, but there seems to be a fatal flaw:

The first three entries that I tried all came back with terrible tracks.

In comparison, The Sixty One seems to have found a nice approach in limiting the tracks that you first encounter so that you're likely to have a good first impression and explore further. The stuff on their front-page tends to be really good stuff even if it often misses my genre sweet-spot.

You might consider something along those lines with curated tracks being the first encounter to make sure you get things off on the right foot.

Yeah, definitely agree. We'll be working very hard on that over the coming months.

Hey bandhunt, what's your email? HN profiles only show the text in the big about box.

dj < a t > isound . com

I used to go to thesixtyone and found a ton of great music that way, but when they changed their site I couldn't navigate it at all it was/is completely unintuitive and annoying compared to the old interface. I can't find any of the artists I haven't heard of easily unless they are top scorers and it is maddening that such a good site was destroyed for design.

Edit: whoever downvoted me please show me the error in my ways I really would like to use the site again but just can't because it seems like only those artists who everyone thinks is wonderful are easily found while the true gems that you looked for on the site are now impossible to find.

http://old.thesixtyone.com/

Thank you

I think attacking your competition reflects poorly on you. I'd recommend coming up with something better on your About page than "Myspace sucks; it really sucks."

I was trying to incite some passion. Following what Jeff Atwood says about "picking an enemy" (eg stackoverflow's enemy is experts-exchange). Maybe it's in bad taste to list that in the about though.

I've found that often the best advice is to take whatever Jeff Atwood says and do the complete opposite.

hahaha. I tend to enjoy his stuff. but noted

Dig it. I put in Muse, got back a few Muse songs and some decent recommendations with similar sound. Clear simple UI, very fast on Chromium 6 on linux. Looks great so far.

However, I created an account and got the following email confirmation:

Hi listener [my plaintext password] body ....

I assume that's an artifact of pre-beta testing, but time to fix that asap. Nobody likes their password getting emailed in plaintext.

Thanks!! Yes, that will go away and they definitely aren't being stored in plain text.

I like that it works natively in safari on my iPhone. That's a plus. One suggestion for content, as far as the rap scene goes, I would have thought to see mixtapes released by the rapper when I type something like lil Wayne. Instead I get other remixes from other artists sampling lil waynes beats...

Another HNer was working on something like this for rap: http://www.hiphopgoblin.com/

It is apparently not being worked on anymore but was focusing on mixtapes and such.

Edit: Found the project open-sourced on GitHub: http://github.com/zackster/hip-hop-goblin

A couple of my friends are working on a new and much improved version of it - there should be an ask HN thread about it in the next month.

I'm excited for them to release it :)

Hi, signed up just to let you know that the track progress meter has some issues:

1) Because the total length of the song increases as it is streamed the proportion of it that has been played can go down as it is played, causing the progress bar to go backwards, or jitter backwards and forwards. You must know the length of the song before streaming it, so this should be easy to fix. I hope the explanation made sense.

2) Sometimes clicks on the progress bar are missed. Maybe less than half the time it would skip ahead in the song, other times it just did nothing. EDIT: Also when it does jump it's often not to where I've clicked.

This is in Fiefox 3.6.6, Flash Player version returns WIN 10,1,53,64

HTH

Thank you!! These are on the list of fixes.

It's pretty clean and easy to find new artists. I like that. However, I didn't really like the "Enter a favorite artist to hear up & coming music like them". Maybe it's because I am not native english speaker but I wasn't sure what it meant. So, I was kind of surprised to click on the artist I wanted but to hear a song from a different artist. Now, I know it looks kind of stupid because that's what the site is supposed to do.. but maybe you could make that sentence a little bit clearer. "Enter an artist you like, and we'll show you other artists you'll like." or something like that. (That's my 2 cents, good job)

Thanks! Yeah, I think the wording is a little clumsy (even for native speakers). Haven't nailed down those details yet.

I have to use Firefox 2.x due to a weak PC. I was impressed that the site came up fast and worked without any bugs. The only fix it needs under 2.x is the Next button is obscured by something in the bottom right corner. I tried difficult matches: ABBA, Enya, Morrissey, the Cranberries. I didn't like any of the matches. I'm not really the target audience for this site, though. I don't play music while working. Otherwise, I liked the look of it. Good luck.

Thanks! We'll check that out in FF 2

I get the following errors in Safari 5 when it tries to go to the next track:

    TypeError: Result of expression '(d||f||i.body)' [null] is not an object.

    560/javascripts/jplayer.js?1277763781:398INDEX_SIZE_ERR: DOM Exception 1: Index or size was negative, or greater than the allowed value.

That 560 is the error count for that second error at the time I copied the text. It was increasing quite rapidly.

I'll look into this. thanks!

Sound quality is great, found some interesting music. Recommendations are a bit of a crapshoot, but I don't necessarily mind that.

Why no thumbs down option? Might also be cool to see popular tracks or searches.

edit - An indication of how many tracks are in your playlist in the top nav would be nice, and would also let people know that clicking "Like" adds a song to the playlist. Multiple playlists would also be useful.

I'm uploading a few tracks right now as Able Danger.

Do you have a filesize limit? I tried to upload a track that was a little over 10 MB, and it just disappeared. EDIT: I saw that you have to pay for that...

Also, you need to add categories for Nerdcore, Chiptune, IDM, Glitch and maybe a generic Electronica. Techno and Trance don't really cover that.

Yeah, we need to error out the file size better. Also, we'll be adding genre tagging in the future as it's almost impossible to keep up with every genre ;). Thanks!

http://beta.isound.com/#/artists?search=Passion+Pit

This search comes up with confusing results (what are the words with underscores for?) and clicking a link results in a "not found" error.

Sadly we don't have Passion Pit in the index yet :(. I know, very bad of us. They and most every other band will be imported soon.

Thanks, I was just confused by the results, since I didn't know exactly what I was looking at.

Yeah, the search result layout kind of sucks right now...

Tried Silversun Pickups and just get directed back to the initial search page. No error messages, no "artist not found", just the front page.

Really should have some kind of "artist not found" message, that's just confusing UI

Aren't you going to be sued, like everyone else that has tried this?

We have agreements with the artists and labels.

Artist upload process broken on Google Chrome.

:edit i guess sometimes it's hard to navigate in the open dialog.

Working great, added my band Awesome Party. Nice player.

Thanks!! "hard to navigate in the open dialog" can you give me some more specifics? You can email me if you'd like: dj < a t > isound.com

sometimes the open dialog would not respond to keyboard tabs/input or mouse clicks. i'm on mac osx using google chrome.

The first artist I tried (Ronald Jenkees) came back with no recommendations.

Pretty slick, and a great idea. +1.

thank you!

Have you tested in Opera?

Actually no. Most everything else. You having a lot of trouble in opera?

looks solid!

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