Ask HN: Feedback on Mixest, my HTML5 ironic indie Pandora
mixest.com
mixest.com
* Cool idea, I'll definitely use this if the quality of music is high.
* I agree with the comments that having my password show up in the clear is bad. It surprised me. And if I sign in, then hit "log out" before closing the tab, it makes the login form viewable with my password still there. Very bad. While you figure out another solution, can you at least add autocomplete="off" to the <input> tag so that my browser definitely won't remember it?
* This does not work on my HTC Droid Incredible. When it loads there's no song title or artist like there is when I load it on my computer. Then I can hit "Next" to make a song title appear, but it doesn't play.
* How do you get artists? I see the "upload", but how did you get the initial artists, and do you have any plans to incentivize artists to sign up? (You may not need it, a lot of indie bands just like sharing their music, especially if they're not well-known.)
The clearing of passwords after login must have slipped by our testing, thank you for pointing that out. [update: autocomplete has just been turned off]
Our initial set of music was scraped from various indie blogs, but in the future we hope to get most of our music from uploads.
We are thinking of some ways to help artists make money off their music. We may offer high-quality downloads to listeners (and pay artists when the songs are bought). This would be for artist uploads only.
Is that legal? Was it all licensed under Creative Commons (or similar) licenses that allow commercial use?
Edit: *High Quality flac or 320kbps mp3. For the audiophiles our there!
But the music was all CC licensed at least (or similar)?
It appears I could upload some obscure music to the site via the Upload tab. I assume that your team has to vet that the music I upload is 1) what i say it is and 2) that covered by a CC license.
Can you play back non-CC music you 'own' because you're streaming it (ala a radio station) rather than allowing user's download it?
I love the site, but it seems scary having something like this in today's litigious world.
Which (speaking as a musician) I think I'm okay with; if you're going to go to that much trouble to swipe it, my gut says you weren't going to be a paying customer to begin with.
EDIT: We've improved the text color contrast! Apologies to everyone who had to tilt their monitors or squint. The page should be much clearer now.
Update: You might want to rethink your overall graphical design. A general rule of thumb states that things should first look good in black & white (no gray, no colors). You shouldn't rely on colors until you get it right without them. If you then add colors, you are quite flexible, and can thus create better looking results.
Also, you then won't require too many colors for your design to work, which is especially important in your case where you rely on too many different gray tones. That seems to be the deeper cause for your trouble. It's easy to pick two good gray tones that have a good contrast to each other (i.e. black, white, gray1, gray2). When you add a third gray tone it's quite hard to pick good ones. Adding a fourth gray tone and you are lost! Well, at least that's my experience, unless you have a very good monitor and are creating a print design rather than a web design.
For now I have reduced the text color scheme to use only two shades of gray. I tried to pick two shades that have good contrast but with neither being unreadable on white.
Let me know what you think
Did you? I'm counting at least 4 gray colors, 3 of which are competing: The background, the text, the login field's text and the login field's background. Maybe there are even more different gray tones, I didn't check thoroughly.
> Did you?
Yes I did. The "4 gray colors" you mention are not part of the text color scheme.
I'm sorry that you despise the design so much. I've tried to remedy the stylesheet in response to your suggestions, but if you're going to suggest I lied, then I don't know what else to do.
Sorry, I overlooked the "text" part. That's why I was wondering.
I didn't expect that you would just fix a part of the design and ask for further advice, because, well, the further advice is obvious: Fix the rest of the color scheme, too. :-)
The text part was definitely improved, by the way. But in order to see whether the colors are good, we need to have a look at the fixed overall design. Judging such things from only a part is something that only very good artists are capable of, maybe not even those.
We'd really appreciate any feedback you have for us!
Edit: I almost forgot - the app should work on the ipad and iphone browsers - let us know if it is horribly broken!
So Jplayer works in IE7/8, as well as firefox,chrome, safari and opera? The browsers that do not support <audio> tag it falls back to flash?
Edit Got it working, but it took a lot of clicking.
I'm going to try this on the iphone. I like how the design is clearly made with that in mind, while still being perfectly usable on the desktop.
That being said, the text and icons are really hard to see. They blend into the white background too much.
*edit: The password is showing clear text. Why?
*when you can see your pass it's harder to forget
Password masking, along with asking for a password confirmation, is what everyone expects. Any affected attempt at 'simplifying' that UI without a total transformation (like no accounts at all, not shit like openid) leads directly to anger and disillusionment when their plaintext password is staring them in the face.
Use <input type=password>. Use two of them when registering, and one when logging in. It's a basic affordance, don't fuck with it.
I've been favoriting tracks but it's not clear that it has any effect on what gets played. You're saving the tracks I fave, but then I can't do anything with them except delete them — which should absolutely not use the same heart icon you use for creation. I clicked it thinking it would play that track again, and POOF.
I also liked the ajax signup. I was very afraid of the song being killed.
I have to say, I non-ironically LOVE Mixest!
Edit: Slightly irked that Play and Pause are text (a minor quibble, to be sure) — Just a guess: You guys searched for the Unicode play/pause/next icons and, having realized they don’t exist, gave up on that idea for now, right?
Feature request: Last.fm scrobbling. Incredible Pandora doesn’t have this. They aren’t really direct competitors in terms of the use-cases they focus on.
Press '?' to get them to show up (just like gmail).
Also there's an easter egg but it's not konami so I don't expect anyone to find it.
Edit: Baaa! I found your nano-easter egg. :)
- <input id="password" autocomplete="off" tabindex="2" type="text">
+ <input tabindex="2" type="password">
Also, on my iPhone the <3 for favoriting a song does not show up, however it is great that the music keeps playing in the background.
But, I'm finding starting a song buggy: I have to tap pause, then tap play for it to start playing.
I'm David's friend and a dev for Mixest.
iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch's mobile Safari does not allow auto playing of music unless it's triggered from a user event (like clicking the Play button). That's why you have to click play you first load the page and when it loads the next song.
"But, I'm finding starting a song buggy: I have to tap pause, then tap play for it to start playing."
This was fixed for iPhone and iPod Touch. I forgot to include iPad into the mix!! Thanks for the bug find
This is just a suggestion and in all probability you guys must have thought about this. So I'm sorry if I am wasting your time.
Why don't you make a desktop application like last.fm that analyzes the music lying on a user's hard-drive using local resources and then uploads the info to you? I think that it may be possible for you to take a speech recognition API and modify it to recognize patterns in songs instead. Something like Pandora's music genome but automated, and then as User data builds up you can use it to predict what the user would like on your end.
Thus, this way you save server load by using the user's PC for some of that heavy lifting (i.e. analyzing their library) and analyzing the music on your server using your scheme would be a one off effort. You could make something like custom info files denoting details about a song that can be picked up when you run the app. It would be so cool to have a service like this.
P.S. - Thanks to you guys I am now in love with Yael Naim.
Also, a search feature for me to find Yael Naim on mixest would be nice too :).
Otherwise, so far so good. Like the simplicity. Question: Is the only thing that 'More Obscure' does is to suppress songs you've heard before or don't want to hear again? The words imply a little more.
Only complaint is the registration password field needs to be obscured, instead of plaintext. Always disconcerting to type my password and actually see it, even in the privacy of my home PC.
The algorithm is not plainly random. It factors in how many times people have clicked more obscure for a particular artist!
tldr; When you click More Obscure, the song won't play again for you. The entire artist will play less for everyone.
I'd be careful where you're pulling the music from. Maybe look into other sources for getting tracks. I made an application (http://www.pitchforked.com) that scraped Pitchfork for best new music albums/artists and then grabbed tracks from 8tracks.com. They have a (fairly) easy to use api that you could take a look at.
Design-wise I would just like to see the box with the controls and I'm ready to look further below for the "about" and "team" things. The bottom part seems a little crowded right now.
In FF3, at least, there's a tooltip that explains what it means.
Also, could you log my last 20 played tracks, or tracks listened to in the past 24-48 hours, so that if I leave the site and come back later I don't keep hearing the same track. Listened to 3-4 songs, accidentally left the page -- returned, and then got a repeat straight away.
Would also be nice to see a history of tracks, but Last.FM integration would solve that neatly.
edit: and a back button please, tracks can be slowed to load (pre-load the next track?) and sometimes I click next as I think it's stalled, but with hindsight it hasn't and misses the track.
This means it will be tough for us to use amazon affiliate links for example. We are determined! We may even revenue share with artists, who knows.
EDIT: I see. I should hover more often.
-Disable keyboard navigation while registering/logging in (I'm in Opera, so it could just be that)
Otherwise this is really great! I like the minimalism.
edit: oh, and when I bookmark it, I have to manually delete the song name from the title.
For artist uploads we plan to have links to their personal sites (artist upload not yet implemented). Glad you like it :)
I read some more The algorithm is social crowd filtered as opposed to individually tuned. That's pretty interesting.
I can enjoy the simplicity of the design and interface, but at this level why not go all app since there's no network effects to leverage with a web interface?
If you're going to have a heart icon, you might as well make pause and next icons too. Or use a word instead of the heart.
Too many different font sizes. The signup form needs a little love. Maybe a little space between the fields?
Good-looking, overall, and works very well in Chrome.
Apart from that, I really like it. I love the minimalism, and again, seriously impressed with the player.
Hopefully we can find a better solution in the future.
Nice music so far, though. And I like the minimalist interface too.
How do you curate content?
Are you planning on releasing a desktop application?
Also:
1. Username / password fields are a bit confusing 2. Do let the users know that registering won't pause / stop the music 3. Icons Icons Icons!
Otherwise, nice job :)
there IS one thing it does which isn't advertised: we actually use the "More Obscure" click data in our algorithm to select which song plays next. So by clicking More Obscure you're helping us fine tune our library so that everyone only hears more obscure music =]
We'll definitely improve on communicating that aspect of it.
I dont know how your algorithm works, but it doesnt seem like it would be collecting accurate data if i click "more obscure" for music i just "dont like" (this might be just be part of the cute irony of the site though) .. anyhow - good idea and execution.
The logotype is very tightly letterspaced. Some letters overlap. Maybe try a different font face to try than Voluptua.
One problem we encountered with development was Firefox's HTML5 <audio> not supporting MP3, so we have to use a flash player as a fallback for FF.
Hopefully we'll have a better solution for this in the future :)
Edit: This page has more info about HTML5 <audio> support: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/
http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/#4
(not saying you need a license, just pointing out that you might need to check)
Ironic does not mean sarcastic.