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Show HN: Launched my first app where people hum songs for others to guess

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Seems like you'd build up a great dataset for training an automated hum -> song classifier if this gains traction.

Shazam for humming. It could be huge!

This already exists [1], although I'm not sure how accurate it is.

[1]: https://www.midomi.com/

Came here to look for this. IIRC Midomi launched as an app for feature phones? (Razr-era)

Used that maybe 50+ times, it NEVER gave me anything remotely accurate.

Same here. I'm sure it would work if I already knew the song I'm humming, and could sing the lyrics, but that would defeat the purpose of the service.

I have great melody memory, terrible title and lyrics memory, and good pitch, and it has never helped me the many times I've tried to figure out what song I got in my head.

Midomi is fantastic. We made a game out of it: you'd pick a song a try to sing it to Midomi (not hum). If it guesses what you are singing, you score. Note this is for amateurs and for drinking parties :) it doesnt have a lot in the catalogue, but it has enough. Super fun :)

Shazam has that feature years ago. You could hum a tune and it'd try to find it. I don't recall it being that good.

My memory might be failing me though. There was another competitor to shazam with an orange soundcloud like logo that also has song id. It could've been that app.

Edit: It was soundhound and it supports humming https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melodis.mi...

SoundHound. I never had success with the humming feature though.

It supports it, but it doesn't work that well in my experience.

I definitely had success with soundhound. No Rain by Blind Melon was stuck in my head but I couldn't remember the band.

Hummed the riff and had it in no time.

you sing well?

I'm not the person you asked, but I can tell you that I sing very poorly, yet have gotten SoundHound to recognize songs.

I think its about doing the notes correctly, not the voice. I think it could even work with your mouth closed.

It's all about getting the direction change of subsequent notes right. Up or Down is all that matters. And the nice bit is that it doesn't matter if you transpose or if you go up too far or down too far for the next note.

You'll note that you need to define a sequence of similar notes as 'down' or 'up' to make it work.

I mean, that's what humming is.

I dont think shazam used humans, which is a cool aspect of this idea. Its just missing a market.

Soundhound also works fine with humming/singing. It isn't perfect and I have an indian accent.

I would greatly suggest letting the user try the app without making an account. I'm not sure if the app is something I like, so when the first screen I get is a login screen the odds are high that you'll lose me.

Other games often have a guest account for this with some random name, which they can then upgrade to a real profile by signing up.

Yeah I was extremely annoyed at having to create a fake account

Thanks a lot for the feedback. Guest account added on my todo list :)

My feedback: you definitely need to add tags. Because I'm quite good at, say, classic or jazz, but I suck at other styles. And I don't want to listen uselessly to 90% hummings from styles I don't know before starting to become helpful... Excellent idea, though!

Good idea! I just have to be careful with implementing something that will make it harder for people to just record a hum and send it away. But I agree that tags will make everything easier when there are more people on board.

Make it optional then. If it's not tagged it won't show up for people that filter but for anybody else it will.

Cool idea, I used to play this when I was a child.

I'm unable to download it right now, but my initial concerns are:

- How do you stop people from cheating by singing the words, or otherwise just saying the name of the song? Or, depending on the scoring system, could you not just submit silence?

- How do you deal with people screaming profanity or disturbing audio clips?

This is actually a minigame that exists within one of the four card types for the board game Cranium, but a nice mobile implementation for playing with strangers.

It's also being kickstarted as a standalone card game: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1559002049/earworm-beco...

You could ask people to flag the ones that are not humming and if a user is flagged multiple times you ban that user.

I built a report function. Not sure what more I can do to stop that. So far so good :)

Maybe limiting the game for people you know, like a list of friends on Facebook or phone list.

That feature is definitely on the list and I'll implement it soon

> just submit silence

433 by John Cage?

Careful,I think that's under copyright

For people that are interested in how I developed the app: https://medium.com/@razvanilin/challenged-myself-to-build-an...

Read the blogpost. What do you use and recommend to write React Native? Nuclide, VS Code, Vim, Atom, Intellij?

I'd recommend VS Code simply because of its great performance compared to other options (I never used Vim because of other reasons so that might be better for you) and a lot of good extensions.

I use Atom, so I definitely recommend that. You can install all sorts of plugins to help you out with different things. For example you can install an Eslint extension that will show you all the errors depending on your eslint configuration. I'm sure others have similar support, but haven't really used them.

It seems like a poor branding decision to name the app after the rather awkward domain name ("Hummi.nz"). As a mobile-first app, you aren't constrained by domain names, so you have better options.

Thanks for the feedback, this is definitely something I should consider. I guess I was inspired by musical.ly here. I also built and launched the app in a week and I didn't pay too much attention to the branding side of things

I liked the domain if it helps

When I was studying jazz we’d play a game where somebody would improvise over the chord changes to a song and you’d have to guess what song it was. That could be an in app purchase for this.

only if they outline chord tones in their solo. (ha) They should get points off for taking too many choruses or for doing Parker transcriptions. wink

Awesome, we all had this idea but here, as an app, it's just great thoughts put in action ^^

Now time to make sure the implementation suits the needs of the community :D

This pretty awesome.

On an unrelated note: Even though I type the exact name of the app, it is hard to find it on Google play. I have to type almost all the name and description to find it. The play store is so saturated.

After publishing a new app, it usually takes a couple of days to rise in Google Play search results.

But I agree about the saturation.

I suggest adding a Google login option as well since it's an android app. I don't have FB and don't want to type email/password.

I #deletefacebook'd earlier in the week. A google login option would be appreciated.

Google and Twitter are on the next release :)

It's a fun app to download... it could become huge.. great idea anyways. Good luck !

Hopefully, it will get there, thanks!

Looks like we are on the same field ;) I'm the CEO of https://www.watzatsong.com/en our mobile app is coming very soon.

hah, that's cool. I was googling to see if there's anyone doing this and couldn't find anything. Good to see there is need for this market. Maybe we can do some sort of collaboration in the future. Keep in touch!

Have you seen the married with children episode when Al is driven crazy by a song he can't name and poorly hums it?

It's uncomfortable for me to think how this is showing my age.

I can't register with my email. "There was an error with your request. Please try again."

Same.

Should be up and running now, sorry for that

Sorry for that, I was sleeping while my server was throwing errors It works perfectly now

Excellent idea and implementation, not so god naming. Might I suggest a name (.com not taken)?

Appreciate the feedback! I will take this back to the board soon and see how I can improve it. I already bought the .com domain just in case

Interesting idea.

Only if youtube add the feature of getting a humming as input and show the video of that thing.

Maybe I can automatically query youtube's API when someone guesses your hum :)

would be interesting!

Cool idea! First step to service that searches track names by humming, right? :)

Well, if you humminz will get to have a huge community it might work faster than a smart algorithm, right? :)

that's correct :)

Ah yes! It's like shazam for a song you can't get out of your head!

That;s how I came up with the idea!

What do you do if a user slightly mistypes the correct song title?

It's up for the hum 'owner' to accept the guesses. If it was me recording a hum and someone will mistype the guess, I will still accept it, but otherwise this is just in the hands of the community

I see. I misunderstood how the app worked.

Is whistling allowed? :)

That can work...as long as there are no words :)

Scorpions - Winds of Change is the first thing that came to my mind when you mentioned whistling.

how did you solve the problem with people trust? things like purposefully humming the wrong tune tune for the song title?

Hey, I know! Blockchain, right?

The way it works is that you have to hum a song and people will have to guess it. It's up to you to accept guesses by other people

What’s your monetization strategy

I have to admit, if I was choosing a new car to buy I would want the one where if I start humming it just starts playing the real song.... (with an option to easily disable of course)

I will leave it completely free for now and later on I will probably integrate ads with an option to buy the app to remove them.

ouch, we're not in 2012, the number of people that pay to remove ads won't turn your app to profit. You might rethink your strategy. Hope you've got another stream of revenue, honestly

Any plans for an iOS version?

The iOS version is all tested and working. I'm currently just waiting for my salary to kick-in to get the "affordable" developer license.

Can't login or register

There was an issue on my server which is now solved. Sorry for that

I went through all the comments. Just wanted to say thank you for being here to reply to all questions/comments opened minded on the feedback and responding with courtesy.

It is always nice to see a fellow dev being so engaged and listening.

It's my pleasure to do that. This feels great for me to finally launch something of my own and get so much great feedback from the community. I'm currently at work, but can't wait to get home hack a bit more on the app!

Any timeline for iOS port?

It will be very soon. The app is already tested on iOS, I just need the time to deal with all the Apple licenses and make a build for it. Before I launch on iOS I want to make sure the Android version is working as intended so I don't bring something broken over to iOS. You can subscribe for the news at http://hummi.nz and get notified when I launch it. (just click the iPhone button and enter your email there)

Cool

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