Show HN: Beatnik – Streaming Music Sharing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Beatnik – Streaming Music Sharing

beatnikapp.com

50 pointsnick4149625 comments

This is a "FINALLY!" app for me; something that I've talked about for years among friends, former Rdio colleagues, etc.

The soundcloud resolution is hit-or-miss, and I would be interested to see youtube in there, but the "auto-redirect" option is solid; if you managed to figure out a "cookie-dependent embed", where the auto-redirect setting also decides which service's player to embed in Twitter or Discourse, this would be magical.

Yeah Soundcloud has been tough, a lot of things aren't available via the API so I'm trying to scrape their site. I'm hoping to improve Soundcloud support soon.

That's a good idea, I'll investigate some sort of embedding strategy that would support that!

Another thought here, perhaps more urgent than the rest: bandcamp or label site links where available, so that you can also promote buying and supporting artists. E.g. https://www.beatnikapp.com/music/514 should also link to https://bigbigbusiness.bandcamp.com/album/the-beast-you-are

I had the exact same response. FINALLY!

One if those things where I always knew eventually someone would make it, and I'm grateful.

I thought the same thing. Any plans for a similar feature with the iOS share sheet?

e.g. Share this Apple Music song -> Beatnik -> send to friend with Spotify

Mobile is definitely on the roadmap!

Reminds me of the service that Tomahawk Music Player used to offer. [0] The rationale is, your friends don't have the same streaming service as you have, but you want to share a track. Solution: Generate a track URL that would map to any of the streaming services.

[0] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk

The name triggered memories of the Beatnik music player from a couple of decades ago which was created with the promise of high quality wavetable synthesis at a time when cheap sounding General MIDI was common - where you could bundle your own samples with control if I recall right.

Sigh!

Where is the modern day Napster for music streaming?

More than a modern-day Napster, I'd love to see a modern day AudioGalaxy as it was initially conceived. Genres and sub-genres linked organically and visually. You could explore for hours and hours and hours and find new music to try.

Alternately, I'd love to be able to tweak the parameters of Soundcloud's recommendation engine, so that it was less like "You listed to 3 songs like this last week... here's 25 more songs very similar to those."

I know they acqui-hired Paul Lamere (of Infinite Jukebox and Boil the Frog fame), I'd love to be able to get automagic "everything-in-between" for a variety of songs from my recent past. My tastes trend broader than they do deep, though, so I reckon I'm an outlier.

Music discovery has always been a hard problem, but I think AG back in the day had it mostly solved.

(Edit: fixed the spelling of Paul's name.)

The piracy people were saying forever that the music industry just needs to offer their music in a comparable form and people won't need to use stuff like Napster. It's interesting to see it working so well, with Spotify's growth charts are straight upward.

But considering all the P2P tech I'm sure someone could create an open-source Spotify replacement if they did it right.

Help me understand what I am missing here. The majority of my friends use Spotify, which already has a "share" feature to drop a song I want them to check out to the FB Messenger app for example.

If that's the case for you, I don't think you'll get much utility out of Beatnik. It's intended for people whose friends don't all use the same service. Mobile support is also not quite at the place I'd like it to be, but it's definitely on the roadmap!

Thanks Nick!

This is interesting. Although an individual song is fairly easy to find. Any plans for playlists?

(for a second I saw the title and thought it was a grooveshark like service, those were fun days)

Playlists are definitely on the roadmap, along with adding more services (Youtube Music, Pandora, etc.).

Would definitely use this if it supported YT/YTM.

I use YT/YTM (I have GPM subscription but have been trying to transition to the YTM ecosystem because believe they'll be migrating GPM to YTM at some point and figure it will be less painful if I do as much as possible in YTM), but most of my peers use Spotify, so if I want to share a song I'm listening to in YTM, I have to open Spotify and search for the song or album and grab the Spotify link, which is a pain in the ass.

Realistically though, how is grabbing the YTM link (once you support it), and then inputting it into you app/website, to get a different platform link, any faster than my current process? Unless there is some kind of plugin to your app in the various music clients (which I doubt would be allowed) ?

Great, but please, add an ATOM feed!

I will add this to the roadmap. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks so much! :-) Ideally, one could state in the URI, how much results one wants back.

Nice app, congratulations on launching! Any plans on sharing the data on MusicBrainz or other similar services?

Thank you!

I've been meaning to look into MusicBrainz, I definitely intend to do some integration with them.

What does "streaming" mean here?

Streaming in the context of music streaming services such as Spotify.

Ah okay, it's a reference to the idea that streaming music services exist, not that you've implemented any type of streaming in your app. Cool enough though.

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