Show HN: We made this 'Pandora for Music Videos', let me know what you think. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We made this 'Pandora for Music Videos', let me know what you think.

viddyjam.com

37 pointsiloveyouocean29 comments

Looks neat.

Couple suggestions:

1. Add some suggested artists that let me click and immediately start watching/listening. You want to demonstrate the value asap, so anything you can do to reduce thinking will help. I spent awhile thinking, came up with "Arcade Fire", then found that there were no results. If this wasn't a post on HN, I would've bounced there.

2. Keyboard shortcuts. But this is obvious, and I'm sure you'll get around to it.

3. The on-hover controls are ok, but there should be some indication that they exist before I mouse-over. You could also use some basic icons to make the controls easier to parse (especially arrows for next and prev).

4. As it stands now, there's no way to surf videos easily. After clicking "next", I have to move my mouse out of the central area, then move it back over to click "next" again. The goal of a site like this is to facilitate brainless and easy surfing, so you should try to reduce as many friction points as possible.

Seems like a great idea but I agree strongly with point 1 here. As retarded as it is it took me 20s just to remember Lady Gaga's name.

Why not just start playing a video with the volume down, a one-click unmute button and then have five or six more popular ones for someone to chose down the side.

This.

And the fourth video related to Radiohead was a 2 hour and 24 minute video of the 4th meeting of the Bipartisan Fiscal Commission in the USA... a la http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSXhjjsRcCQ&feature=playe...

the selection algorithm is going to be pretty hard here. i had a different problem, somehow getting stuck in a loop of two videos, back and forth forever. new Jam!

Thanks so much for the feedback.

1) I personally like the 'Google search box' method more than suggested artists, but I will definitely implement it and see what happens. Also, no results for 'Arcade Fire'? Bummer, I get plenty?

2)On their way :)

3)The controls are indeed a bit rough, improvements coming.

4) Excellent point. Perhaps we will make the 'Next' and 'Alternate' buttons persistent.

I discovered another site that does exactly the same thing but with seemingly better algorithms for pulling the Last.fm data. The site: http://tv.timbormans.com/ was developed in 2007. Just not the same marketing story as viddyjam.

3) some basic icons added. good suggestion

So, I moved to the Bay Area a few months ago and have been looking for work. In my copious free time I worked on this fun little project.

There are such a huge number of great music videos and performances out there that I was completely unaware of until I started working on ViddyJam. I feel like I discover something interesting and cool every time I use it.

I liked the idea immediately when I saw the title :)

UI suggestion: Try making the Jam button bigger and slightly more button-ey (even a 1px drop shadow would help), also maybe add a » too. Would make it clearer that it's a call to action.

Like it!

However it didn't find me anything for Weezer, surprised.

When typing, it felt really laggy, lots of JavaScript going on?

When I hit Donate, it opened in the current window, killing my music! Needless to say I then hit back again to get back to the music, and didn't end up donating... ;-)

Consider adding Gigs along with Amazon and iTunes? DISCLAIMER: my day job is with GigJunkie.net, we could link your users to gig tickets and share the affiliate. If you're interested, send me an email, tim.iles@gigjunkie.net.

Good work, nice project!

The UI is a little finicky. The artist selection when a video is playing tends to appear and disappear a little too easily.

Otherwise, awesome! I'll actually make use of this!

It may be too early to complain about the recommendation system, but I think you should invest some more time on a good one.

Nope, not too early, but it says they are pulling data from last.fm, Never used last.fm, but it's seems like their system is not as good as pandora or jango.com

Can you sort for music videos as opposed to static images with audio? I attempted to tackle this problem with youvj.com (a weekend project of mine) a while ago, filtering for music video, official, etc in the description and title (as well as popularity and other factors), but never got results I was truly happy with.

YouVJ looks nice.

There are many songs that do not, and never will, have a 'real' music video. Even songs that do have official music videos are often not allowed to be embedded/streamed. [As I'm sure you know.] I chose to offer the largest amount of music, at the expense of having actual music videos for each song.

Perhaps I could implement some type of pref that could toggle between 'all music' and 'real music videos'.

Great idea! I actually found some nice video's I haven't seen in 25 years.and the recommendations are fantastic! Keyboard shortcuts obviously; arrow keys and space bar so I can remote control it from a couch, bathtub, shower or while dancing with a hmd.

Love the "lower the lights" feel when in stream.

I'd like to have a link to the specific channel (possibly the combination of artist/song?) that i'm currently listening to in the URL so I can send to a friend.

Great work!

You can use the 'Get Link' button to get a link to the current video, which will then be used to seed a channel if someone follows it.

Perhaps we can make that clearer.

Excellent! I assumed it linked to the youtube video url.

I noticed that when trying to change the artist name while watching a video that the UI disappears when the mouse stops moving, so I can't see what I'm typing in the search box.

Didn't totally pick up on my like of the artist"White Town" well.

I'm not sure what you mean. Did you attempt to 'Like' a video on Facebook and have something go wrong? What happened?

I went to the site directly and told it I like artists like White Town.

Does it not do as well with more obscure artists? It seemed to do ok with the mega-popular stuff I threw at it (metallica, lady gaga, etc), but nothing too profound.

Ahh, gotcha. Yeah, the more obscure the artist, the harder it is to find videos for their songs. So if you are looking for something really obscure, theres a good chance you wont find much.

The band Tool sounds nothing like Lovemongers, but Lovemongers is what I got when I typed Tool. could be cool if it worked consistently.

I just did a search for Nine Inch Nails and got Rickrolled.

Great idea. Didn't work on iPad.

im getting a lot of static cover art : (

Very cool app though

Autocomplete!

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