Ask HN: Trying to innovate in online music. What do you think of it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Trying to innovate in online music. What do you think of it?

20 pointsnico_weezic12 comments

Hi,

A few weeks ago we launched the first beta for a new music app: http://weezic.com.

"Weezic is your place to play classical music. Print your sheet music, grab your instrument and hit play to be accompanied by the whole orchestra."

After a few weeks of user feedback, we decided it was time for a reshuffle/redesign of the whole app.

We launched this Beta2.0 this week. We really love the output. That's why we really need to be challenged.

Developer, Entrepreneur, Investor, Designer, Musician, whoever you are, it would be really great if you could take a few seconds to tell us what you think of our product!

Thank you very much in advance ! Nico for the Weezic Team

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weezic.com/en/download-free-sheet-music,mp3-accompaniment/mozart,k-191-k6-186e,bassoon-concerto,1:allegro-:43156:-bassoon

Those are some crazy urls. Looks like the site is trying to stuff them full of keywords, but seems overboard to me.

Thanks for the feedback.

I agree the urls are not the slickest part of the app.

But I think this is also linked to the amount of content we have on the site (already 60K+ urls) and the fact that we've tried to build unique descriptive urls that describe the exact content of the page:

"download free sheet music, mp3 accompaniments" is what you can do/find on the page

"mozart K191..." is the title of the work/movement on which you are landing, with the instrument for which the ressources are available.

Hey guys congrats for the v2, seems like you killed some features and redesign the whole site. Very nice improvements !

I know well Nico and Gregory and they're very smart people with no previous experience in programming (at all), you should check out their stuff.

Here's a clickable link by the way : http://weezic.com

No previous experience in programming? Wow!

Wow? More like a scary nightmare. No concept of OOP, DRY, etc.

I went to press on "add accompaniment" and it said that content is not ready yet. Why not source accompaniments from the user, then users can vote up or down accompaniments based on their quality? Users then have incentive to give you free content, the quality is managed and they have a reason to practice and get better.

I think it is a great idea BTW.

Thanks for sharing the idea.

Actually user generated accompaniments along with more advanced social features are things we plan to develop in the future.

Why we do not do it now then ?

Because we want to build serious tools to ensure the quality and structure of the content.

We want the musician to be able to play the exact work he/she is looking for in seconds: 1 click to find the work, 1 click to print the score, 1 click to launch the full orchestra and start playing.

It is a real challenge to provide this kind of experience with user-generated content (just imagine the number of user-generated recordings needed to build a full orchestra on a given movement, then you need to mix them, ensure they have the same tonality, tempo, etc.).

That's the first reason for which we don't make it available right now.

The second reason is that we provide customizable accompaniments (you can change the tempo and tonality of the orchestra to suit your needs). Again, making it available with user-generated content needs advanced music recognition algorithms.

We are already working on this and it will be part of the offer in the medium term.

We have already included some social features for sharing recordings though: on a given movement, musicians can upload their own interpretation and share it with others. Musicians can listen to each others' interpretations and give comments and quality ratings.

We totally agree this is just a start ...

Really nice overall design, although I had not checked the previous version before. Not a musician, but sounds really cool to be able to read the score and setup my backing track. Not sure how on-demand works: will the asked mp3 be available for everyone once produced? Will I have to pay for each on-demand mp3? Cheers!

Thank you very much for your feedback

Concerning "on-demand", this is how it works: It is a system for us to prioritize the mp3 accompaniments production and it is 100% free.

When you find a work where the sheet music is available but for which we don't have the accompaniments ready yet, you can upvote this work by clicking the "thumb up" button.

We produce the most upvoted works first. When we have pushed the accompaniment online, you receive an email.

Of course, once the accompaniments has been produced, we make it available for every weezician.

http://weezic.com/fr/telecharger-partitions-gratuites,accomp...

This is a direct link to a sepcific work with sheet music and mp3 accompaniments, for those who want to go directly to the core product:

I like the idea. Too bad it doesn't work on my iPad. It's hard enough carrying a cello around on the subway, so I'd prefer not to carry a whole laptop.

Thanks for the feedback

Actually the website should work on the ipad for everything except the sheet music display: that means if you want to play the full orchestra accompaniment on your iphone or ipad, you should be able to do it.

The music scores display uses the Scribd API. Scribd is currently switching from flash to html5. The full app should be 100% available on the ipad in the next few weeks / months.

Of course, we are also planning on developing a more specific version for easier navigation on mobile devices.

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