mixturtle.com
Thanks Louis
However, is this really a viable business? I assume you intend it to be, based upon your description of it being a startup, but please correct me if I'm mistaken. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'm going to have to piss on your parade a little bit.
I have considered developing something similar to this in the past, but I've always stopped myself - simply because if it becomes any sort of success and is seen to be either (i) taking in revenues or (ii) encouraging others to develop similar services then the RIAA will give the slightest of gestures.. a wince of the lip perhaps.. to direct a battalion of lawyers to march upon your place of business and annihilate it with a bombardment of 4,000lb bombs stuffed with subpoenas and the internal organs from children and puppies.
Although many (including myself) argue that what you're doing is probably legal, it is not really open and shut - the RIAA would argue that you're encouraging and cooperating in the acts of copyright infringement. It's going to cost you a fortune to defend yourself.. and even if you manage to generate enough revenue to successfully defend yourself once, they will keep coming after you time and time again, from many different angles.
If the CoS can sue the IRS into submitting to its demands for tax exemption then the RIAA can shut down your little operation. The law can be cruel if you can't afford it.
If anybody else (with legal training) can enlighten me then I'd love to have my doubts assuaged.
I'd like to see a single global licensing body with a harmonised and simplified model covering every component; record labels, publishers, performers, writers, download rights, artwork, etc. There could be ways for them to support small broadcasters - by providing access to a large catalogue of digital music, waiving fees in exchange for delivering ads, etc. From this we'd see some really innovative services bubbling up to the top.
However, I still stand behind what I said - if you want to turn a service like mixturtle into a viable business then you have to play their game, which is very difficult. I know it makes me unpopular, but it's just a reality we have to live with (for now).
I had discussions with PPL and MCPS-PRS here in the UK a long time ago - their model is pretty complex - and if I wanted to have users in other countries then I'd need to get licensed with their representative bodies too. Not to mention the issue of download rights and artwork - all that has to be negotiated directly with the copyright holders. I'd wanted to build an ad-based model, but in the end I couldn't see any alternative to subscriptions, so I gave up - I couldn't afford the £10,000 advance fee.
While I expect the load time after typing will be better as you work on scaling (and work out the bugs), I still think you'd be a lot better off with a little text explaining why I should even type something in and hit 'music search'. Will I get to play music? Will I get to download music? Will I find the cheapest prices for buying music? Who knows. Just my 2 cents.
In which case, very impressive. I'm particularly impressed that it even finds mashups, and the interface (apart from the difficulty I had with getting it to play) is very nice.
I hope you've thought through the legal issues. It could really use a FAQ with answers to questions like "So where the hell is all this music coming from?"
I've found a couple of tracks where the time (in green on the right as it plays) was given as "NaN:NaN". That's probably not a desired behaviour. (fwiw the track was "Thunderbirds Are Coming Out" by TISM)
Other than that, I love it.
edit: I'm not against requiring Javascript for those parts of your website that absolutely, positively require it, but everything that can work without JS should gracefully degrade.
What am I not getting?
I think it's better to express as much as you can in a more "constrained" language like HTML or CSS because it's more like data than code, so it offers less opportunities to make a big mess of spaghetti code and having obscure interactions in the code. It's easier to reason about. HTML and CSS, being declarative, are much easier and cleaner to deal with than JS (it's more WYSIWYG).
So I guess what I'm saying is, coding in a style that avoids JS as much as possible is beneficial, and that style facilitates graceful degradation. Conversely, keeping an eye on graceful degradation will facilitate a better style.
I'm partly kidding. I might use that design style under some circumstances. I disagree that it's the right way to do things. There are many ways to do things. I think people want a "right" way because they want to feel like they've got stuff figured out. (This is especially common in our world because software is complex and there's a lot of uncertainty around how to do it well.)
As it happens, the app I'm currently working on is as far away from this design style as you can get. We do almost everything in JS, even things that could easily be done in HTML and CSS. Our way of carving things up relies heavily on expressing everything in a single language, and the Turing-completeness of said language is an advantage not a disadvantage. It's a solution I'm fond of because it neatly combines high-level abstraction at the source level with some stringent performance requirements in the browser. It will also be fun to watch the purists turn green when they see it.
Edit: we do almost everything in generated JS. Might be relevant.
great execution, but where's the differentiation with Songza, Seeqpod, Streamzy, et. al?
Most of these apps just do a search on Youtube and play the audio portion of videos. Only prob is that audio quality is not so great but on my laptop speakers I can't even tell the difference so all is good.
I like MixTurtle. It's a nice app! Good job louislouis! Add a queue/playlist and I'll use it as a default music search app.
(also the differentiation is that songza's more usable. but yeah.)
It's great instant gratification to play songs on the search results page, but I can't then access the source. You don't give anything back to the music sources, so if you they find about you (like when you get big), they'll fight you.
Is this legal? Great application, but I can't help but feel that the RIAA will crush you if they find you.
edit: Another problem: since you are getting the music from remote sources, they can stick in HTTP authentication headers. I got hit with a few of those. Not sure if there is a practical technical solution to this though.
The auto source-finding works way better than songza's trial-and-error approach.
It's a lot like Songza, except I like yours better. The white background is much superior to red, also your fonts are easier to read.
It also works very fast and have had good luck with finding good songs.
I like the ability to create playlists.
Occasionally the search would slow down on me.
Great job.
EDIT: Oh wow, just figured out you can save playlists. Very cool.
Created an account and the playlist I saved there. Cool stuff.
Heh, nice touch with it saying "Welcome" in the search box when I login.
I would be a bit sad using your site a lot because I use right-click frequently to go back/open-in-new-tab, etc. But your service is cool enough that I'd live with it, surely.
Be careful with the music industry-- you may want to make it clearer where the source is coming from somehow so you don't land yourself in hot water.
The few songs I tried don't work on the iPhone, but I wouldn't have expected them to. If you made an iPhone app like this, I'd definitely buy it, but I imagine a lot are youtube/flash/etc.
That was also totally not self-explanatory to a non-registered user, but it did keep the playlist selection after signing up which is good.
For the results, it would be cool to see the album and year, or if it's live a 'Live @ Foo Stadium' in the album spot and the year still shown.
Also wasn't 100% clear on how to play the track, and the 'Try next source' should look like a link, not like any other text.
Otherwise, pretty cool. Got it playin' in the background as I type :)
* Export playlist in standard format for external players.
* Need a way to share playlists with friends (sharethis.com or addthis.com?).
* Post playlist onto other sites (Facebook app for example).
* A way for artists to add themselves to the search.
* Continue playing current song in iframe while I'm searching for others (see thesixtyone.com for example).
Good luck!
The really impressive part of this is "mixturtle". I remember it and its easy to type. You've got time to improve the interface. The name is very clever: WIN on branding.
1. There's no indication of what the service does — "The Music Search Engine" is written too small and in a horrible font.
2. After entering my favourite artist and waiting nearly 1 minute there's still nothing happening. MAKE IT FASTER.
3. The font in the footer also looks horrible (Mac user).
4. I _hate_ it when someone changes the default right-click menu.
Two things that would have made my first 5 minutes better: 1. Giant play button 2. Giant playlist link, or playlist always visible in a column, or something.
Have you considered hooking into a service to pull more thorough album information so stuff could be organized a bit better than just a list of songs?
I'm really enjoying this. Thanks.
When I right-click near the right edge of the browser window, the playlist pops up off-screen and hidden, creating scrollbars. Novices won't get this at all, esp. since it's not the interface people are used to.
but major FAIL in usage terms.. * I start saving out a playlist - then realise there's nowhere to play it. * Normally I'd leave, but I figured I'd sign up. * Signup worked fine - and then I clicked on My Playlists * And I'd lost my playlist!
Love the design though.
When you click [+] it would make sense for it to change to a [-] in case I want to remove it (right-clicking is not obvious). The ability to pause a song and change the volume would also be nice.
You should add some kind of visual tutorial (but keep it simple) at the top of the page so new visitors know what to do.
In my opinion this is something that Wordpress does especially well: http://wordpress.com/features/
This is much better than Baidu's MP3 search. You should run this in China and make some serious cash.
I considered using amazon for scaling but the article below this one says amazon is down, hehe.
You should really leave up your old site in parallel with the new one while you're moving it, I'd say go for a period of 7 days just to be on the safe side.
Hope this helps your needs.
Awesome app though. It looks like a great starting point.
am I doing something wrong?
wondering how long before someone else copies this idea and takes it mainstream... also the elephant in the room, DRM.
I also hate having my right-click menu hijacked. Please re-think that...
...i write the songs...i write the songs.
I'm some competition...lol
I would recommend Linode for hosting/scaling. you need controls, SEO advice, legal statement - have a read of this: http://thenextweb.org/2008/01/30/the-music-wars-continue-war...
Good luck with the app, it looks great.