Turntable.fm is back from the dead – and now there are two | Hacker News Reader

Turntable.fm is back from the dead – and now there are two

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162 pointsjbredeche35 comments

Even more interesting is what the turntable.fm site said back in January: https://web.archive.org/web/20210118082936/https://turntable...

tl;dr Lots of startup drama

lol, cute.

Something similar happened to MyEtherWallet splintering to MyCrypto. I recently had some telegram moderators split up and argue about which one of them I should be paying. I don't care who babysits my channels lol.

I guess the hilarious thing is that nobody really cares. Just figure it out.

Turntable.fm is the original founder who hired the entire team, got investors, built out the office space, etc. etc. It's literally the same code from the old site revived.

Turntable.org/"TT.FM" is an ex-employee who left before TT even got its moment in the sun, trying to recreate the experience from scratch to take advantage of a lapsed trademark & profit from peoples' nostalgia.

I don't want it to be about the drama, I'd rather just celebrate the return of the real thing - Turntable.fm - and it's cool to see them taking the "high road" response of relaunching and being better than the knockoff rather than suing/leaking details to press/twitter cancellation/etc. But some people do care - and that's the truth of it.

sounds like a TurntableClassic brewing, what is "real"

I would have assumed you're Joseph by the name and timing but judging by his... 'inflated' linkedin profile there's no way he'd talk ill of himself on HN.

Just had a several-hour-long session with complete strangers in a turntable (classic) room and I'm happy to report the old vibe and communal feel is exactly the same as it was left. It was a real treat.

Pebbles [1] was a JavaScript library written by Joe Perla.

It was the first time I’d seen a pjax like library and was as fascinated with it as I was turntable.fm.

[1] https://github.com/jperla/pebbles

The article mentions it briefly, but I've found a ton of new music through JQBX[0]. If you have a Spotify Premium account and like Turntable.fm it's definitely worth checking out.

[0] https://www.jqbx.fm/

What’s the business model? Free app without updated privacy details raises a flag for me.

Since the music comes from Spotify I suspect the cost of running this is dramatically lower than the old Turntable was.

I just spent an hour in JQBX, my first experience. I haven't had so much fun on the internet in a long, long time. How will I get any work done now that I know?

Wow, this really brings me back. Found so many great songs/albums.

A fun story. A friend and I created a chrome extension called Turntaste [1] that would help suggest what to play based on what was previously played and help avoid songs to play. Basically, we used everyone who used the chrome extension to scrape the play history and stats. I was hoping to apply some cool ML... well cool for 2011 ... as I was doing my PhD in ML but ended up just using some simpler statistics based approaches. My favorite room was something like “Trending Indie - No Mumford & Sons”.

It was also used to generate a few cool playlist like a trending indie Spotify playlist [2]. It’s a bit frozen in time since it stopped working whenever the site went down.

[1] https://turntablefmfans.wordpress.com/tag/turntaste/ [2] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/63h132rkg3oNhirWbJqGWZ?si=...

I think there's a really basic human itch that TT.FM scratches: namely that, for the vast majority of human history, experiencing music has a social/collective experience. It's really remarkably recent that it's even been possible for each individual person to be listening to a different song.

I recently thought of TT.FM again looking at all these music rooms in Clubhouse, which are really a much less-good experience, but I expect they exist for the same reasons.

Our old mashupfm room is back in action, fun to see so many familiar faces I hadn't seen in years! https://turntable.fm/mashupfm

What's the password?

it's the name of a place where you might have gotten alcohol during prohibition. where you could 'talk without challenge'

So happy Turntable is back.

    solarwinds123

Even better is that tomorrow is Friday, and that room gets down on Friday (for better or for worse).

Guess we should turn off mashup.fm and redirect to here ay?

I sent you a DM on twitter, hit me back ;)

I have fond memories of Turntable. I opened a Turntable tab on our reception computer, which let me control the music playing in the office from my desk. Was a huge distraction at work, but super fun!

At the time, Turntable was special because it let you listen to any music, approximately on-demand, for free. Now that YouTube, Apple, and Spotify all have popular alternatives, I wonder how Turntable will adapt. Would be awesome if you could bring-your-own streaming account, and using Turntable for playlists and social.

I always thought this would be a killer feature of Spotify. They already have music licenses sorted and they have social connections already baked in. A turntable-like feature could be little different from a collaborative playlist.

Maybe they'd be cautious because a feature like this could become a way to manipulate Spotify's sensitive algorithms.

I have fond memories discovering lots of new music thanks to my colleagues on turntable.fm around 2012/2013 and I was sad when it shut down.

More recently I discovered the Spotify "Party" mode which works similar to how I used turntable.fm. You can start a party, invite people so they can add to the queue and people can choose if they also want to listen on their device or just be silent participants.

Great news! I loved turntable. My office had a room, and we traded off DJ'ing. There were times when we had a few hundred people tuned in.

A lot of nostalgia for me. Early in my career I frequented turntable with my all night coding sessions. Was really disappointed to see it shutdown.

Blast from the past. I loved turntable.fm and glad it's making a come back.

Comes at an interesting point in time: plug.dj was shut down just last month [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/plugdj/status/1359210486798114819

I am in doubt. How smart is it to duplicate a site, an experience from a previous decade? Why not taking it to the next decade as www.BeatSense.com did?

Makes me maybe want to revive Sleep.fm - The Social Alarm Clock... still think its a good idea.. communicating thru the drudgery of our morning alarm tone(s) with something fun & nice ... yet about 100 or so followed and none stuck.

Social music fans might also like https://tunemeet.com/, where you can chat with people who are listening to the same song right now

I wonder if my greasemonkey plugin is still working...

https://github.com/cballou/Turntable.FM-Squared

Great to see it come back, Hopefully they can have a successful business model this time, although I'm intrigued how they can do this without a fee or being run by Spotify or Apple etc.

Does turntable.fm actually make money or have a business model?

Has it been that long? I was a big fan of hanging out and playing a few tunes.

Looking forward to this.

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