Show HN: my weekend project - music discovery for karmawhores | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: my weekend project - music discovery for karmawhores

songspin.fm

15 pointsjiffypop21 comments

The interface could be a little more intuitive.

It wasn't clear to me that 'spin' just meant 'get a song' ... I thought it would end up with a tracklist. And then I wasn't sure 'spin' meant 'get me a different song'.

Also, clicking on the name pauses it, even though a URL appears on my status bar. Not at all what I expected. (Though I'm glad there's a pause, because I didn't think there was one.)

Yeah the controls are not as intuitive as we hoped. We'll be adding more traditional pause/play/skip buttons so as not to confuse our users. thanks for the feedback.

Awesome, love it.

I like how it's based on genre, most other music discovery sites I know of tell you to pick an artist or song, and then they suggest others they consider similar.

But for someone new to say, dubstep (moi), it's a great way to iterate through marking ones you like.

A few thoughts/questions:

1. Where does your list of genres come from? Is that all the genres available from soundcloud? I ask because it's relatively general. For example, check out this list of subgenres of electronic music:

http://www.reddit.com/r/electronicmusic/comments/czhzq/offic...

And even that is out of date and doesn't include things like complextro (http://www.reddit.com/r/complextro).

2. Can you make it so that when you click the name of the currently playing song, it takes you to its SoundCloud homepage instead of the pure SC flash player playing that song? Would be nice to favorite it on SC and dl it if possible.

3. had another but forgot, will add it if I remember it...

Hi thanks for the ideas. We're going to add more genres - I think it will be autocomplete so that the full list will be available. For #2 we're looking at different ways to integrate further with Soundcloud, but obviously we want to keep users on our own site. ;)

Clicked "electronic" and got dubstep ಠ_ಠ

Just kidding, this site seems pretty cool :)

As a music producer, can I upload my own music? What is your source otherwise?

Also, while I am getting music and the tab title says name of the song, the page only shows your logo and a "Loading..." animation.

edit: until the end of the first song and then no song plays further. Still, cool site!

Yes the songs are sourced from Soundcloud, so if your tracks are on there and properly tagged with genre, they should appear eventually in songspin.fm

oh, neat! Good sourcing idea.

I clicked "Indie" and got dubstep... There seemed to be a very limited selection of songs, but I'd be happy to use it more if there were more songs to listen to.

there is a lot of songs, but to be honest, they aren't tagged very well in soundcloud. we were thingink of adding a feature to let people re-tag them and then storing that meta data on our end to help improve the selection.

Hi there,

You've done some nice work on the project. Since I follow most showHN posts, I think I am seeing this submission 4-5th time in last 1 and a half month with different titles. I tried to search for previous submissions but seems like they were taken down later.

Please don't get me wrong, I wish best of luck to this startup, but would you really still call it a 'weekend project'? I think not.

Yes, this has been submitted a few times. And I'm finally getting the useful feedback that I respect HN readers for. Maybe what you see as spam is what I see as persistence. But I think a lot of getting good feedback from HN is submitting at the right time with the right title so your submission doesn't die on the vine so to speak.

We did a pivot from another project called songsp.in. Songspin.fm was just built in the last few days, hence the label "weekend project"!

I use http://thesixtyone.com a lot. They have quite nice game mechanics, which are just nicely done and not annoying at all.

But of course, the main thing that keeps me on that site is good new music. I'll give your site a spin (ha!) and see how it stacks up.

Still some kinks to work out, but the idea is you can get karma for listening to a track all the way through, liking it etc. The karma system is intended to encourage finding and promoting new stuff, not just listening to the same old thing.

songs under hot section arn't loading. And channels under the home page give no response. same problem for firefox and chrome. But im intrigued by the idea. Would like to play with it

hmm strange - it's all working here, but i'll look into it! thanks.

Can you add 90s or 80s&90s as category ? I like it :)

That's an awesome idea! Adding to the top of the to-do list.

So you're just pulling tracks from genre tags on SoundCloud and then put them through a random song generator?

Yep, we're using Soundcloud - right now it seems to be the best solution for a 3rd party music API. We add some filters to our selection criteria to weed out some of the longer mixes etc. We think it's a cool way to access the Soundcloud catalog and let users find stuff they maybe wouldn't have otherwise.

Is this not just console.fm?

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