Show HN: Find new music with your friends | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find new music with your friends

flock.fm

25 pointssnikolic16 comments

Is it really the best idea to auto-play music? It feels like a web design cardinal sin.

Normally I would definately agree with you, but in this case I think it's OK since that's the whole point of the website, I think?

thanks for the comment -

i'm the ui/ux designer on the project, so if a cardinal sin has been committed, it's mine to pay for. snikolic makes all the magic happen on the backend.

normally i would totally agree with you - but the whole point of this site is to listen to music - and it's been paramount to us throughout the project to engage our users right off the bat. it's pretty easy to change tracks or stop playback if you don't like what you're listening to - but part of the fun is hearing things you may not have before. we haven't received a whole lot of negative feedback from our current users about this aspect of the design, but if that starts to change, we're totally open to revising the way things work.

By negative feedback do you mean people emailing you, or any automated metrics you're using? Are you guys doing some sort of A/B testing on this?

I find it terribly annoying when I open multiple tabs and one of them starts playing anything and I have to find which one is the culprit. And when this happens I usually leave the site immediately. IMO it would work better without the autoplay by default, allowing it to be turned on using a very visible play button at the right side of the list or something like that.

By the way, nice project, I love the idea. I once used a site called muxtape[1], and all I hope is that you guys don't have the same fate they had.

[1] http://muxtape.com/story

So far most of our feedback is users emailing us - which has its limitations, but we've got a pretty active and vocal base right now. I'd love to do A/B testing in the future, but we're limited by resources right now. It's been more important to roll out new features than do intense refinement.

I can definitely empathize with the annoyance of having to play musical tabs.. I'm going to be giving this aspect some serious thought in the coming weeks.

Great link to the muxtape story - thank you for that.

I'm confused by where this music is coming from. After digging into the about page, I finally understood that people are uploading music but it wasn't readily apparent when I first arrived. For me, music discovery has a lot to do with discovering where the music comes from.

Great job on the visual design. :)

thanks! it's come a long way since the first iteration. it's been a real challenge balancing what's fun and sexy with what's easiest to use..

i'd appreciate any suggestions...

I should add that we're beginning work on a new system for uploading tracks (or just pasting URLS to audio files or SoundCloud). That should make it much easier to share, and much more clear where the content comes from. It'll feel something like Twitter's "What's happening?" or Facebook's "What's on your mind?" sharing boxes.

We just got anxious to "launch" (if you can call a Show HN post a launch) and get some feedback before pushing too much further.

A music sharing box sounds great.

Congratulations on launching (even if it's a post to HN).

Thanks! :-)

Any feedback appreciated! This is definitely a work in progress.

I have a lot of music enthusiasts for friends, and we're constantly overwhelming each other with word-of-mouth music and band recommendations. I decided to build something that felt like my Twitter timeline, but for the music my friends were listening to and recommending to one another.

It's been a private site for close friends, but we recently decided to open it to the public and submit it to the EchoNest's Social Music Competition (http://developer.echonest.com/devcontest/).

Thanks for checking us out! We're excited to hear what people think. :-)

How do "cool points" work? Also, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to search for specific artists or tracks.

Otherwise, I like the idea and had some fun discovering new artists.

Think of cool points as HN karma. You get points if things are hearted after you heart them (double if you were the original person to share them).

Search will come soon...that's another beast. :-)

Glad you found some good music! That's what we're aiming for.

I was able to get some pretty good results using the custom stream feature (by artist, by genre), but yeah you're right it's not the same as a full featured search.

Aren't http://Console.fm doing this with genres and other features? What does this do that's different? Are the playlists based upon anything?

Think of the playlists as your Twitter timeline or Facebook news stream. They are chronological lists of what other people are listening to.

If you login and make an account, you can follow other users and find your friends, and the playlists will be lists of what they're hearting and listening to.

If you're not logged in, the feeds are just lists of popular music and activity from all users on the site. Maybe this is confusing/misleading for new users, and doesn't make it clear that the site is about your friends' activity and music recommendations?

I might be wrong, but my understanding is that console.fm is recommending music to you (by genre) based on the editor's choices and what the general public is hearting. We are showing you a chronological list of what your friends are hearting. We think your friends' tastes and discoveries are way more interesting than music curated by an anonymous editor, or worse, the general public.

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