Lofi.co – Relax and Focus | Hacker News Reader

Lofi.co – Relax and Focus

lofi.co

302 pointsevo_9116 comments

While I think this is a really cool product with incredible art assets, I just can't see myself paying $4 monthly (or $100 once) for a number of looping videos, a spotify playlist, customizable audio effects, and a few productivity tools, most of which could be stored in the user's browser, and most of which have better, free alternatives.

As a user I'd probably feel more comfortable handing over closer to $1/mo, but of course that's very subjective and this may be worth more/less to different people.

The art is really awesome though, but the amount I find myself actually looking away from my task at hand to enjoy it just isn't enough for it to be worth another subscription. I'm not sure what the big costs are for a site like this, but I imagine something like Cloudflare could kill video/asset delivery costs, having users connect their own music accounts (or just use Youtube for curation) could kill any music costs, but that's about it.

Ya its a bit pricey but really good execution. If there was an open source version of this where you could use ur own files but this was the player or something would be dope. Cant fault someone for trying to make some money though.

Hey! This is actually a website of mine, so I appreciate the feedback. About the price, any alternative or similar products' memberships cost around double (if not more) for often less features, so I'd say the pricing is actually quite low. For the costs, I would say S3 for the assets is the biggest one, at least with the current 150-200,000 monthly users. The actual art as well is a cost since it's all original, but that can vary if say we don't add any new set for a month, which has happened only one time. Thanks again for the feedback!

Hi there, paid lofi.co member here (I joined to try it out). First off thanks for making this site. I am super into Lofi, listen to it every single day, make my own playlists, have lofi merch, etc.

As much as I love lofi, I agree with the other comments that it's hard to compete with the abundant cheap/free content out there. I'm not saying this isn't higher production quality (it definitely is) or this doesn't pull it all together better (it does). I'm saying: it's not 10x better such that I would want to pay for it. I don't think $1 vs $4 makes much of a difference - it's the jump from free to paid that's the sticking point.

I want this to succeed and I think I am your exact target market, so I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what would make this worth it. In its current form it seems to only be providing enough value to be ad supported (hopefully your revenue proves me wrong?).

Stepping back: the overall purpose of lofi IMO is to be able to concentrate and work in a chill productive environment. Some crazy ideas of things I would definitely pay for: - Maybe it's a monthly coffee subscription sent to your house and the coffee gets featured in the artwork - Maybe you can set up group study sessions and listen together. There's been some great experiments of scheduling a focus time with another person and they are highly productive - There's coffee shops in Japan where you can't leave until you finish your work. Maybe some kind of social commitment like that built into the site - Commit Action is a cool service that helps you break down tasks. Maybe some human consultation like that

All of these are pretty big investments.

Good luck!

Hey there, thank you so much for supporting the platform and also providing valuable feedback. I definitely agree on the group study sessions, as a matter of fact there's a major feature that's been in the works for months heading in that direction. Hopefully it will be ready soon after summer. The coffee idea seems pretty fun as well!

As for the price, I do agree on the jump between free and paid, but I also think that there's nothing actually similar to lofi.co around. The timer for one, even though it looks like a simple pomodoro timer, it's actually a lot more advanced than that and the only platform I know offering something slightly similar has only that as a product and charges double our monthly fee. Again it's hard to think of lowering the price when the competition is charging netflix-level monthly fees or other similar companies still higher fees for a fraction of the features.

May I ask what you mean with 'enough value to be ad supported'? I don't really like to share revenue online, but I can say the platform is profitable and has been growing steadily since launch.

By ad supported I just mean that if you aren’t creating enough value for enough people to pay, you may be able to get money from ads. But if the site is growing in revenue consistently that’s great!

Oh got it, I've actually never really considered ads because I feel like they could ruin the experience and the money they'd be making wouldn't really be worth it. MRR has been growing in the 10%-30% range MoM since launch with a pretty high margin so can't complain about that, what I'd like to improve is the conversion rate though, as I feel it could be much better considering the high amount of traffic.

I wish there were in general on-demand payment alternatives with low friction. If I go to a real cafe I also do not have a monthly subscription there but pay for what I consume. Similarly, I do not want to pay monthly Netflix subscription but I could see myself paying from time to time to get access to a movie or series I am interested in (similar to video rental).

Yeah I wouldn't pay a recurrent fee for this at all. Though I'd pay 20 bucks once-off easily. Unless they had regular new content or something. Why does everything have to be a service?

Reminds me a lot of https://lifeat.io/. No affiliation.

That's amazing, are the videos live ?

they are not. you can load and reload them to see their starting point.

free alternative: https://www.lofi.cafe/

another free alternative: https://lofi.limo/

Thank you for the shout-out! I see a bunch of folks came by to check it out :)

Hey, no problem. I found it from your Elixir posts and im loving it.

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing

I like that one. It won’t force me to sign-up

You can click the 'X' in the top right corner to skip the sign-up/login page.

I’ve been compiling a list of focus inducing songs on Deezer.

My method is to vet a random playlist by listening to it during an intense coding session. If I can make it through without getting distracted I add it to my focus playlist.

I have a subsequent vetting process where - if at any point when listening to a song on my focus playlist - a song grabs my attention I’ll remove it.

It’s grown to over 75 hours of music at this point. I can listen to it for days on shuffle without hearing anything familiar which helps keep it in the background.

https://deezer.page.link/JChycwJz7ArqGDtRA

That's great, thanks for sharing! However you will soon hit the 2000 songs limit on the playlist, if Deezer did not remove it already.

Ha! I already hit it. That’s why the playlist isn’t any longer.

You’re the first person I’ve met who knows this limit. Every time I complain about the 2k limit in my social circles, I get these weird looks like they’re saying “who’d ever need more than 2k songs?”

Why do they delete it?? Why not just stop the addition of more tracks. I'm not a customer but I'd really be pissed if a service would delete my data this way.

I guess what OP meant was that Deezer might have removed the limit, not the playlist.

Is it possible to convert this to Spotify or YouTube music?

No idea. Deezer is DRM free, has a deep catalogue, has a solid API, and provides high fidelity files. I have no use for other services. Personally I’d recommend them. As an example of a personal project I’ve built on their API: https://audile.app (a random album on every page load)

Unless you have an online service you won’t be able to keep this playlist in sync on another platform as I continue cultivating it. I do keep a backup of the playlist in the event Deezer disappears.

Fair enough. I'm pretty coupled to Spotify's ecosystem so for anyone on Spotify here's the first 200 songs: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0IcZx8V66DzI2apfnutcvq

I used a service (soundiiz) that only allows 200 songs to be converted for free.

I've currently got Soundiiz Premium - converted it to an Apple Music playlist (1810 tracks, https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/focus/pl.u-PJD9BskgpYKR ) and a Spotify playlist (1827 tracks, https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0OFXAFqVC5A5yJMp7gxDTs )

This is awesome, thank you for doing this. Have never seen soundiiz before - looks cool. Does it automatically keep these playlists in sync with Deezer as I change the original?

Looks like Soundiiz does have a "scheduled sync" option (although it only allows adding to an Apple Music playlist destination.) Although it'll eventually stop because I'm not sure I'll keep paying for premium... :)

Thanks a lot, I use mainly YT Music, can you convert the playlist to it too?

In theory, https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshYL1S1rER_eLEI1CC...

Hey man, can you generate a Youtube music playlist too ?

> My method is to vet a random playlist by listening to it during an intense coding session. If I can make it through without getting distracted I add it to my focus playlist.

Very interesting. Up until now I been thinking that I need some kind of noise or non-vocals music just to silence the other distractions to get started, once I get in a "flow state" I think music becomes white noise to me and I barely notice the music playing. Never noticed particularly that anything from any of those playlists on YouTube got distracting in between.

I too have noticed that I end up having to look for some other playlist every few days once that combination of tones starts getting familiar.

Unfortunately, Deezer isn't available globally so can't access that playlist. Thanks for sharing.

> It’s grown to over 75 hours of music at this point. I can listen to it for days on shuffle without hearing anything familiar which helps keep it in the background.

> https://deezer.page.link/JChycwJz7ArqGDtRA

Is there any way to export the list (csv, Google Sheets, etc.)?

Here it is in JSON: https://api.deezer.com/playlist/9054155762?index=0&limit=200...

The tracks are under .tracks.data[]

I've downloaded few mixes with relaxing music from YT and created a playlist in my foobar, it's simple and it doesn't require browser. I also recommend some radio streams:

https://somafm.com

http://echoesofbluemars.org/

https://plaza.one/

Somafm digitalis has been my beat since 2008ish

secret agent or die

2001 ;b

Me too! I've been listening to Digitalis on-and-off since before it was announced on the front page.

Somafm’s DEF CON channel is factually the best working music.

Thanks for this! I checked it out and it works surprisingly well for me.

My egotistical statement paid off! Glad to hear it.

Foobar?

It's a relatively minimal gui mp3 player application.

https://foobar2000.org/

As others said it's a music player, it can also play radio streams and podcasts but that requires plugin.

plaza is my go to, such a great site.

EDIT: Really enjoying Soma, thanks for the link.

Another good one is https://ambientsleepingpill.com/

Been listening to these channels most of my programming career.

https://di.fm + somafm

this network it has many sister channels including https://zenradio.com

soundcloud can be good, once it knows your preferences, but to much random stuff and volume changes happen that i switched back to di now. di has a treasure shows now for each genre which basically what i used to use SC for so im set.

hos.com get s special mention

https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/

Is my go to. The web design is slick, all tracks are downloadable mp3s, and the tracks are great background noise

I'm happy with my personally curated "Flowstate" Spotify playlist, comprised of tracks I can put on repeat for deep work sessions: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...

https://poolsuite.net is the one I use.

The retro 90s asthetic is awesome.

Ah, I loved poolsuite but then they got the NFT brainworms. Most disappointing.

Yeah their marketing and aesthetic was so refreshing, then they went mental with pool related NFT's.

They seemingly made a decent amount of success with their consumer products - they started a sun cream line and moisturisers etc. all with the same fantastic aesthetic, and not-too-serious sensibilities.

as someone who is currently subscribed to both endel AND brainfm AND has several lofi playlists on spotify, you need to work on your onboarding process.

first I had to navigate several tutorial screens and then I have to sign in just to hear music? You're going to lose a lot of signups. You need to make the music available asap so that I can see what I'm buying into. even taking the time to fill out another signup form is an investment.

I definitely did not have to sign up to listen to music. Took a few more clicks than I’d like but still was able to hear stuff within 5-10 seconds

There's an "x" in the top right on the sign-in screen that lets you bypass the sign up process and use the service logged out. I'm with you, though, that I almost closed the tab when prompted to sign in; I don't really see the need to make an account until and unless I want to be a premium user.

Some music starting to play in background would definitely be great. Btw, I just tried both endel and brainfm and both required me to sign up before i could listen to any music.

maybe something changed but back when I signed up for them both, I'd listen to the free tracks without signing up. they proved their value and I ended up signing up so I could get the whole catalog.

Don’t do that, I could see that being bad too. Unable to stop or pause is another problem. The various screens to get started just need to go away.

Hey there, I appreciate the feedback and the tutorial screens will definitely go away as soon as the landing page will be live later next month. Can I ask what you mean by unable to stop or pause?

I presume they might mean ability to play and pause with either integrated phone controls or keyboard play pause. In other words, it should be simple to pause the background music if needed. Lovely application! I’ll use it at work tomorrow.

It was a direct response to auto-playing when loading the page. I think if you did that but popped the screens you do now you pose a problem of people that load the page but don’t have the ability to pause. Imagine a work environment as an example of that.

when the 'buy premium' window with the difference between free and paid tier was up, I couldn't use the controls to pause the music. The controls should always work.

>Some music starting to play in background would definitely be great

strongly disagree. If your web page of any kind autoplays music, I'm just closing it right away.

Also it suggests to check out two Premium backgrounds that are free until... three days ago. Quite a tempting offer.

If you are into binaural beats, you can try listening to this: [link redacted]

I made it with a piece of software many years ago (seriously! It was a DOS program). It's the sound that most consistently puts me into a trance. I put it on Soundcloud to make sure I wouldn't lose it, because I have no way of recreating it and all the apps and videos I have found don't work nearly as well for me.

Sbagen, by any chance? That program was quite handy, but it does take a little elbow grease getting it to run these days. I have done it though with the help of "padsp" (ships with pulseaudio). I always loved the "-p drop" sequences it had; nice way to progressively go further and further down the rabbit hole.

Hey there, answering as this is an app of mine and I like to hear people's feedback. You don't actually need to do any sign-up or navigate the tutorials to use the website, there are both an X on the top right and a 'leave tutorial' button to go directly to the play button/mixer

I skipped the tutorial and was right into a scene with no signup?

Really? Because I ended on a scene that was unusable without signing up

There is a (very stylized) cross mark on the top right corner which you can click to get rid of the signup screen and then hit the play button for music to start playing. Clearly the process needs a few more iterations of improvement. I get why prompting signups is important but without making it less intrusive a lot of potential users will simply walk away when they already have an existing solution of productivity tools + Youtube playlists.

I don’t see it. I’m on an iPhone and I see the play controls at the bottom. When I press play I get prompted to select a scene. Oh well. Yes, I agree 100% about needing a few more iterations of improvement on the whole UX. All I could get out of this is a rain sound and a signup. That’s not a very enticing proposition.

Big fan of Endel, never went back to any playlist. The development and collaborations are amazing.

Yours is great but I love this one :)

https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

Ha! This is great, I wish I could just turn off the video and just listen to the street sounds and radio from various countries.

This is basically lofi-girl as a service.

I’ve settled on https://www.brain.fm/ for this. I really like how I can dial the music in for the desired effect. For me, it’s more convenient and effective than searching playlists.

Brain.fm was a good deal when lifetime memebrships were available. It’s not worth the current monthly fee.

I lucked out and did the lifetime membership. It mostly stays unused but it's fun to have sometimes.

Yeah, I wish I got it too. I was pretty great to drown out distractions without being distracting itself. I hesitate to confirm or deny whether it actually made me more focused or relaxed.

Just type in something you feel in YouTube and you get that kind of music. Relaxed coding music, tavern programming music, melodic slow dungeon music, dark church chill music. Celtic modern electronic lounge music, wizard fantasy medevil dubstep relaxed music, sad jungle music, back to 90s synthwave modern music, truckers traffic jam music. You name it. I am amazed how many genres there are out there. I listen it all the time.

Is there anyone who's making this type of music? How to get started?

There are some good tutorials on YouTube. If you use iOS, GarageBand is free and up to the task.

I really expected there to be something like this, but for VR, by now (although I haven't been keeping as close attention lately, since so much of the market has gotten locked down).

The problem with VR right now is almost no support for background tasks so if you release this as an app it will be all you can do. There are complicated workaround and edge cases but for the most part locked down vendor OS will need to advance a little to make this work. That said there was a custom Spotify release in 2019 for Magic Leap [1]

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-11-13-spotify-magic-leap-ar-ap...

Everything I click on results in a pop-up directing me to go premium, including links that don't have that little icon indicating it's only available for premium subscribers.

nice vibes. Monetization kinda in your face, but I dig the site.

looks great. wish I could break it free from the browser though. a browser tab can't really be the backdrop to my work, and clicking into a browser tab just to view the visualization is an extra distraction -- defeating the purpose. Doesn't seem realistic, but I wish I could set this to be my desktop background without loosing the interactivity.

if you use chrome, you can "install" it and it will look like an application then. i do this with spotify

fwiw, I take sites like this and use chrome's option to make them stand-alone apps. (three dots -> more tools -> create shortcut -> open as window)

does anyone know if you could take a window and make it always be in the background -- the reverse of "always on top", say "always on bottom"? doesn't seem to be an option on Mac or in Gnome that I can tell but maybe there is someway to gain that functionality.

Hey, thank you for the feedback. I absolutely get what you're saying, a solution can be 'installing' the website as an app (you should get the prompt in the browser to do so). Plan for the future is to have both a desktop and mobile app though, which would definitely be the best solution

Curiously, what really works for me relaxation-wise are real background sounds. For example, a 5 hours long recording of a single rain. These artificial generators doesn't give me the same vibes.

Same. In fact, lofi seems to really disrupt my focus. There are times where a beat/kick is so loud it becomes disruptive. I also like background sounds and true ambient music.

You might like (or already know about) https://coffitivity.com/

Same. I have rainymood running all day at work. I love it. Makes me miss home where it rained weekly.

Thank you for additionally giving back 1% of your subscription earnings to mental health organizations!

Hey there, owner of the website here. Glad someone noticed that! It's not something we really like to advertise, but I also know there should be more info about it. For anyone interested, the organization we have donated to since launch is the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, I recommend checking them out!

Anyone knows a good radio for dub techno? Something like CMYK's uploads on YouTube.

I just get some animation of some dude walking, nothing happens.

Sounds relaxing

I can only focus so long on it though.

Been using for the last few hours, pretty good!

> billed yearly

ouch, was hoping there was a monthly.

This is great

I tried to use the site but couldn’t without registering for premium.

If there any free soundscapes to try this out or is it all behind a paywall?

Reminds me of lofi.cafe, same concept but without creepy login screens and "onboarding processes".

The best onboarding is to let your users use the product without all the pop ups, Next buttons and registrations for spam.

Yep. Three taps in and I'm already hitting "premium" screens. No thanks.

There seems to be an option to x out of the signup, on a laptop. But it looks like there are lots of complaints from phone users? (or I assume as much, since you say tap rather than click).

Yeah was on mobile

Very sorry if the login screen looks creepy ahah, definitely got to improve that side. The tutorial will go away as soon as the landing page is live later next month. I do know lofi.cafe as it's from a fellow italian developer, but I think the concept is quite different. Thanks for the feedback!

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