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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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