Show HN: Bandhiking (Unofficial Bandcamp Radio)

Author here, if anyone's interested I'd be glad if you'd give it a try. Some preemptive answers:

> How is music selected?

Randomly from the first two pages or so of the top lists. They're scraped very gently daily, so if you listen to everything you'll get yesterday's tops, etc.

> Why no recommendation algorithm?

Piggybacking off work hosting, I only have like 2gb of storage. Preventing manipulation seems hard, and I know nothing about recommendation algorithms.

> It'll take forever to find new music listening to whole songs.

I'd like 30s samples (maybe a few seconds from different parts of the song) too, but this was easy to implement. It's just supposed to be better than manually clicking through the player on the front page. Basically you'd put it on (like the real radio) while you do other things.

That said, I typically find one or two amazing albums a month, and probably a handful of decent albums a week. After disabling a few genres locally, songs I dislike enough to skip only come on rarely.

> Is this ethical?

It's designed so you never listen to a song more than once and subsequent plays must be done through the Bandcamp site. And I think most artists would like more exposure.

> Texas isn't a country (yet)

The locations provided by Bandcamp seem to be free text, including some nonsense.

I really like this idea, good effort to make it. I do like Bandcamp, and many artists I've bought from tend to be there, so this should help me with discovering even more of what I like.

I think I've run into some weird issue maybe you can tell me what I'm doing wrong. I unchecked all the top level options. Then I went to Rock and under that I chose Post Rock only and unchecked every other item under Rock. Now when I try to go to the play section, there's nothing I just get a black box. Also when I refresh, the genres section seems to be slightly messed up.

https://i.imgur.com/mXmtDCb.png

https://i.imgur.com/BMpLL8o.png

Was I too specific?

Also I'm not clear if the top level items, whether they need to be checked or unchecked.

This is such a neat idea! I’ve been doing this manually for years… I’m surprised Bandcamp hasn’t done something like this on its own. The Bandcamp weekly show is cool, and I appreciate curation, but a simple random walk through the best sellers as “radio” is what I’ve always wanted.

Thanks!

OK here is some feedback (or is it better to use GitLab for that?)

* no one ever reads instructions :-) If user makes any changes to settings (genre, etc), I'd suggest to show an overlay saying something like "advance to the next track to apply changes"

* any chance for keyboard shortcuts? Space to pause/resume, right arrow for next.

That's all so far! Music is power.

Excited to give it a try!

It took me some time to uncheck all genres except "Ambient" :-) but now I got myself a nice background music station for programming.

Love it! Bit like Musicovery but with way better music! Will you keep developing/supporting this? I will definitely use this a lot!