Synctify – Sync a music drop with a time in the real world | Hacker News Reader

Synctify – Sync a music drop with a time in the real world

synctify.app

66 pointslukew328 comments

I really don’t understand the confusion in this thread; it was immediately apparent to me what the purpose of this tool was after reading the headline, the UI elements are sensible and intuitive, it’s use case is unique and sound (no pun intended). Great job OP, a pretty cool project to have under one’s own belt.

I've read the website and all the comments and I'm still totally lost. Guess that means I'm not the target audience? To me a "music drop" is when someone releases a highly anticipated new song.

that's "Dropping a new track"; a "drop" in a song is the part where the music stops and then comes back with more energy/whatever.

example (tongue in cheek) https://youtu.be/CJzfTZlEl40?t=38 drop is at 0:41-0:43

Thanks, I learned a new thing!

Lifelong musician - I thought from the title that it meant dropping a track on spotify at a specific release time. (I imagined, like, putting out one song from a new album at midnight every night). Most people I know would call this a "break", as in the build-up to where the beat breaks. Probably a generational thing.

Also lifelong musician and knew immediately what it meant. "The drop" is fundamentally different but not unrelated to a break - indeed typically it's after a break.

("break" and "breakbeat" are also overloaded terms, particularly in electronic music)

The drop within a song is what happens after a build up.

The (beat) "drop" is genre term for a buildup of tension, sharp pause, and then suddenly resuming at greater intensity/tempo. Usually associated with EDM/dubstep.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db5f-A-vSyw (drop at 0:45 seconds in the video, thought the countdown to New years that takes up most of the stage should make that obvious anyway)....

Thought it's certainly not a new thing - plenty of classical music has similar moments, e.g. the 3rd movement to Beethoven's 5th symphony: https://youtu.be/xAQFJ1YpFaI?t=279 ("drop" at 5:05 when the horns blast their way in...)

Hello, I created Synctify to help you sync the drop in a song with the start of the new year or any other noteworthy or casual event. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Hi. I like the concept but could not figure out what this app does before I read your comment. I am familiar with the concept of a "drop" in modern music but didn't immediately associate it with the feature. An example or a more detailed description could be helpful.

Thanks, that's helpful. I'll probably call it a moment instead of a drop in future descriptions.

Honestly, drop is the better word. I read the title with drop and understood what it meant, but I wouldn’t have if you called it moment.

Contextually I like the word "drop" more too. Saying that, I might want to sync a moment in time with a particular Yann Tiersen's piano phrase that's hardly a drop, more like a favorite bit that I want to hear right when the clock strikes midnight.

Really cool idea. One second is a long time. A drop being synchronized within a 0.5 second of an event can be a bit of a miss.

Would it be possible to make this more precise?

Seems to be broken atm - I tried a few songs and it fails to load them. The Spotify API responds with a 403 "User not registered in the Developer Dashboard"

https://i.imgur.com/bDdl0yz.png

I don’t understand what the times mean exactly, e.g.

   0:34
   ———-
   2:16

The timestamp when the "drop" or target moment occurs is at 0:34. The duration of the song is 2:16

Cool to see someone created this finally, have been manually calculating start times for syncing a drop for a long time. Hope you get it back online soon!

I was expecting a visualization of a drop of water that syncs up with the music by loading two instances of the same song. One to play, the other do analyze.

Doesn't seem to be working for me. Kind of just a blank screen when I paste in a link.

Do you have javascript disabled?

Nope. Using latest chrome. Click activate and it doesn’t do anything. No picture where there should be one and an empty drop down.

Bizarre. The dropdown should show a list of devices Spotify is open on, and should throw an error if no devices found but activate is clicked. Does the rest of the metadata load right? Maybe the link you pasted wasn't what was expected. Your link has to come from clicking Share->Copy Song Link on Spotify.

I ran into the same issue out of nowhere with my Spotify app a few months ago- after hitting around 300 users. Apparently, Spotify has a limit [0] on their API quota for auth (around 25 users or so in theory), but don't feature the limit very prominently in their documentation.

Have you requested and obtained a quota extension? I gave up on my app altogether after a couple of weeks and seeing in their documentation "[this] review process can take up to six weeks."

0. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/concepts...

Oh no, I didn't know about this. It looks like Spotify hasn't authorized anybody but me and I would have to add every user I want to add individually. I don't think that anybody has been able to use this app. If anybody really wants to try it out you can DM me on X https://twitter.com/thelukew3 or follow me there and I'll post an update when it's fixed. Maybe I'll relaunch next year. Thanks for the help.

Don't hold your breath, despite the usual fanfare their review process is as poorly implemented as the rest of their API/developer support https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Impo...

i thought this was going to sync lyrics containing a specific time to that time in real life

Very cool

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