Hacker News Reader

So to boil down your comments into easy points:

  1. kill the first-load chrome download bar (I don't want it until I know I like the service) or make it non-blocking
  2. use something like pushState (or location hash) to have all URLs always be referencing something useful (like the current song)
  3. a canonical share source (solved by point 2) rather than *just* social-network buttons
  4. add a "recently listened" thing of some sort

A few other ideas:

  5. add a "listening with XXX others" count (specific to artist/track), for social proof of a different kind :)
  6. add an "up next" with the option to skip
  7. channel combinations (might be possible already? but the ability to listen to post-rock + ambient-electro would be cool, might confuse the UX)
  8. nicer design.. it's ok at the moment but definite room for improvement.

2 cents provided, back to work!

The same points, formatted so the text actually appears on the screen:

1. kill the first-load chrome download bar (I don't want it until I know I like the service) or make it non-blocking

2. use something like pushState (or location hash) to have all URLs always be referencing something useful (like the current song)

3. a canonical share source (solved by point 2) rather than just social-network buttons

4. add a "recently listened" thing of some sort

5. add a "listening with XXX others" count (specific to artist/track), for social proof of a different kind :)

6. add an "up next" with the option to skip

7. channel combinations (might be possible already? but the ability to listen to post-rock + ambient-electro would be cool, might confuse the UX)

8. nicer design.. it's ok at the moment but definite room for improvement.

I agree with all of these points, and would like there to be a replay button.

Great feedback, almost all of which is in the works.

I agree with your feedback -- although I always close those pop-ups as soon as they appear, it shouldn't cover a crucial part of the UI like that.

I didn't get the sound level thing -- I know it's possible to batch-normalize sound files though, shouldn't be a massive thing for them to fix.

Agree with your other points. Hope the OP takes them on board, it's a site with massive potential!

Yes, after listening to a few more it was only one song that was especially quiet and I must have left my speakers turned up last night so didn't notice. It just so happened it was the first song I listened to.

It can be a problem with self-made indie music sometimes, not everyone realizes they should do a final mastering step that's pretty essential. A friend's band for example did the same thing and you end up just taking it off your rotation as it's irritating to have the sound level suddenly change on shuffle.

    find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3gain -r -p -c \{} \;

on unix will set the volume level for all mp3s below the current directory so that they sound similar. it sets metadata, so it doesn't change the signal itself (ie it's reversible).

as for the site linked - if you're going to have a blog about your business, have an easy-to-find link to the business on the same page (i couldn't find it and ended up editing the url).

It's slightly more complicated than that -- depending on how the track was compressed or limited you end up having to make a decision to apply that light compression/limiting (possibly altering how a musician wanted their track to be heard) or 'compromise' by lowering the volume of all tracks to give enough headroom for the especially quiet ones to be scaled up. The more 'uniform' you want your tracks to be, the more aggressive compression you have to apply.

But that is exactly how both Replay Gain and EBU R128 behave.

Initial set of conditions:

  - we want music to have uniform volume
  - we want louder parts be slightly louder
  - we want quieter parts be slightly quieter

In the end, over compressed songs are penalized. Songs that are recorded too quiet are pumped up. But it is a per song setting, leaving song to song progression on same level.

Here is a discussion on comparing how Replay Gain and EBU R128 algorithms http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=8642...

> In the end, over compressed songs are penalized.

OK, that's what I'm saying though. You can attach 'loudness scores' to songs all you want, but eventually you have to pump it through a fixed-range DAC and have to make some tradeoffs :).

I just clicked "click to listen" button.

Thanks, Matt. We have some technical reasons why we can't do that with the URL, or don't anyway. But if you want to share music in that manner, just click the tweet button and steal the URL from there.

Sorry about the volume issue. It happens so rarely that focusing on EQ hasn't been a priority.

I had the same issue with chrome. If I didn't know you were an HNer, I would have closed the window without giving it the effort. I wonder what your stats look like for first time visitors on chrome vs the other browsers?

Oh man. I tried it out for a little bit but gave up when I absolutely could not find any way to skip a track I didn't like. Never occurred to me that it might be hidden behind the popup.

So funny how the HN crowd has such a hard time with this when regular users seem to be doing just fine. ;)

I'm curious, how do you know that?

Because we haven't received a single complaint from users or seen any decline in the way people listen to or skip music since implementing that feature, and like 4 people here today complained about it. Not to mention, just generally there is a ton of new Feedbackify today complaining about things clearly for the sake of it.

Edit: One of the complaints is so golden that it's almost a blog post in itself, and the person said they came from HN.

You seem to have missed the point, if you're an existing user you know the control is there.

If you're a new user you don't.

I was wondering if there might be some sort of sampling bias at work. It sounds like it still might be, although you mostly have those bases covered. Specifically, people who already use the service know where the feature is, so they know what they need to get rid of to find it. Perhaps more importantly, they know that the feature exists, so they'll be more persistant in finding it. Not having/finding a skip feature is probably a dealbreaker (it certainly was for me, until I came back and saw this), so it would just manifest as some new people not sticking it out for very long.

But maybe that's not it. My other theory is that the less adept a computer user is, the less they're able to ignore popups like that. I've noticed that many less experienced computer users have an almost pathological need to get rid of any sort of dialog box, message, popup window, etc. More advanced users tend to just ignore anything that isn't directly interfering.

I think it's the latter, and there is definitely a possibility that it's a behavior in usage that makes the difference. But I don't think we should rule out that the HN crowd just likes to nitpick. ;)

I definitely couldn't find the skip control after quite a bit of looking. Maybe I just had a dumb moment, or it's due to how I approach these things, but mine, at least, wasn't due to nitpicking! Can't speak for anybody else, of course.