Ask HN: Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
mugasha.com
mugasha.com
I actually love electronic dance music.
But.. I clicked twice, ended up on a page full of from to fill out, and just didn't have the energy to go through with it 'cuz I had no idea what the point was. So as my 4yo (who used all said energy up) would say.. I x'd it.
1. Seems to only have trance-y stuff, not the general electronic dance music (e.g. search for popular non-trance artists: Pendulum, Prodigy, or Aphex Twin). The only problem with that is the expectation from the description.
2. On my browsers (Safari, FF3), the sets search edit box isn't clickable / won't take focus. I can only search tracks and artists.
3. How does this help me? Is it just a nicer interface than Amazon's? I frequent sites like http://dnb-sets.de to listen to music. I suppose this is a compelling argument for pandora to take mixed sets into their playlist?
Now, I've closed it because I don't see a reason to use it. This is a major problem because I figure I'm probably the best consumer you can imagine for this. I love this music. I listen to it online for literally hours nearly every day. I'm very hungry to find new stuff to listen to, have it available to listen to again (I had physical media storage problems back when raves were big), and I'm happy to pay ridiculous sums for the service (e.g. i'd pay $10 just to know the name of the D&B song from 1-2 years ago with certain fight club samples#, and if I couldn't quickly find a mix with it online, maybe $25 for an mp3 of it).
If the site had a much broader range of music, and at least 100x more of it, I might use it. Even then, you'd need a compelling reason for me to stick around on your site (e.g. making it easy for me to find tracks I don't know what they are and buy them... or sucking in zillions of mixes and indexing them continuously in a way more convenient than others do).
___
# example sample, Tyler Durden: "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you." This isn't the more common tune you'll find in your quick search. Like I said, I'm serious, I want this tune.
Once again, this is exactly the kind of feedback I wanted and expected from the HN community. Cheers.
i run a little site that people go on to help identify music, called http://iden.tify.us you could try uploading it, and see if anyone knows it. there is a signup form, but if you'd rather not signup, just email the song to me and i'll post it (there is a link on the bottom of the site) sorry to threadjack, but this is the exact reason I started my site
BTW, this is site is FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!
It has a bunch of live DJ sets that you can listen to and even allows you to jump between tracks. It's for people that enjoy trance music and are tired of having to constantly find new sets.
Good job man, keep up the good work.
This issue is quite critical on acquiring new users. A good read on designing sign up form.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form-design-p...
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/08/web-form-design-p...
"Login" should be "Username" (username is used on the login form)
"Name" should be "Full Name" or dropped altogether
Log me in when I register, there's no reason to have me retype my details
It seems like the message should be something like, "Listen to full DJ sets, searchable by track."
We go through this on nearly every review. I think that instead of a day of coding, the team should sit around the table and bang out a list of reasons why people should sign up to their service right now.
This is critical: if you are launching a site, spend hours and hours and hours thinking about this. You know why you started the site, you know why you've been working on it so hard, but we are all busy playing minesweeper.
Tell us why we should spend 15 seconds checking it out.
Its the difference between gaining some traction from a YC! "review" and getting zero traction and having no clue why.
If you want to track interaction, just give everyone a cookie (or Flash cookie, nearly nobody clears those) and watch behavior by that.
[me goes to unsubscribe from electronic music podcasts in iTunes]
Now, just make it so you can continue browsing the site without interrupting the currently playing track/set. You could do that with frames, or by loading content using AJAX (that's what http://www.thesixtyone.com/ does)
The UI is nice, one thing that would help, though I'm spoiled, is how on the new playlist.com website you can browse music without interrupting your player stream.
I love this by the way. I always listen to long trance mixes while progging..
Also, I noticed that the album art was constantly flickering for me.
(I'm using FF 3.0.5 on OS X 10.5.6)
It's disappointing, since I actually want to use it :p
Tried it in Chrome and Firefox 3 so far.
Small side note: log me in right after I register! Especially if you don't require email confirmation. It's a minor one-time irritation, but any friction you can remove, especially at the beginning of a user's experience, is worth it.
according to http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn...
Edit: about 15 minutes into a set, it stopped playing with no explanation, although the time elapsed changed to NaN:NaN:NaN. Changing tracks or fiddling with the controls couldn't get it going again, but reloading the page did.
Love the concept, and I'm going to keep using it, but it seems to need a bit more QA :p
A couple of things.
1.1 The invite a friend form is broken. 1.2 Could I invite multiple friends using the same form?
2.1 Why are you searching for music like this at Amazon.com? I think you would have much better luck using beatport.com.
I just started using this right now; I'll keep you posted when I have more comments.
Thanks for creating this.
:-)
But regardless, congratulations! You got something up and running, and the custom link greeting page was a very nice touch. Please give us updates + progress reports.
Have you checked out soundcloud?
The input box has a highlight but when I click on it, I can't type anything at all.
1. Flow of the signup form. I think this was mentioned before, but the "login" field should be titled "username" since you have it on the login field to the right.
2. Can you add a lighter color to the footer? I think it may look better with three variants of the black on the page.
3. Can you direct me to a tour of what Mugasha does, rather then pointing me to text with a "Find out more" pointing me to an "About" page with copy? Give me a guided tour, show me what it is and why it's useful!
I listen to whole sets, not single tracks... why have a per-track buy button?
I do not listen to progressive house in single tracks. That doesn't even begin to make sense - progressive house is all about the progression across a set.
The input of a DJ in selecting, arranging, mixing the tracks into a set is what makes electronic music great to me. I would not buy single electronic music tracks, but I might consider paying for a subscription that would give me access to vast amounts of sets by the likes of John Digweed, Anthony Pappa, Sasha, Dave Seaman, Mirel Jarca, Nick Warren, Danny Howells, etc...
Also, worth noting, if I can't download them to my computer in a DRM-free format, those sets are absolutely worthless to me. However, I'd be very willing to pay a subscription fee (even with a - reasonably generous - limit on the number of sets that I can download. In fact, I used to subscribe (for money) to freshlymixed.com, and all they did was record and republish Digweed's kiss100 mixes and the Essential Mixes from BBC 1.
Invitation is required
Invitation has already been taken
I used the link in the original post. If you want to send me an invite, use my nick/handle at yahoo dot com. I'd also use the same nick/handle as the login name as I post here with.