Show HN: My weekend project using the Soundcloud API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My weekend project using the Soundcloud API

getworkdonemusic.com

178 pointsryanio83 comments

I'm a college student with a bit too much time this summer. Thought of this site on a plane ride a few months ago and finally decided to put it together, let me know what you think! Should be great coding music.

Do you know any other sources of coding music?

My favorite is definitely Trance Around the World http://trancearoundtheworld.com -- I actually themed the music on this site to kind of fit in a similar flow, I always feel like a productivity robot when listening to TATW

Thanks for this link - that's a great music source, reminds me of FriskyRadio

TATW is the only thing I can listen to when doing work...it just pulls you in.

The UI is HORRENDOUS though...

Love the music/idea - but jesus, kill that page with fire.

http://di.fm/

http://hybridized.org/

http://astrangelyisolatedplace.com/mix-directory/

I used to have all the mixes from hybridized.org

Gray Area and Digital Witchcraft were fantastic

http://console.fm (Disclaimer: I'm friends with the founders)

http://hypem.com

Console.fm is great. Thanks.

Looks like console.fm crashed... I got a 502 bad gateway. MOAR BACKENDS NOW!

It's fixed now, you can always try the iOS app too.

I enjoy the few tracks on http://musicforprogramming.net/ , though it's not for everyone.

I listen to the "Coding Soundtrack" playlist on Spotify by James Dennis and there's also a programming music room on turntable that I can't remember the name of.

The name of the room is also Coding Soundtrack.

http://mixture.fm

http://ex.fm

limbiq frequencies http://tunein.com/radio/Limbik-Frequencies-s2225/

http://www.trance.fm/play/progressive192.wvx

First thing that goes on when I sit down at the computer. Suits me perfectly for hacking away.

Does "gimme the next one cap'n" just advance to the next song, or is there some Pandora-type 'I hate this song, never play it' thing going on? Presumably the former but thought I'd ask.

Also, the insertion of extra text into my copy of "gimme the next one cap'n" was annoying, though I see its utility.

All of the music comes from two json objects, one is 'fast' and the other is 'faster'. Clicking "the last one was sweet" goes back a song, and "gimme the next one cap'n" goes forward a song, from whatever list you're currently playing (fast or faster).

Ryan if you'd like an internship hacking on stuff, let me know.

I'm going to see how long I can leave it running before/if I tire of it

Fantastic. If this something you could write about or open-source? I'd love to mashup a version for jazz, soul. funk, etc.

This looks great, but unfortunately it doesn't actually play for me. Soundcloud works fine for me (Chromium on Ubuntu), any reason why it wouldn't play?

not working for me under the latest Firefox either. Soundcloud itself works fine and I use it all the time.

I tried again and it started working... must have been a server issue.

No offence, but it's a bit rubbish. How this got 174 upvotes is beyond me.

Anyway, Here's my weekend project on the SC api, which we won the Amsterdam Music Hack day SC api prize with:

http://soundfluence.com

Can you explain what it is?

From what I can tell, there is a "Fast" playlist and a "Faster" playlist of music (which you've selected) to listen to when working, because the songs are upbeat I presume. So the play button plays the music, and do the Fast/Faster buttons switch between the two lists?

Or is that not it at all?

I'm assuming this is BPM, if you want something a bit harder. IMO needs an option for ambient/downtempo stuff I personally find it hard to get stuff done to dance music.

You might like somafm.com, they have some great channels including beat blender, among others. Ad free too.

Di.fm is also good for the same reason. I find I listen to Soma more though because of Groove Salad.

I totally forgot about groove salad. I'll check out di.fm .. for now I'm liking getworkdonemusic.com a lot.

If you're looking for ambient/slower tracks I would check out Ghostly Discovery: http://ghostly.com/discovery/play/ cool interface and great music.

I love this! The only missing is a mini-player theme, like this Chrome app mock-up: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9196433/news.ycombinator.com/ghostl... Clicking on the album cover would pop-up all of the album specific stuff, clicking on the (i) would give you all the "static" stuff.

I'm more a fan of rock and metal, but I dig the Fast & Faster functionality. It would be awesome to have that for a rock & metal playlist:

hard rock -> heavy metal -> thrash metal -> speed metal

And for this genre, even Hard & Harder functionality. Hells yea.

I'm surprised at how little Rock/Metal music is represented on Soundcloud. I have several songs I recorded years ago that get virtually no views on Soundcloud, most likely because they are tagged as rock/metal tracks. Seems like these bands are more content with MySpace than experimenting on Soundcloud.

Great Job. I viewed this just because I like seeing what people on HN are working on. Then 1 hour later, I realized that the music was still playing and I was in a state of flow with the work I was doing. This surprised me because I don't normally enjoy this type of music.

Definitely put "slow", "medium" categories on there. Also, maybe filter out the songs that do those jarring breakbeats since those break the state of flow.

Good stuff man, I like what I hear so far! What type of algorithms are you using to choose what to play?

Nice work! I'd love to see the addition of a volume control. With my headphones, even at the lowest volume level above mute, the music is still louder than I'd like.

This seems to be a common issue for me with a lot of the embedded music players.

Same issue for me! Unusable without volume control.

I'm not sure if you just happened to hit some good songs or what, but I like this a good deal, am using it this evening and plan on doing so in future. My tired old play lists thank you. :-)

I've used soundcloud for the past few weeks for background programming music and the main issue I had was the need to find the next artist with enough songs for the next session.

Thanks for saving me time!

Dear god; PLEASE MAKE AN ELECTROSWING version/channel.

Like one that plays through Parov Stelar, Caravan Palace etc...

This is awesome!

This is the next Pandora

Just noticed: REQUIRES a volume slider. Also a Download link.

+1 for Parov Stelar & Belleruche. Check out 8tracks for some ElectroSwing playlists.

Have a link to a good playlist?

shameless act of self promotion, but i threw this together a while back: http://8tracks.com/simba-hiiipower/swing-swing

a mix of mostly ‘mainstream’ (if there is such a thing) electro-swing tracks i like to groove to.

SICK Channel!

Where are you? Do you play out? I am in SFBay and really need to get out and see some live electroswing.

We used to dance at top of the mark in SF - I'd really like to help organize an electroswing party at that venue!

EDIT: I see you're in DC...

Email me your contact info: sstave at gmail dot com -- If I succeed in organizing an electroswing party in SF - your presence will be required.

haha, that sounds totally awesome!

and yeah I’m hoping to make it out to the SF area in the near future; would definitely be down if it works out.

A download link for each song? You can get them via a browser add-on like DownloadHelper for Firefox.

The interface is nice and I like the responsiveness of it all. Could you briefly describe the technology/infrastructure stack you used?

This is great, I've wanted something like this for a long time, wish I could upvote it a hundred times ;)

If you don't mind doing a blog post on how you found and picked all the music it would be interesting to see how this came together!

A feature to save the songs will be great. I know that I can go back to SoundCloud when clicking on a song but its a hassle so far. So how about adding a small profile? Otherwise excellent idea.

I want the ability to choose genre - Trance is ok sometimes, but I like to be able to switch it up. Should be an easy adjustment. Check the input, sanitize, pass to your javascript api call.

Might want to fix your like button. I had to click again to confirm posting to my wall (not sure if new Facebook feature or because you don't have any Facebook meta tags on the site)

What would be cool is if this hooked into your github account or similar and was able to measure what effect music actually has on productivity (assuming a causal relationship).

this music is terrible. good job in getting it done though

really ? I am liking what I am hearing.

Love it. Would love a way to play it outside of the browser. I guess I could pop it open in a Fluid window, though.

I like the idea, not so much the music though. My recommendation for getting work done music: soma.fm.

Do one for mashups similar to Kap Slap's spring break mix, and you can have my first born.

This is awesome! If you're in San Francisco (or next time you're here) I owe you a beer.

This sadly doesn't make me want to code, it makes me want to compose music. Curses!

been looking for something like this! Needs more collections and more options!

I would kill for a "no vocals" option. Trance vocals make me want to jump out of a window.

"No vocals" would be especially nice for coding.

EDIT: P.S. I've been using it all evening and I love the site. Thanks Ryan!

I think the concept is very minimalist on purpose, for something more complete, maybe you will enjoy something like 8tracks...

I like the minimalist design but I think a volume slider would be nice!

If it chose well based on existing SC favorites it could be great.

I had this same idea! Great job! I look forward to using it!

Great pickmeup for this morning, in Moscow, Russia. Thanks!

Love it. I was looking recently for music for work.

Awesome! Have my background music for the day!

Any chance of a favicon that isn't pure black?

it would be great (and probably trivially easy) if it included a button to add the song to your soundcloud faves.

Nice work. Definitely going to use this.

Btw, why does not the ex.fm plugin show?

this is great! Thank you. Have a lot of work to get done today, this is going to help :)

Where do you get the music from?

console.fm (500 Startups) is based on the same idea. Good stuff.

very nice, but need a version without Flash.

nice work!! cool weekend project to do.

Love it.

It doesn't support IE 9. Fail.

I remember when it was fashionable for "enterprises" to make IE-only sites circa 2000.

Now it's fashionable for "startups" to make sites that don't work with IE. It's every bit as short-sighted.

If you use the right DOCTYPE, IE 9 complies with standards well. It's a decent web browser, and very fast for day-to-day browsing. The only thing wrong with it is I occasionally run into sites like this run by people who discriminate against IE users.

I don't like Firefox for most browsing because it's got numerous problems that never get confronted. I don't like the browser from another web conglomerate because I don't want to share my usage data with a company that will ultimately use it to put me (and you!) out of business.

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