Tunes.io - simple, awesome daily playlist of new indie tracks | Hacker News Reader

Tunes.io - simple, awesome daily playlist of new indie tracks

tunes.io

47 pointsjamesgagan41 comments

Not necessarily 'indie' music (by label independence or genre), but the songs I know on it are fairly good, so I assume the rest are too.

At least it isn't 95% trash like Hype Machine.

thanks!

i purposefully keep the playlists small and vet each track to keep the quality high. this is the listening experience i want for myself.

hype machine is more of a firehose which makes it a bit harder to find the gems.

That seems like a lot of work for you - finding twenty tracks each day good enough to put on a playlist. I could probably do it comfortably once a week, but every day would be a struggle.

I would maybe consider a .fm TLD? For some reason I naturally associate .fm with music and .io with more tech/HN-oriented stuff.

Seeing "tunes.io" reminds me -- I'll share something cool with you all. I was using the .io domain name search tool that I made (http://iodomains.nickmcnutt.com) and I noticed that songs.io has not been taken yet! Can you believe it?

We'll see how long it takes for someone to grab it now ;)

EDIT: Holy cow that was fast! Less than 4 minutes!

woot! guess i have a name for next weekends project now ;)

You got it? Good luck with it!

(I've noticed domain-squatters are starting to grab the good .io names so I figured someone on HN would do something more productive with it!)

yeah i see bands.io is available too - unfortunately at $65 a pop, can't afford to scoop too many up!

.io domains are currently pretty useless because Google webmaster tools won't let you target a global audience. So no one apart from those who live in the Indian Ocean states will find you via Google, which is a bit of a disadvantage.

Very cool James, I usually use Spotify indie lists, but surprisingly this has a found a few cool tracks I hadn't discovered yet.

If you don't mind sharing, how does the playlist selection algorithm work?

well i've only just begun so no doubt it will change a lot. but right now it's a combination of scraping/crawling for tracks and manual curation. i actually listen to all the tracks and nuke ones that don't measure up and change the order to mix it up a bit. the goal is to have a playlist every day of some quality tracks that you can consume in a sitting and hopefully walk away with two or three you really liked.

The Tallest Man on Earth & Cat Power! Like it already :)

Dooooooooope. On Android the songs keep playing if the browser isn't active - how'd you do that?

On what basis is something "awesome"?

Are the tracks handpicked? If not, what is the overall method?

Why is there no attribution if the tracks are clearly from websites that have recommended the music?

this isn't the hype machine - its just a very simple way to enjoy some new music with no bells and whistles or distractions.

one important part of discovering new music is discovering new trusted sources. that'll build trust between you app and your users, and i'm sure the folks whose keen insights you're scraping would appreciate it.

fumar suggested guest playlists - it might be a good way to get bloggers/tastemakers to participate while keeping it simple.

Yeah, I love music and the whole art behind finding new music and enjoying something unique. I like when artists release their "influential tracks/songs." It gives me some new ground to explore.

I will use this Royksopp as an example. I liked "Melody AM", their first album. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melody_A.M. It was chill and atmospheric. When they released "Back to Mine," a compilation of their favorite tracks. I understood "Melody AM" much better. http://www.discogs.com/R%C3%B6yksopp-Back-To-Mine/master/294...

Sure, but how is the music picked?

Attribution is not a distraction.

Why is there 'Blur - Song 2'? http://www.freewebs.com/ste_thompson/Blur%20-%20Song%202.mp3

still tweaking the web crawl a bit - the occasional older song shows up now and then.

Would it be crazy if you had guest days? Perhaps a prominent person would curate a playlist. It would be a cool way to drive traffic.

it's a great idea - i like it

Base it off listening habits?

Today's playlist was great. I'll be checking this a lot.

I've listened to all 4 lists and the quality is good. Can you speak a bit about the algorithm behind this? I noticed that even though the tracks are different and clearly from different artists they still fall under a new-age-y genre. Is that the nature of the source, algorithm, or personal preference?

Stupid question - How do I pause it?

just click on the song that's playing. i plan to add keyboard controls at some point.

this was a weekend project - trying to keep it simple but any feedback is appreciated.

It would be neat if there were a way to save songs for later consumption. As a spotify user, I would love to be able to "star" it so it saves to my account, but I'm not sure if that is possible on the web

thought about that - wanted to keep it dead simple, but i might add it.

Good work mate. Nice and simple.

One suggestion is to make it easier to look up the artists/songs that you enjoy. I find it hard to select the text of the artist/song because the anchor tag fills the entire width of the screen. Perhaps a nice way to approach it might be a "Info" link somewhere, maybe just when the song is playing, which just sends the query to Google or something.

Later on, you could hook it up to some other sort of service which provides better info.

Keep up the good work.

just might do it - thanks for the suggestion!

Were you inspired by mixest.com that appeared here last week?

no - but i do like mixest. this was an idea i've had kicking around for awhile.

Have you ever used a playlist sharing site like 8tracks or songza.com?

i used to run a site called skreemr.com, and our API helped power sites like songza (long before it was a hit ios app), playlist.com and even short-lived Y-combinator graduate mixwit.com

Could I submit my band's tracks to you via email or something?

if they are actually good, shoot me an email at info at everlook dot ca

A download button on each song would be awesome!

See also: http://console.fm if you're into EDM.

Thanks :)

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