Googling a musician and their song brings up a new track listing UI | Hacker News Reader

Googling a musician and their song brings up a new track listing UI

google.com

45 pointsartursapek27 comments

Seems like there is also a special view for albums

This is fine, but where’s the lyrics ? I’ll argue people want to see lyrics display inline when they do a lyric search. I understand licensing will be an issue with the major labels but Google could take a bottom’s up approach. Before Myspace collapse, it was on top of the social network world. Developing software on the web for indie musicians helped Myspace get to the top. Soon majority of independent musicians and their fans were using myspace. When Myspace become a popular place for discovering music the major labels all did deals with Myspace. If Google made effective cross promotion/sales tools with lyrics search for indies, I believe the majors will follow

Searching for author, movies, television shows, music etc. brings up an interface that is scraping the data on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia could/should have done this a long time ago, trying to do anything like this on Wikipedia would take at least 1000 lines of discussion on one of the many talk pages.

Does Google have less politics than Wikipedia?

Why should Wikipedia have done this? Wikipedia is conservative because their job isn't to do much more than be a solid encyclopedia. What's great is they keep their data open so people can do what they want with it.

This looks great, but why have a special UI style for this when they already have a useful sidebar display when searching for movie directors or other famous people? : http://goo.gl/JGMQ6

Interesting. I'm amazed that anybody buys music at all anymore when it's possible to just use google as your jukebox.

Type in a song name and get back a youtube result with the complete song pretty much every time.

I buy music for the sound quality, the ability to play back on any device type (xmms2 or my sansa player), and to support the artist.

Some artists share their songs on YouTube and being able to listen first makes it much easier to pull the trigger on buying the album. But I wouldn't listen to music on YouTube in preference to buying the files (or one of those shiny disks they had in the 2000s), even if the artist is making money through YouTube monetization.

You buy music to show support if you can't make it to a concert.

You buy music because Youtube usually has horrible sound quality.

You buy music because you want to listen to your music on your iPod or preferred MP3 player.

You buy music because you want to hear your music as it's released, and not wait for someone to upload it on Youtube in 3 days.

You buy music because you have obscure songs that don't exist on Youtube.

You buy music because you'd rather have local files in case you have no Internet.

You buy music because you have a superior alternative to Youtube, as in playlist management, Replay Gain, and more.

I'm not an audiophile, but is there a significant difference in quality between an MP3 file and a 720P youtube video?

Streaming 256kps would seem fairly trivial on even a mobile connection these days.

I know I can use spotify on my phone over 3G at 192kps.

It would also just seem to be a question of "when" before somebody releases a really good music player application that just uses youtube as a backend.

No, but many, many YouTube videos that are songs (either music videos or slideshow + song) have been re-uploaded and/or re-encoded many times, so often they don't have a high quality option, or if they do you're watching a 360p re-encoded in 720p. If you've ever listened to a song on YouTube that sounded like it was being played underwater, that's what happened to it!

That is pretty cool. I very much also like the other info-box style summaries that they provide. For me there is high value in sometimes not having to navigate off of the first search results page.

Indeed, I have been enjoying DuckDuckGo's zero-click results for over a year now :)

Doesn't work for me - I was able to bring up your selection but my searches don't work, even if I substitute them into the (absurdly long) URL.

If you search for e.g. "Pink Floyd" it shows the sidebar, with a tracklist. If you then click on a song on the tracklist, it'll display the same UI as the linked one.

On the other hand, it's listing The Great Gig in the Sky as being part of the Brain Damage album, which as far as I know doesn't even exist.

It doesn't, they mean Dark Side of the Moon. It's not exactly Floyd's most obscure album...

One thing I learned at Amazon, data quality is a huge problem for any media information. It wouldn't surprise me if this specific instance was just a missing field somewhere which you could use to "fingerprint" the data source (or more correctly, one of the data sources, because aggregation is the next huge problem in media data). Often these data sources are in truly awful formats as well, with special problems when it comes to eg. Unicode names.

The popular stuff gets fixed quickly, everything else gets to rot until someone with the right mindset and interest goes and fixes it. The bet with a lot of sites that take corrections is on whether there are enough people who care to make a difference.

Not working on mobile. Google still seems works on the basis of "mobile second" when it comes to search.

Which is probably the correct decision.

That's weird. It only works when I click on the submitted URL, but not when I search for it myself.

Slightly off-topic, but since the 'UI' is in the topic, I'll bite:

Why did Google need to re-invent the scrollbar ( http://i.imgur.com/ztm93.png ), without the two squares (sorry, don't know what they're called) on the opposite sides, which you can click without having to move the mouse up/down;left/right?

What is wrong with traditional scrollbars that Google felt the need to get away from it?

Probably an aesthetic decision, but why would you have to move the mouse? No scrollwheel?

Probably because the "squares" have a very small target area and most people either use the scroll button if they're using a mouse or scroll gestures if they're using a touchpad. I'm pretty sure they have detailed information about this from the metrics that they collect from Chrome.

too bad scroll gestures on a touchpad are rather inaccurate on some laptops.

Looks like it's your browser: http://i.imgur.com/xsWgk.png (or maybe they are a/b-testing it?)

It's a Webkit thing.

I think they're just called "arrow buttons."

Unfortunately some influential sites and UI designers have lately been trying to improve on the standard scrollbar [1], often in an attempt to make them work better for very small screens and/or touchscreen devices. IMHO, their changes have mostly been steps backwards as far as traditional mousing is concerned. The scrollbar is old and highly evolved. It's not immediately obvious that it can be improved. I suspect it will be with us until we eliminate scrolling itself.

In Firefox and Opera, the arrow buttons are showing up fine for me. How are you viewing this?

[1]] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/11/...

>In Firefox and Opera, the arrow buttons are showing up fine for me. How are you viewing this?

I see it in chrome, not firefox.

Also works for authors.

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