Show HN: What's New? Music - an enterprise coder's first ever website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: What's New? Music - an enterprise coder's first ever website

whatsnewmusic.com

Full details of how someone who knew almost nothing about web development managed to piece this thing together: http://lifebeyondfife.com/98-what%27s-new-music.html

This side project though nothing revolutionary has been a bit of an obsession and labour of love for most of this year. I would just like to thank the HN community because, whether or not I read any of your blog posts, links or comments, coming here and getting motivation and mental stimulation has really dragged me up and kept me going. Cheers.

Just realised, the comments section is broken for that link: http://lifebeyondfife.com/98-whats-new-music.html

Neat! This is one my oft-mentioned longtime broken use cases when talking to friends about where technology is failing me. With all the "genius" services that recommend new music to me I still find it infuriating that there's software that knows how often I listen to the last Neko Case record, but won't dependably tell me when a new one comes out!

Also, don't be discouraged by comments w/ links to other services. That's not an indication this is a solved problem, it's validation that it's a problem worth solving... I think that's much more valuable than taking the only bite at an apple that may or may not be worth eating.

I always take critism constructively, regardless of how it's presented. Comments like this help from getting me down though, thanks.

I second this - I built one of the competing services (shameless plug: http://beathound.com), and it seems like every day I find a new one (or a new one gets announced - like yours!).

I gave this a shot, and it's pretty cool - but it seems like some of the javascript is a bit superfluous, and I was confused by the interface. On this page: http://d.pr/i/e0hN - why are there no thumbnails? I was expecting that box to have a picture inside it (and I was expecting clicking it to take me somewhere).

On the New Music! page, I expected clicking on the album boxes (not just the thumbnails) to load up the albums for me to take a look at. It took me a second to figure out I needed to click on the thumbnails - and having to wait for something to load (Ajax, I'm guessing?) was a bit strange. I was expecting that click to be near instantaneous.

I'm sure the slow bits are just because you're getting hammered today - cool service, and good luck!

I currently use http://www.albumreminder.com/ for this. It imports your artists from last.fm or itunes, and provides you with an RSS feed and/or email notifications of new artist releases.

I wish I'd known about this a year ago ;)

For those interested in a non-signup-for-something solution, I've been tracking album releases for a long time with http://www.metacritic.com/browse/albums/release-date/new-rel... (I believe there is an RSS feed, but I don't use it).

There is also the New Releases tab on Last.fm if you already use that.

This page seems really light on data - do you know how they decide which artists/albums get listed?

I'm sure it's correlated to artists/albums that get featured in major review publications, since Metacritic is about aggregating the results of those reviews.

Tried but it didn't seem to work. I'm using Chrome, and I typed in Atmosphere. It took me to another page asking me to enter the artist name again. After 3 tries it finally showed an empty box for "Atmosphere", with a very slow resizing animation. Nothing ever loaded inside the box for "Atmosphere" (by the size of the box I'm assuming it would show an album cover?), and no data ever displayed.

The first tab is for your username, the second is where you add the artists you want to follow (that's where you add Atmosphere), the third is where the recent releases are shown.

A UI fail though, is my fail. Possibly more work required.

Had a hard time finding artists with "common word" names, such as "copyright" for instance. And when it did find the accurate artist, the songs where much older than what I would have expected. Though the idea is great, because I'm tired of checking each artist manually or on SoundCloud to know what's coming. Again, great idea.

Thanks. I knew I had some issues with data (artists and albums) so that's going to be a future development area if this takes off.

So anyone can add bands to anyone else's list? And remove them? What's to stop me adding my band to everyone's list?

Also it can only find 3 albums for Slayer, none of which were released this millennium...

Other than that this is a great idea and nice looking website.

The FAQ addresses some of these points. If you keep your username sufficiently unique and secret then no-one can edit your list. I wanted a really low barrier to entry for trying out the site i.e. no email addresses or login via a social media service.

The service shows you albums from the last 5 years but that could also include re-releases (which might explain the Slayer weirdness).

Thanks for trying it out and the compliments.

It's certainly worth a try, but don't you think finding an unguessable username is more of an entry barrier than the usual username/password combo?

You are right, it links to what looks like 2009 re-releases for those 3 albums, but it still doesn't have their 2009 actual release...

That's ok, keep up the good work, will be even better when you integrate last.fm!

An image upload site I know of used the same approach to 'login' and I quite liked it - I suppose the ideal configuration would be to give the user a choice. I had to nail down on feature creep at some point or I was never going to ship anything.

I'll look into the missing album though, edge cases like that are handy to know about for data quality.

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