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Ask HN: Advice on my application (iCue)

5 pointsalyx6 comments

One day when I was listening to music from a recorded radio show I realized that I had no way of knowing what the individual songs were that were playing. I'm a big trance music listener so I regularly download and listen to A State of Trance, Global DJ Broadcast etc. All these mixes come as single file mp3s usually over 2 hours long. So whenever I hear a good song I have to go look up the track list and guess what I'm listening to.

I decided to remedy this for myself. I mostly use iTunes on my Mac to listen to these sets. So I wrote a Mac OSX cocoa application that takes advantage of CUE Sheets which are usually released with single-file mp3 sets. My application hooks into iTunes and displays Growl notifications when a new song inside a set starts playing. You can even skip between songs, inside the giant mp3. I find it quite useful and I haven't found anything at all that is functionally similar.

Anyway to my question.

At the moment I have released the application as freeware and submitted it to Apple downloads. The response has been great, a lot of people are downloading it and it has climbed to the top 20 (#7) most downloaded applications in the iTunes section.

I was wondering how easy it would be to monetize the application/website. Have any of you accomplished something similar? Is it doable? I realize that I would need a richer feature set before I can charge for the application, I'm just trying to see how far I can take this project.

I currently have a single adsense banner on the website but obviously nobody clicks. I'm thinking of replacing it with a donate button. Do donate buttons work?

I would appreciate any and all suggestions and comments about the application or the website.

iCue - http://icue.suprak.com

that's a clever idea. nicely done!

have you considered enabling click-to-buy for the MP3s and collecting affiliate fees? i could see many impulse buys happening that way.

That's a really great idea! Thanks!

Any suggestions perhaps as to where best to get info on click-to-buy partnerships? I guess something like iTunes music store or Amazon would work right?

I haven't accomplished anything similar, but I have a few ideas. You can always just charge people for it, but I'm not sure if this is substantial enough for people to pay money for. However, I would love to be wrong.

Another avenue is to create a service that compiles these CUE sheets for sets that don't come packaged with them. You can aggregate cue sources, or even potentially outsource identification to Amazon's Turk. If not identification outright, data entry from multiple sources.

I'm really not sure what the market is for sets, since I listen mostly to individual tracks, but hey, it's an idea.

edit: I'm curious, did you write this as a proper cocoa component, or a COM object using Carbon? Last time I looked at writing iTunes plugins, I had to use Carbon w/ COM.

I'm currently using a very neat framework called EyeTunes (http://www.liquidx.net/eyetunes/) which handles all iTunes communications.

When I was prototyping I would access iTunes information by AppleScripts.

Have you thought about contacting one of those "premier ad networks"? This would seem perfect for your app, where once in a while an advertisement is growled with a click hook to go to a URL. Twitterific does this too with The Deck. Check out:

http://decknetwork.net/ http://fusionads.net/

i have a similar experience, i'm running a free Barcode Creator software, it's the best free ever in the market.

I used adsense with it and it made $670 or so the last year, not so much but i think better than what donations can make. (I have few traffic 200 unique a day)

Charging for it can be good, the application need to look professional and priced correctly. you'll have other few things to look into, like how payment will be made, supporting your users...

I was very busy for the last while or i would make a pro version and charge for it. So my advice : Go for it!

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