Ask HN: please review my webapp: metracks.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: please review my webapp: metracks.com

metracks.com

19 pointsjanedoe23 comments

Do you really need age, gender and country to sign up? Remove that signup form and replace it with a "Try" button that lets people use the service. Attach the registration code to the onunload method of the user's "home" page, popup a dialog asking them to register to save their settings (requiring only login-name, password and email "in case they forget their password", for now.) Ask more personal questions to help them improve their experience or find others like them. You can even get home address once you are big enough and start launching parties or local events.

That's a really good solution. Many sites don't need user accounts at all, and often a cookie would suffice. Showing the user what they gain from an account before requiring one is a smart move.

I started reading "Currently in Beta, we require..." first, and then I started reading the features, and then I was thinking "wait, what does this thing do?" and then I finally found "meTracks is an innovative web based audio player...". I think the reason I didn't find the description first is because it's at the top right of its area. I recommend putting it at the top left, swapping its place with the meTracks logo.

I remember learning the word "bespoke" for the first time a couple of years ago. My point is, that's not a common word. Maybe use the word "customized" instead.

It makes more sense to use "e.g." than "i.e." here: "Your answer must be in textual format (i.e. three not 3)."

In general, style guides advise spelling out low numbers, so replace: "All it takes...3 simple steps"

with: "All it takes...three simple steps"

Or: "All it takes is three simple steps"

Remove the unnecessary words here: "For the purpose of beta testing we will be restricting every account to 200MB"

Change it to: "For the purpose of beta testing we restrict accounts to 200MB"

Remove the space before the asterisk footnote mark in: "Limitless audio *"

Remove the space before the question mark in: "What do you get ?"

Add an apostrophe to "its" in: "so give it a go, its FREE!"

Add an apostrophe in "Amazons" in: "Unlimited space is available through Amazons S3 service."

Remove the space after the footnote mark, and add a full stop to the end of: "++ based on track size of 4MB and length of 3 minutes"

Capitalize the "S" in "Use my s3 account"

This is a service I would use. I was turned off from signing up though, because:

- why do you want all that info? I usually don't even give my full name to a site until it has earned my trust. - what does Bespoke audio player mean? I'm guessing it's the flash audio player, but that means nothing to me. - I can't tell if it's free forever, or free only while in beta. For this sort of thing I would rather not use it if it's ad supported, since the ads are likely to be untargeted and visually intrusive. But it is the type of thing I would be willing to pay (<$10/mo) for. - The text could be improved. I see a few small grammar errors and some sentences that could be worded better.

I was in a hurry when I wrote this so I didn't realize the formatting didn't work:

- why do you want all that info? I usually don't even give my full name to a site until it has earned my trust.

- what does Bespoke audio player mean? I'm guessing it's the flash audio player, but that means nothing to me.

- I can't tell if it's free forever, or free only while in beta. For this sort of thing I would rather not use it if it's ad supported, since the ads are likely to be untargeted and visually intrusive. But it is the type of thing I would be willing to pay (<$10/mo) for.

- The text could be improved. I see a few small grammar errors and some sentences that could be worded better.

Anyone else remember when mp3.com did this and there was a huge controversy? I doubt you'll have the same problem this time.

Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, the mp3.com controversy was about providing a streaming version after verifying that you own the CD. There was at least one other company that did something like metracks.com, but they shut down.

Couple of design points. The large bold text at top right ("music store, radio charts, audio charts) looks terrible. It's too big, not centered within it's bounds and the black highlight on something that big looks wrong.

Username/password login could be made to look nicer too, especially as there is a lot of unused space there. At the very least the login boxes + labels should be as wide as the "lost password" stuff underneath.

Also look at your page title - the obvious SEO linkbait stuff gives the impression of a hoax/scam site and this will just be more noticeable on Google results (i.e. less people will click it).

I like the concept, not the interface.

You need to talk a little bit more about the Amazon S3...outside the web developer community noone really knows what that is.

I would go the other way on that -- overwhelmingly, your customers want to get their music streamed, NOT get a pretty wrapper around a separate service that is way the heck over their technical skill level which they nonetheless have to understand. If I were you, I'd see if you could possibly structure it such that a) they paid you in advance and b) you stored all the music on YOUR S3 account, which is then an implementation detail that no one has to care about.

Now, of course, the obvious worry with this is the major advantage for your service is "If you use us, you can listen to music without having to pay for it", which is pretty much the selling point of every Internet music based startup I've ever heard of, and you'd probably prefer to structure things in such a way that you don't know that 90% of your customers are using your app as a convenient pirating service, because that will result in less legal hassles.

This is why hell will freeze over before Apple integrates any sort of cloud offering with their iPods. As long as they can't see the contents of their hard drive, they can continue with the polite fiction that their hipster twenty-somethings are filling those eight gigabytes with music they've either purchased legitimately or which is licensed appropriately.

More broadly I think the challenge with startups in the music space is coming up with a value proposition which is not "Using this service is a lot cheaper than paying for your music".

It took me some time to realize that meTracks allows you to upload your music and listen to it anywhere. Is there a reason you can't say that instead of "meTracks is an innovative web based audio player allowing you to listen to your music on demand"? I can already listen to my music on demand. I hit play.

"Currently in Beta, we require you to help us in testing the service and providing subsequent feedback, so give it a go, its FREE!"

Your copy needs some work. That should be "it's FREE", for example.

Regarding the UI: When the 'charts' to stack over the site content but are the same width as the rest of the site, it appears at first that one has navigated to a new page, which makes it even more confusing when you're trying to get rid of them. I think this is a counterintuitive piece of interaction that unnecessarily confuses the user. If there's no significant functional reason for the charts to behave this way, I posit that it's uselessly damaging the overall usability of your site. Just make them their own page.

What are you trying to solve with the text captcha? Users might get confused what is going on there. If a spammer wanted to create a zillion accounts, they could very very quickly write code to solve a captcha like that.

Those kinds of captchas work well for blog comments where the spammer is trying to get their link on lots of separate blogs, but usually spammers aren't trying to create accounts on every free service out there. They either want a zillion accounts on your service or they don't care anyway.

But why? Not even to website itself?

`You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without "meTracks’s" prior written consent.`

A few things 1, you should put united-states at the top of your country list

2, WHY does everyone use Flex for their audio players, I simply CANNOT understand this. Just use flash and avoid the 200k framework code and the few megs of memory usage associated with the Flex framework. And since you are running a few instances of flash applets on the same page, the problem is exacerbated.

3. I think the interface is ugly.

Can't tell whether BBC stations are available--no way to search the radio stations. The site hardly works at all in Google Chrome, have to reload the home page frequently to get out of being wedged. I see it's "unlimited" except for about a yard of footnotes qualifying that and giving limits. And, like everyone else, I'd never fill out all that personal data just to try a site that doesn't obviously do anything new.

I don't want to upload my music collection before using any site. If there was something I could try without spending all that time, I'd be more likely to.

I have actually been looking for a website that plays all my favorite radio stations, but did not find any stations for my country or some way to see if i can add them by url

the logo should be static, the colors can be better

i think a webradio site standard would be a huge thing

I have a pretty niche taste in music, so it might be worth my while uploading all my music so I can access it from anywhere. However, if I had a normal taste in music, why would I not just use Spotify?

How does this differ from:

lala.com mp3tunes.com

I keep hearing "meat racks" in my head. Not sure if anyone else will, perhaps I'm just hungry.

can I upload my FLACs over there?

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