Show HN: Upbeat, HN for music - Node + Redis + Angular + Soundcloud | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Upbeat, HN for music - Node + Redis + Angular + Soundcloud

upbeatapp.com

77 pointsshaunrussell40 comments

I really like this. I had this concept in my head for a while now. It's a great execution.

What I never could wrap my head around is how to monetize it without using ads all over.

I see you are using "Buy on amazon". Is this giving you a share of the profit?

Anyway, great job!

Yeah, we have Amazon affiliate links set up so we get a little share of the purchases. There's ad/sponsorship possibilities and a couple other ones we're exploring.

Thanks for checking it out!

This is really cool. It is the first Show HN I've immediately added to my favorites and sent over to non-technical friends. Also I'm glad you found a good way to monetize without adspamming the crap out of the sidebars. To echo above, really cool execution.

I see this working very well if it is possible to create sub-upbeats, especially for groups of friends. A big general one is hard in the context of music. Good interface btw.

Thats actually something we'd like to do soon, appreciate the input!

One UI request however. Put the music controls above the comments section immediately below the album art or above the album art. The bottom right is like a ghost town when you're looking for a control (at least for me, took me a bit to notice them down there).

First of all great job guys. The website looks really good even better than HN. One thing I dislike is the scroll bar in the middle. It makes navigation a bit cumbersome in my opinion.

I see you are using redis! It would be great if you could share some details about your usage like how much memory your app uses and what are your costs associated with it.

Thanks for the feedback on the scrollbar.

Our redis instance is pretty tiny (~10mb) and we haven't had any issues thus far. The performance has been outstanding and we have only used a small fraction of our capacity.

I like that this will allow me to try to promote my music in a way that doesn't feel so spammy. If people don't like it, it won't get any visibility, and I won't have to feel like I'm bothering people.

A bit of feedback: people's submissions should default with 1 upvote(ala Reddit).

Absolutely, we hope this grows into a platform that artists can promote their songs in a unique way not available anywhere else.

Regarding the auto upvote, we agree and will implement that soon. Thanks.

If you don't allow people to submit their own tracks then it isn't really HN for music. You should make that clear on the submit form.

(Posted my own track under the artist name, just got deleted. Guess I should have lied.)

EDIT: the site is very nice though.

Thanks! You can submit any song from Soundcloud at the moment (they can be yours if you'd like), and we'll be adding more sources soon. We'll work on making the submit form more clear, good feedback.

Ahhh sorry. It appears that after submission I was on the New page, with my track at the top. When I clicked away I was back on the Hot page. I thought it was a different algorithm where there's only one page, and new stuff starts at the top and drops away very quickly unless it is upvoted, something you sometimes see on other sites. So I assumed it was deleted. Silly me.

So, in conclusion, you need to make the Hot/New link stand out more.

EDIT: I'll tell you what happened: the Hot/New page doesn't touch the history stack, so when I hit refresh, expecting to be in the same place, my track had vanished.

Ironically of course the refresh was probably pointless, everything's all websockets these days.

Gotcha, I see what happened. We'll work on making hot/new pages more easily accessible

Apparently I love the site, because I already left a comment and submitted a song :)

Here's my submission, if anyone wants to hear it: https://www.upbeatapp.com/#/?track=662

great song, upvoted! Thanks for signing up and checking it out.

Wow, very cool, I will use it.

How do you deal with copyright and author rights?

We stream all of the songs via Soundcloud API, so its not really any different than a blog posting a song their site. If an artist wants a song removed though, we do have a channel set up to request removal.

Your are still liable for copyright infrigement, wherever your music comes from.

   - so its not really any different than a blog posting a song their site.

And that's totally illegal since the owner usually doesnt give you the permission to do so. Did Grant Lee Buffalo label or Placebo label gave you the permission to broadcast their music ? Your host can shut down your website directly without warning following a DMCA takedown notice,if it is a US business.

Do you even know what SoundCloud is? The music is uploaded by the artists themselves so this is perfectly legal.

How is this any better than say /r/listentothis? Not being snarky, but genuinely curious how you are setting yourself apart existing services.

After 1 minute play: It's a lot simpler, even with RES, better filtering and automatically plays the next hottest song.

I can't submit a song, just keeps on saying 'submitting'. I am using Chrome (30.0.1599.69).

Have you considered doing the same thing as a spotify app - this'd be a great spotify app!

Great Job on this. I really like the light upbeat (pun intended) feel of the design.

Shame that it doesn't support Firefox though...

It works fine for me in Firefox 24.

FF 24 too, and It complained here about the lack of MP3 support.

I can't test the sound playback because of a broken jack plug in the headphones socket... A pentalobe screwdriver is on its way.

We are using feature detection for audio/mpeg playback. Soundcloud only streams as mpeg.

Firefox only supports audio/mpeg when a third-party decoder is available.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Supported_medi...

Some newer versions of Firefox work great, we're working on making it work with more versions soon.

Firefox unfortunately doesn't support Soundcloud's stream types, so we're working on some fallbacks at the moment. Thanks for feedback though, we're working on make it compatible with as many browsers as possible. Works perfectly on Chrome and Safari currently.

You may want to try a polyfill like jPlayer.

thanks for the tip

I love this, I'm jealous great execution.

ha thanks for the kind words.

The site is beautiful. I like it :)

Thanks Bender80, appreciate it.

i dig it

Thanks cioc! Let us know if you have any feedback.

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