Show HN: The Discographer – I built Songkick/Bandsintown for new album releases | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Discographer – I built Songkick/Bandsintown for new album releases

thediscographer.com

34 pointsfriggeri20 comments

Love the idea. My first thought is that the icon looks like an alarm clock.

Currently, the way I track album releases is by following every conceivable artist on Spotify, which will then notify me. What I like about this is that I can then stream the whole work, for free. However, Spotify doesn't always have works when they're immediately released. Additionally, I have to follow the artist in the first place--there's no library scanning. There's also the chance that I'll have work by an artist in iTunes but won't have ever followed/listened to them on Spotify.

In other words, could you also make a Spotify plugin which scans listening history, and combines this with your iTunes library?

Spotify/rdio support is one of the most requested feature so far, so it's definitely on my things-to-consider list.

May I kindly ask for Google Music support too, I use it and would love such a service. I was with rdio before, and getting notifications of new releases for artists in my library is what I miss the most.

I'll add my interest in adding a Spotify integration. I'd definitely pay $ for it.

This is something I wanted to build for myself for a while, at least as an RSS feed or email notification or the like. That way I could track bigger releases the same way as my Bandcamp music feed emails. I'll give this a shot.

EDIT: I like the app, but my immediate thought is to offer a feature request to explicitly not track a certain artist. There's at least one artist I spotted in my recent releases that I don't want to pay attention to, and receiving notifications for them would seem like a waste. Otherwise, it's great! Much better than last.fm's release tracking, which had a tendency to get confused by similarly-spelled artists more often than showing actual releases.

Great feedback thanks, being able to untrack specific artists is coming in the next release!

Partly, because I'm disappointed I won't be able to try it, and partly out of curiosity, what was the reason for not just making this an HTML5 web app? Was there some functionality you couldn't get from Web APIs?

Two reasons mainly: 1. being able to scan the user's iTunes library, and 2. push notifications (could have done email, but I find it higher friction).

The idea is sound, but what about those of us who listen to Spotify/Rdio/et al. rather than having an iTunes collection?

There's also Last.fm. Everything I listen to (or at least as much as reasonably possible) get's scrobbled. I believe it's this feed that my songkick account uses. It'd be nice to get integration with that!

Support for Spotify/rdio/last.fm is definitely something I'm thinking about for the future, yes!

Spotify notifies me when artists I follow add new albums. Have you tried following an artist that you want updates from?

You don't need this app if you're using Rdio though. If you add an album by a band to your collection, Rdio will notify you next time a new album is added to that artist's catalogue.

Basically everything the app does? Library scanning and push notifications, definitely, not sure about iTunes previews...

Where do you get the release data from? A couple years ago I started to work on an app to do this exact thing but I couldn't figure out where to get information about releases in an automated way.

I would like to be able to unfollow artists, or selectively follow from my library.

Great concept, I actually wanted to do something like this for a while... Any plan for a EU release?

Most probably in the next few months yes!

What's the reasoning behind only putting it on the US store? Luckily I have a US iTunes account to try it :)

what's your release date source?

for now, it's iTunes focused, so I'm using that data, looking into expanding to other services/sources

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