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Show HN: SoundSeeker – Organize Your Musical Ideas (soundseeker.app)
6 points by jshandling 1336 days ago
Hi HN,

I've been programming for about three years, and this is my first full-stack web app. It's a tool for organizing musical ideas. Building and deploying it has been a great learning experience, and in that spirit I'd be grateful for any thoughts or suggestions if you care to take a look. Thank you!

source: https://bit.ly/3giqrBU

Why:

Composing music is different for everyone, yet some practices are employed by many musicians. One such practice is to record a musical idea on a phone, capturing the idea at its freshest, and for many, clearest. This often leads to a lengthy catalogue of chronologically organized recordings that can be difficult to parse when sitting down to flesh out a piece of music – what matters most is the content of the idea, more so than when it was conceived. The purpose of SoundSeeker is to allow you to organize musical ideas based on their content instead of when they came to be, and to serve as an educational personal project in my growth as a software engineer.

What:

A graph-based organizational tool for scratch audio recordings

Planned features:

in-app audio recording, in-app audio trimming, custom labeling outside of the main tiered organizational system.

1 comments

Looks like a good start - and lots of polish, refinement still possible.

Have you been regularly getting feedback from new people you've introduced to it to make little adjustments to the text/copy, and other elements?

P.S. I think it'd be a good idea to put your "Why" paragraph from this post right under your "Organize Your Musical Ideas" header; you could put the text in a left or right column, and then put a smaller demo video (that people will likely maximize on their own) in the opposite corner - so both the text and video demo are in the "Hero" / top part of the page where scrolling isn't necessary to see either.

Hi loceng, thanks for taking a look.

I've introduced it to a few people who mostly have mentioned features that would make it more usable for them, but haven't received feedback on the copy.

I've added the "why" paragraph to the top of the welcome page per your suggestion. What do you think?

Cool. Yup, I think it's good to have that text.

Another common tactic is creating an actual Demo page, as if a user was logged-in, where they can say play around with sample clips already uploaded - especially if there's functionality like Drag & Drop + Add New etc.

Also, "SoundSeeker has 3 structural tiers:" - I don't intuitively understand what is meant by "structural tier" - and so perhaps there's simpler language that can be used?

And is "Suites" "Blobs" and "Clips" the common name used for people who organize music like this - or are they terms you came up with?

If you came up with them, why did you choose those words - and would a thesaurus maybe help see a better set of words that work well together?