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DiscoverTracks – Musicians you love listen to what you like (discovertracks.com)
46 points by ocolot 4338 days ago
18 comments

Did anyone else find "Musicians you love listen to what you like" pretty difficult to digest?

There's probably a more user friendly way to say that. Cool idea though.

I had a difficult time parsing this. Maybe I still am, because that sentence continues to tell me that using this app will somehow make my most beloved musicians listen to my favorite music.
Yeah, I did. I had to re-read it 2 or 3 times.
Music that inspires the artists you listen to.

Not a new concept, but this one is hard to use. Only one track is presented at a time. Very slow to discover.

well, don't you listen to each track you attempt to discover? or do you use some kind of playlist like "the next tracks to discover"?
yes, very difficult to understand. Had to break it up. The Musicians that you love tend to listen to what you like

I thought it was Musicians you love, listen to what you like or Musicians you love to listen to what you like it caused some cognitive dissonance.

Would something like "Listen to the favorite tracks of the musicians you love" be better?
Beginning with an action verb is already a better start. Another possible way to reword could be, "Listen to tracks your favorite musicians love."

Side note: what's up with the background moving along with mouse cursor? It was a little distracting at first, but I'm guessing the purpose is to make the site feel like you're browsing through a record store?

yep, that's precisely the idea! I think I'll remove the parallax to reduce potential distractions.

thx for your tagline proposal, I think it is the best up to now!

"Listen to your favorite bands' favorite songs"
hey hansy, I just pushed you tagline live, thx for the idea!
Always happy to help! Keep A/B testing and you'll eventually arrive at the optimum solution. Good luck with the website!
Yes.
I got it straight away, but I kept second guessing while I clicked the link to find out that it literally meant what it said.
I still don't get that sentence.
I think this is a really neat idea. I actually know one artist (diplo I think) has started a second SC account just for retweeting stuff he recommends. I have a couple of accounts and am quite particular about the music I favourite (has to be stuff that my followers would also like e.g. No rock music on my EDM account and vice versa). I'm not sure everyone is like this though so it might be difficult to find accounts of artists who favourite music their fans would also like. It leaves an opportunity for you to do some sort of curation of artists with a good history of favouriting.

Edit:

Is the site open source?

Yes it's Diplo. Although souncloud.com/stream page and reposts[1] work quite good for my needs already.

Diplo has second account for reposts[2][3] only.

I personally prefer a curated approach, like blip.fm[4] offered/offers, to any automated methods so far.

[1]http://help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/527370-w...

[2]https://soundcloud.com/diploapproved

[3]http://doandroidsdance.com/news/diplo-approved-soundcloud/

[4]http://blip.fm/all?p=1 Is this site more than a zombie? Still no soundcloud integration in sight.

hum... so how do you link your variety of music tastes in your approach? I personally love headytunes.co and it's curation, but it only fit 1/3 of my musical world unfortunately
Well, lets say I wish John Peel would be still around. Is it almost 10 Years already?
That's a great case. I believe we should be careful with historical biais, because some it could lead to focussing results on a particular music style. In my case fore example, I listen to electonic, jazz and classical music depending on the mood of the week...

It is not open source, but you may be willing to give a hand ;)

I would love to help but I'm not much of a web developer :) I'll definitely be following closely though so if I see a way I can help I'll let you know.
Just in case, I am looking for a community manger...
Shoot me an email - address is in my HN profile.
Please consider linking to something informative, not just a page with a huge picture where they apparently spent more time on the 3d effect than the actual usability of the site, you can't click on anything, it's just....weird.
What 3d effect?
I think he's referring to the parallax banner...which probably didn't take much time at all to implement, but is arguably distracting and unnecessary.
and sucks. since sucks is a word thats apparently free to use anywhere now.
well... 3 mins ;) ... ok, I could remove it!
I'd be skeptical. Often musicians left to make the music they want to make make stuff nobody cares about. I think of the Gerry Rafferty album City to City which is all hee haw music that sounds the same except for the hit tracks.
I like this concept, but you need some sort of automated filtering. My first track (because hypem liked it) is a cat purring.

Plug but it's a useful one: run the tracks through the SCAnalyzer http://labs.echonest.com/SCAnalyzer/index.html and filter for speechiness and duration. If you get a SO ID, you'll also know the artist via fingerprinting and you can do more filtering at that level.

This is a pretty cool idea! I will see what I can get out of it, thx!
Ok idea, but didn't really work for me. I follow quite a few artists on soundcloud. I have several hundred likes. Most of the time, I'm not into the music the artists I follow like. It's simply too all over the place. I clicked next 6 or so times but I didn't like any of the songs given to me.

I made a slightly different take on this: http://likesorter.herokuapp.com/#

It shows me in a table my likes and then allows me to see (in table form) the likes of artists I follow. Being able to sort my tags, plays, and song likes, I get more signals on whether I might actually like the song.

Music discovery is a really tricky problem. It takes roughly a minute each song to know whether I like a song or not. There's almost too many microgenres to keep track of (I like tech house but not trap house). My tastes are eclectic: you'll find cheesy songs right next to the hippest coolest disco funk track. The artists I follow probably have similarly eclectic tastes.

sorry you didn't like what your favorite artists like.

interesting "human algorithm" approach, but I believe machines can help sorting the recommendations with a better bird eye view ;)

btw, I am currently working on an algorithmic improvement to discriminate mainstream tracks from alternative tracks if your interested into it

please share @kyleapennell. Thanks for the response btw.
Nice work, I did pretty much the same thing about one and a half years back [1]. Didn't know it's still running [2], haha. I built it because I liked Favematic [3], but thought it didn't have enough "radio" like functionality.

I like your visual design better though, it's way cleaner. Also the track is better presented, but then again there were no pictures for tracks when I started.

Edit: Oh and btw I also had no clue how to describe what it does succinctly ;)

[1] https://github.com/prayerslayer/favsquare [2] http://obscure-basin-1623.herokuapp.com/ [3] http://ascott.github.io/favematic/

aha, excellent, thx! If you wish to geve a hand, welcome ;)
Bandcamp does something in this vein which lets you see an artist's recommendations of other artists on the site, but it's much more explicit on the artist's part (choosing to recommend as opposed to a mere "like"). I've found some decent stuff through that mechanism.
I like the idea of it. In fact, as an ex-musician myself i have a few ideas of building something using the Soundcloud API. More work definitely needs to be done in the 'music discovery' space and I am glad you've done something with it :)
Cool! This is just the start, so I'd be glad to discuss more about it ;) (twitter: ocolot)
Hey, that's great! ...and the first track is an hour-long Boiler Room set. May be you can implemented some kind of filtering feature?
Ah cool, Boiler Room sets are usually great, to my taste! Would you be willing to filter by max duration, tracks vs mixes, or something else?
Boiler Room is great indeed, but listening to mixes is radically different experience from listening to random tracks. Overall, I'd expect all the filers that Soundcloud has on it's search interface to be there, but duration filter is a must
I'm getting a 500 error on Chrome 36 from api.soundcloud.com, are you sure you haven't hit a rate limit on this?
I don't catch the error in Rollbar so I believe this would happen within the soundcloud player iframe... :-/ I will investigate, thx for noticing

Edit: Soundcloud quota are not explicit unfortunately.

Also, may be it would be a good idea to pre-load next track? Right now skipping works reallllly slow
it's now planned for next release! thx and let me know if you have other improvements ideas
I don't get it. What does it do?
From the site: "Musicians you love listen to what you like" ... "Their favourite tracks become your personal radio..."
Oh I get it, it makes a playlist out of the music that artists you liked have liked.
Why not just go to soundcloud.com/artist/likes and click play? That already makes a playlist of their likes...
That doesn't include multiple artists at the same time, right?
let me know if you find something else unclear ;)
Awesome. Already found a bunch of cool tracks. Follow lobsterdust for some cool mashups.
aha! thx for the advertising ;) check soundcloud.com/olivier-colot/television-rules-the-nation-daft-punk-remix for a cool remix ;)
A more clear tagline: "Listen to the favorite bands of your favorite bands"
it also suggests my own tracks, I guess you should disregard user's own tracks.

also, you may add a 'mute' option for certain musicians/people, (some are not musician but just friends)

This is a great tool.

I can't believe Soundcloud doesn't already offer this.

Recommended!

I love it! Thanks for this.
Really cool idea. I've been digging around soundcloud a lot lately, and it's as challenging as any other site to find good stuff. My immediate feedback is most musicians like their own productions the most. So I keep getting "artist123 likes this song by artist123". Any way to filter out themselves?
Good point. I didn't thought of it because I never thought of liking my own music. I will filter them out in the next release.