5 ms·

Ask HN: check out my new web app lystener.com

36 points by kilian 16y ago

kilian 16y ago
Lystener.com takes your last.fm username and display the lyrics for the song you're currently listening to. By simply selecting the lyrics you like you can post them to Twitter or Facebook. Clean interface, easy to use website. In the future I want to expand it to saving your favorite quotes, making top ten lists of songs and artists, but for now, this is an app I made in about a weekend (with a week of tweaking) and I'm pretty happy with it :) I wrote a blog post with a longer explanation, for those interested: http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/a-web-app-in-a-weekend-lystener-com/ http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/a-web-app-in-a-weekend-lys... Let me know what you think!
- lotharbot 16y ago
  I should be able to tell, just from going to lystener.com, that it will automatically grab lyrics for whatever I'm listening to on last.fm and let me share them. The site doesn't communicate that very clearly; I had to read your post here to figure out exactly what the site did.
  - trin_ 16y ago
    thats right. i had no idea what the app would do "find lyrics. share them" isnt very descriptive.
  - kilian 16y ago
    Good point. I displayed the information after the first lyrics are found, because it becomes useful then, but I've made it immediatelly visible now.
- Vistico 16y ago
  I like it I think it's defiantly an awesome job for a weekend project. I'd have to agree maybe you should add a little more to the description (that it only works with last.fm). Although I can clearly see your interface is similar to backtype there. Looking forward to what you can do next weekend! I'd like to see you mature your logo a little too, although it looks great even now. =P
- apgwoz 16y ago
  My biggest complaint is that I went to the site and was greeted by something negative when I took action and entered my username. No Lyrics Found. While that's understandable as my music tastes are not very mainstream, pulling history and saying, "but we do have lyrics for this other song" might have been nicer. I do love the concept, because to be quite honest, I used to use Songbird because of the lyrics plugin. (I don't use it now because it's extremely bloated and slow unfortunately)
  - kilian 16y ago
    My own music tastes are pretty...eclectic too, so that's definitely on the list (though right now the api seems to be the bottleneck) I just decided to start with the minimum: just displaying the last played/currently playing song.
    - apgwoz 16y ago
      Totally understandable--a weekend project. Just love to see something positive when I visit a site for the first time. Hope you keep working on this and it evolves, I think it's a great idea.
jrnkntl 16y ago
I like the idea! Couple of things: * Supply the user with an URL that he/she can use like lystener.com/user/username so it can be a bookmark * Poll the user feed so it updates the lyrics when you start listening to another song [edit] o, actually it does this, but it didn't work at first. * Find an API that supplies more results because: Now playing: Paparazzi by Lady Gaga We don't have lyrics for this song :( Seriously? :) Good luck!
- kilian 16y ago
  1. http://lystener.com/?username=yourname http://lystener.com/?username=yourname :) but I'm implementing a http://lystener.com/#!username http://lystener.com/#!username soon that will get set by the form. 2. it does that, but every 10 seconds as to not completely destroy everyone's api's :) 3. Ouch. Working on it. The API seems overloaded.
earnubs 16y ago
I think you need to relax the timing of the event listener action on the input box a bit, wait for me to at least finish what I'm typing. (Unless the disco light effect is intentional.)
- kilian 16y ago
  I hadn't made the timing of the event listener pretty yet, it just checks after every keypress now. Will change! Edit: fixed :)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
studioprisoner 16y ago
Looks great, and can see it being used. Just tried it. Love Last.Fm, glad it has that integration. but it couldn't find the lyrics for last song i listened to: Rhinoceros by The Smashing Pumpkins Good luck! Bookmarked!
Bootvis 16y ago
I think this app has potential, but: Your lyrics database is too small or I am unlucky, I just listened to Muse, The Smiths, Jacques Brel and Muse again and it didn't find any lyrics. (For some reason it seemed to miss the Brel song entirely). Furthermore Amarok does not update last.fm quickly but this should be an easy fix.
- kilian 16y ago
  It's the api that's the bottleneck here. Implementing caching and queueing now to see if that helps some :)
daleharvey 16y ago
this was fun, I couldnt think it would be something I use but it was fun to sit and watch what I was playing come up (or in most cases not found) finding lyrics isnt something I particularly need a lot, but the interapplication communication was very smooth, I have spotify scrobling to last.fm to update your web app which is pretty impressive, seems like you could make a pretty good karaoke app out of this.
rogeriopvl 16y ago
Got the "We don't have lyrics for this song :(" message in every track I listened... The idea is very interesting, but you need a better lyrics database.
wa0 16y ago
three letter nicks doesn't work :|
kilian 16y ago
So, I think you all are bringing the lyrics API on it's knees :( I just implemented caching that should alleviate it some, and next up is a queueing system.
d0m 16y ago
With chrome, it doesn't seem to work for me. Whatever I enter in the box, sometime it goes green/red, but nothing more.. no about button, no "What is lystener"..
dionidium 16y ago
You'd be my hero if you included tabs/chords. Your interface would be a great addition to what's otherwise a cesspool.
- kilian 16y ago
  That's actually a great idea! Now to find a tabs API (or build it into the site myself) By the way, I find Ultimate-guitar.com to be pretty good most of the time.
nkohari 16y ago
I love the idea, but you should look into the legal implications. Copyright of lyrics can be a little touchy.
tom_ilsinszki 16y ago
I love rap music, and have been looking for meaningful and deep rap lyrics on the web more than once in the last couple of years (haven't found a webapp for that yet). I'd love to have a place on the web, where others (or your webapp) could recommend such rap lyrics to me as a user, based on my listening history for example. Also, you could also let people discuss lyrics. I might be biased, because I'm a rap listener myself, but you could add any other genre to your repertoire, that has a lyrics-aware fan base.
- joeyo 16y ago
  If you haven't found it already, check out the online hip-hop lyrics archive (http://ohhla.com http://ohhla.com) for your hip-hop lyrics needs. I've been going there for lyrics for as long as I can remember and never quite understood why it doesn't rank higher in google searches for lyrics.
ddrager 16y ago
As the others have noted, no lyrics have been coming up for me. But on the flip side, it does pick up my 'currently listening' song from last.fm very fast. I use Spotify, it must publish currently listening pretty quickly. I think its only about 10-15 seconds. Just a couple of 'ideas': - Fix the lyrics api issue - Show the last X songs played so you can go back and search the lyrics for them. - Enunciate what the site does better than the text box on the side. From the text on the site it looks like it is just a lyrics search engine... display what sets you apart. Great idea!
- kilian 16y ago
  I thought the description in the text box on the side was okay. What would you say sets lystener apart?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sandipagr 16y ago
yeah I get the we don't have lyrics for every song. Haven't got lyrics for any song to make a insightful comment on that. You should update the lyrics database. I am not sure what you are using but I wrote a script for myself sometime ago that shows me the lyrics for songs I am playing by using the url http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?action=lyrics&fmt=json&func=getSong http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?action=lyrics&fmt=json&#... and appending artist and track to it.
lebinh 16y ago
I created a similar app a couple of months ago :D http://nowlyrics.appspot.com http://nowlyrics.appspot.com It was also featured on last.fm, http://build.last.fm/item/481 http://build.last.fm/item/481
- kilian 16y ago
  If I may ask, how do you get full lyrics out of lyricswiki?
  - lebinh 16y ago
    I used lyricswiki's api to get the url for the lyric's page, then parse it's html to get the lyrics. hope that helps ;)
paulnelligan 16y ago
nice app, what's the revenue model?, or is it a 'just for fun' app? .. unfortunate that it doesn't have more lyrics, but it's in beta and rome wasn't built in a day ... best of luck with it!
- kilian 16y ago
  Just for fun for now, but the obvious revenue model would be buying songs or cd's. I want to expand it, first :)
TheSOB88 16y ago
Sorry, but this seems incredibly useless to me. It's dependent on two other services (Last.fm and Twitter), and it provides no value other than the ego-boost that comes from posting to Twitter. Additionally, the problem it solves is not really a problem; if you're on Last.fm I assume you can type in the title and artist on Google and get the lyrics that way. You have to deliver value to your users, and I'm just not seeing how this would accomplish that. Perhaps there's something I'm missing here, though, because everyone else seems to love it.
- kilian 16y ago
  Here my take on it, from the blogpost I wrote about it: Finding lyrics has been a longstanding pet-peeve of mine. A lot of music players don’t allow to you easily copy the title and artist so you have to manually type them into Google. Once you’re there, most sites are cluttered and spammy. Way too annoying. As for posting lyrics To facebook or Twitter: This is something a lot of people (mostly teens) do. Having to do the above, copy and paste it (if the website doesn't use some stupid iframe-trick!), formatting it and then going to facebook or twitter to post is annoying, Lystener is a nice shortcut. :)

36 points by kilian 16y ago

Lystener.com takes your last.fm username and display the lyrics for the song you're currently listening to. By simply selecting the lyrics you like you can post them to Twitter or Facebook. Clean interface, easy to use website. In the future I want to expand it to saving your favorite quotes, making top ten lists of songs and artists, but for now, this is an app I made in about a weekend (with a week of tweaking) and I'm pretty happy with it :) I wrote a blog post with a longer explanation, for those interested: http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/a-web-app-in-a-weekend-lystener-com/ http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/web/a-web-app-in-a-weekend-lys... Let me know what you think!

lotharbot 16y ago
I should be able to tell, just from going to lystener.com, that it will automatically grab lyrics for whatever I'm listening to on last.fm and let me share them. The site doesn't communicate that very clearly; I had to read your post here to figure out exactly what the site did.
- trin_ 16y ago
  thats right. i had no idea what the app would do "find lyrics. share them" isnt very descriptive.
- kilian 16y ago
  Good point. I displayed the information after the first lyrics are found, because it becomes useful then, but I've made it immediatelly visible now.
Vistico 16y ago
I like it I think it's defiantly an awesome job for a weekend project. I'd have to agree maybe you should add a little more to the description (that it only works with last.fm). Although I can clearly see your interface is similar to backtype there. Looking forward to what you can do next weekend! I'd like to see you mature your logo a little too, although it looks great even now. =P
apgwoz 16y ago
My biggest complaint is that I went to the site and was greeted by something negative when I took action and entered my username. No Lyrics Found. While that's understandable as my music tastes are not very mainstream, pulling history and saying, "but we do have lyrics for this other song" might have been nicer. I do love the concept, because to be quite honest, I used to use Songbird because of the lyrics plugin. (I don't use it now because it's extremely bloated and slow unfortunately)
- kilian 16y ago
  My own music tastes are pretty...eclectic too, so that's definitely on the list (though right now the api seems to be the bottleneck) I just decided to start with the minimum: just displaying the last played/currently playing song.
  - apgwoz 16y ago
    Totally understandable--a weekend project. Just love to see something positive when I visit a site for the first time. Hope you keep working on this and it evolves, I think it's a great idea.

jrnkntl 16y ago

I like the idea! Couple of things: * Supply the user with an URL that he/she can use like lystener.com/user/username so it can be a bookmark * Poll the user feed so it updates the lyrics when you start listening to another song [edit] o, actually it does this, but it didn't work at first. * Find an API that supplies more results because: Now playing: Paparazzi by Lady Gaga We don't have lyrics for this song :( Seriously? :) Good luck!

kilian 16y ago
1. http://lystener.com/?username=yourname http://lystener.com/?username=yourname :) but I'm implementing a http://lystener.com/#!username http://lystener.com/#!username soon that will get set by the form. 2. it does that, but every 10 seconds as to not completely destroy everyone's api's :) 3. Ouch. Working on it. The API seems overloaded.

earnubs 16y ago

I think you need to relax the timing of the event listener action on the input box a bit, wait for me to at least finish what I'm typing. (Unless the disco light effect is intentional.)

kilian 16y ago
I hadn't made the timing of the event listener pretty yet, it just checks after every keypress now. Will change! Edit: fixed :)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

studioprisoner 16y ago

Looks great, and can see it being used. Just tried it. Love Last.Fm, glad it has that integration. but it couldn't find the lyrics for last song i listened to: Rhinoceros by The Smashing Pumpkins Good luck! Bookmarked!

Bootvis 16y ago

I think this app has potential, but: Your lyrics database is too small or I am unlucky, I just listened to Muse, The Smiths, Jacques Brel and Muse again and it didn't find any lyrics. (For some reason it seemed to miss the Brel song entirely). Furthermore Amarok does not update last.fm quickly but this should be an easy fix.

kilian 16y ago
It's the api that's the bottleneck here. Implementing caching and queueing now to see if that helps some :)

daleharvey 16y ago

this was fun, I couldnt think it would be something I use but it was fun to sit and watch what I was playing come up (or in most cases not found) finding lyrics isnt something I particularly need a lot, but the interapplication communication was very smooth, I have spotify scrobling to last.fm to update your web app which is pretty impressive, seems like you could make a pretty good karaoke app out of this.

rogeriopvl 16y ago

Got the "We don't have lyrics for this song :(" message in every track I listened... The idea is very interesting, but you need a better lyrics database.

wa0 16y ago

three letter nicks doesn't work :|

kilian 16y ago

So, I think you all are bringing the lyrics API on it's knees :( I just implemented caching that should alleviate it some, and next up is a queueing system.

d0m 16y ago

With chrome, it doesn't seem to work for me. Whatever I enter in the box, sometime it goes green/red, but nothing more.. no about button, no "What is lystener"..

dionidium 16y ago

You'd be my hero if you included tabs/chords. Your interface would be a great addition to what's otherwise a cesspool.

kilian 16y ago
That's actually a great idea! Now to find a tabs API (or build it into the site myself) By the way, I find Ultimate-guitar.com to be pretty good most of the time.

nkohari 16y ago

I love the idea, but you should look into the legal implications. Copyright of lyrics can be a little touchy.

tom_ilsinszki 16y ago

I love rap music, and have been looking for meaningful and deep rap lyrics on the web more than once in the last couple of years (haven't found a webapp for that yet). I'd love to have a place on the web, where others (or your webapp) could recommend such rap lyrics to me as a user, based on my listening history for example. Also, you could also let people discuss lyrics. I might be biased, because I'm a rap listener myself, but you could add any other genre to your repertoire, that has a lyrics-aware fan base.

joeyo 16y ago
If you haven't found it already, check out the online hip-hop lyrics archive (http://ohhla.com http://ohhla.com) for your hip-hop lyrics needs. I've been going there for lyrics for as long as I can remember and never quite understood why it doesn't rank higher in google searches for lyrics.

ddrager 16y ago

As the others have noted, no lyrics have been coming up for me. But on the flip side, it does pick up my 'currently listening' song from last.fm very fast. I use Spotify, it must publish currently listening pretty quickly. I think its only about 10-15 seconds. Just a couple of 'ideas': - Fix the lyrics api issue - Show the last X songs played so you can go back and search the lyrics for them. - Enunciate what the site does better than the text box on the side. From the text on the site it looks like it is just a lyrics search engine... display what sets you apart. Great idea!

kilian 16y ago
I thought the description in the text box on the side was okay. What would you say sets lystener apart?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sandipagr 16y ago

yeah I get the we don't have lyrics for every song. Haven't got lyrics for any song to make a insightful comment on that. You should update the lyrics database. I am not sure what you are using but I wrote a script for myself sometime ago that shows me the lyrics for songs I am playing by using the url http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?action=lyrics&fmt=json&func=getSong http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?action=lyrics&fmt=json&#... and appending artist and track to it.

lebinh 16y ago

I created a similar app a couple of months ago :D http://nowlyrics.appspot.com http://nowlyrics.appspot.com It was also featured on last.fm, http://build.last.fm/item/481 http://build.last.fm/item/481

kilian 16y ago
If I may ask, how do you get full lyrics out of lyricswiki?
- lebinh 16y ago
  I used lyricswiki's api to get the url for the lyric's page, then parse it's html to get the lyrics. hope that helps ;)

paulnelligan 16y ago

nice app, what's the revenue model?, or is it a 'just for fun' app? .. unfortunate that it doesn't have more lyrics, but it's in beta and rome wasn't built in a day ... best of luck with it!

kilian 16y ago
Just for fun for now, but the obvious revenue model would be buying songs or cd's. I want to expand it, first :)

TheSOB88 16y ago

Sorry, but this seems incredibly useless to me. It's dependent on two other services (Last.fm and Twitter), and it provides no value other than the ego-boost that comes from posting to Twitter. Additionally, the problem it solves is not really a problem; if you're on Last.fm I assume you can type in the title and artist on Google and get the lyrics that way. You have to deliver value to your users, and I'm just not seeing how this would accomplish that. Perhaps there's something I'm missing here, though, because everyone else seems to love it.

kilian 16y ago
Here my take on it, from the blogpost I wrote about it: Finding lyrics has been a longstanding pet-peeve of mine. A lot of music players don’t allow to you easily copy the title and artist so you have to manually type them into Google. Once you’re there, most sites are cluttered and spammy. Way too annoying. As for posting lyrics To facebook or Twitter: This is something a lot of people (mostly teens) do. Having to do the above, copy and paste it (if the website doesn't use some stupid iframe-trick!), formatting it and then going to facebook or twitter to post is annoying, Lystener is a nice shortcut. :)