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Show HN: Listen Notes – A podcast search engine that actually works

12 points by wenbin 9y ago

wenbin 9y ago
Hello HN, I’m Wenbin, a software engineer in San Francisco & the maker of Listen Notes. Listen Notes is a very simple “I can build this in a weekend”-ish project. It crawls podcasts RSS from iTunes, indexes podcasts meta data in ElasticSearch, and provides a simple web UI. No AI. No speech-to-text. No audio search. Despite of the simplicity of this project and the little development effort, I find that this project is actually good enough for my personal use — some of my friends feel the same way as well. Example: https://www.listennotes.com/search?q=Carmelo%20Anthony&sort_by_date=1 https://www.listennotes.com/search?q=Carmelo%20Anthony&sort_... As an engineer & 1st generation immigrant, I’m very practical. I always prefer “spending 10% time solving 90% problem”-type solution. We are not building a pyramid (or making an iPhone). Software projects (especially online services) can always evolve. There’s no need to get everything right all at once. I’ve been working on some side projects on and off for several years. Listen Notes was one of my side projects in the past several months. However, I had never worked on these projects full-time (e.g., several work days in a row). Things changed recently. I just left the company I cofounded on Sep 15, so I got a chance to work on my side projects full-time. In the past few days, I rewrote the web UI, refactored a big chunk of backend code, and laid the foundation of future fast iteration of this product. I’m curious to see how big Listen Notes will become before I run out of my personal savings in a few months :) I’d love to get some feedback & I’m happy to answer questions! (Actually, I wrote some FAQs: https://www.listennotes.com/about https://www.listennotes.com/about )
rmateu 9y ago
Wow, thanks for sharing. Agree with your friends, it's pretty good! Managed to find an episode that Castro and Overcast search never seemed to find. Bookmarked.
- wenbin 9y ago
  Thanks! Glad to know that this simple project is useful to people :)

12 points by wenbin 9y ago

Hello HN, I’m Wenbin, a software engineer in San Francisco & the maker of Listen Notes. Listen Notes is a very simple “I can build this in a weekend”-ish project. It crawls podcasts RSS from iTunes, indexes podcasts meta data in ElasticSearch, and provides a simple web UI. No AI. No speech-to-text. No audio search. Despite of the simplicity of this project and the little development effort, I find that this project is actually good enough for my personal use — some of my friends feel the same way as well. Example: https://www.listennotes.com/search?q=Carmelo%20Anthony&sort_by_date=1 https://www.listennotes.com/search?q=Carmelo%20Anthony&sort_... As an engineer & 1st generation immigrant, I’m very practical. I always prefer “spending 10% time solving 90% problem”-type solution. We are not building a pyramid (or making an iPhone). Software projects (especially online services) can always evolve. There’s no need to get everything right all at once. I’ve been working on some side projects on and off for several years. Listen Notes was one of my side projects in the past several months. However, I had never worked on these projects full-time (e.g., several work days in a row). Things changed recently. I just left the company I cofounded on Sep 15, so I got a chance to work on my side projects full-time. In the past few days, I rewrote the web UI, refactored a big chunk of backend code, and laid the foundation of future fast iteration of this product. I’m curious to see how big Listen Notes will become before I run out of my personal savings in a few months :) I’d love to get some feedback & I’m happy to answer questions! (Actually, I wrote some FAQs: https://www.listennotes.com/about https://www.listennotes.com/about )

rmateu 9y ago

Wow, thanks for sharing. Agree with your friends, it's pretty good! Managed to find an episode that Castro and Overcast search never seemed to find. Bookmarked.

wenbin 9y ago
Thanks! Glad to know that this simple project is useful to people :)