8 ms·

Show HN: 2u.fm is a social music discovery site, my side project for over a year

121 points by nwienert 14y ago

jakozaur 14y ago
Nice concept, but find mostly crapy remixes. I couldn't find even the most popular artists (One Republic, Adele). All of "their" songs are remixes, even those marked as originals..
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- nwienert 14y ago
  Within 10 minutes you've managed to listen to enough songs to judge they are "mostly crappy remixes"? I'm working on expanding the selection, I'm sure that will be a big point of feedback, but no need to make such a negative snap judgement.
  - ScottWhigham 14y ago
    I think you're being a little protective here. How much time do you expect the average user is going to give you? I can promise you it's not 10 minutes. You're being somewhat childish, IMO, by not recognizing that this guy took 10 frigging minutes out of his time to check out your site. Thank him, take note of the feedback, and move on. You will get feedback all the time from people you don't agree with but that's not a reason to be so quick to act this way. I hardly think a 10 minute website look is a "snap judgement". You might want to check out this post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/judging-websites.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/judging-websites.ht...
    - nwienert 14y ago
      First, there is and was on launch both One Republic and Adele on the site. And all of their songs are tagged correctly. Also he commented within 10 minutes of me posting it so including time see the post, listen to songs, and write the comment was certainly almost none especially considering this HN which is a place that has rules for quality of comments and good discussion. I judged his feedback unnecessary and negative, not anything personal, which is more to say than what you did. I've read that post and thats talking about someone judging 300 sites not one.
dools 14y ago
Our only works in modern browsers
- hnriot 14y ago
  of course?
  - dools 14y ago
    Well, aside from the fact that I'm on IE9, there is a typo in the text.
nwienert 14y ago
For anyone looking for a little more insight into the whys and hows of the site: http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1 http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1
- phildeschaine 14y ago
  I'm a little confused on your use of both genres and tags. For the former, how are they determined? Just in a database, pre-decided by you?
  - nwienert 14y ago
    Yes, and they need expansion certainly. I get artist genres through EchoNest and plan to expand my genres to match theirs.
andrewmunsell 14y ago
Impressive-- it's incredibly polished and professional looking, especially for something you call a "side project" :)
Jelte12345 14y ago
Looks really great. Just a thing I noticed, when you need to log in and click on the or log in without facebook link, the link persists and toggles back for some reason.
_sentient 14y ago
That looks great, but I would default with the red on red color scheme (which can be changed by hovering over the logo). As a designer, I find it much more eye catching, which helps pique interest in first-time visitors. Also, two minor interface issues: your hover tooltip arrows don't point directly at the "Playlist" and "Me" icons at the top right. Also, the genre list in the sidebar would benefit from a Google+/Facebook style minimalist scroll bar. It wouldn't clutter the feel much, especially if it appeared only on hover, and would make it easier on people without a mouse wheel. Outside of those very minor issues, this looks great!
cwilson 14y ago
Looks like a much more slick version of HypeMachine (www.hypem.com), which I've been using for years. Competition is never a bad thing, so this is great, I'll be trying it out. Very well done for a "side project".
- freeslave 14y ago
  it's more of a copy of ex.fm (http://ex.fm http://ex.fm) than a slicker hype machine. ex.fm has been around a few years now too.
  - chrischen 14y ago
    Yea but if they mainly aggregate music blogs, then it's more in line with hypem.com.
    - freeslave 14y ago
      ex.fm is a music blog aggregator: http://ex.fm/about http://ex.fm/about
      - Kiro 14y ago
        Thanks to your spam I will never ever use ex.fm.
flexxaeon 14y ago
looks great in the iphone. teeniest bit of left/right scrolling is my only nitpick ;)
andygcook 14y ago
Nice work! It's impressive you were able to stick with a side project of this caliber for over a year without giving up or remaining in the feature abyss. This app works really well for music discovery. I just found a Mumford and Sons track I've never heard before, and I thought I had listened to them all. Solid UX touch by never stopping my music when I move around to different pages too. Where are you pulling the songs from? Youtube and Soundcloud? Just FYI - I wanted to skip through a song to see if it was any good, and I couldn't find the progress bar at the bottom. It took my awhile to realize it was at the top. If I'm not mistaken, most music sites have the progress bar at the bottom of the screen (Rdio, Spotify, GrooveShark). Pandora has it at the top though so perhaps I'm wrong.
- nwienert 14y ago
  Pulling from blogs that post mp3's or soundcloud. It indexes youtube but I can't play youtube without showing the video. A video's section is on the plate for the next release. Thanks for the feedback, the responsive design has the progress bar at the bottom, though I prefer it all on top.
  - dshanahan 14y ago
    Where do you source your blogs?
DigitalSea 14y ago
This is the most impressive side project I have ever seen. Everything feels polished, the UI is delicious and the site works and functions very quickly. Very nice work, I would love to know what programming language you built this in perhaps another blog post detailing the tech side of things?
Jarred 14y ago
This is awesome!
frankdenbow 14y ago
Really like how this looks and feels. Interested in the blogs section, how are you grabbing that info? Thats the part I would likely use the most, picking out the few hip hop blogs I go to regularly and just getting to the music quicker.
hoka 14y ago
Add a 'mix' category and I'll pay you if it's done well! New tracks are all well and good, but the continuity of mixes really helps me get in the groove. I've listened to the Essential Mixes, and follow a bunch of podcasts/dj radio shows, but there's got to be stuff from non-DI.fm/Sirius-XM stuff. Sheepymixes on youtube would be a good example.
- nwienert 14y ago
  Love the idea. Shouldn't be too hard to do.
rkaplan 14y ago
This is fantastic. The UI is wonderful, site design is responsive, and from what I've found so far it has great content. Kudos for you for committing the time to building such a major project and finally shipping. Initial feedback (major to minor): - Please add a button to let me add songs in my feed to a queue rather than cutting off the current song. - There's a bug where, for some reason, the modal popup that I used to sign up / add artists is still capturing mouse events even though it is now invisible. It's taking away my ability to click in the middle of the screen, which is very frustrating cause I can't use search. Not sure why this is happening. It's Z-index is 201 and opacity set to 0 via CSS, if that helps, and I logged in with Facebook. - My screen is small (11" Air), and some parts of the site are cut off height-wise. For example, the left nav bar's "find friends" button. - When I click on a new song, the artist in the top bar updates immediately, but the title takes a few seconds. - All of the letters in the colored boxes next to song names are too far to the right by one pixel. Again, congratulations on shipping! I'd be happy to provide more feedback if you're interested.
- goldfeld 14y ago
  - When hovering over the left side menu items, I would highlight the text into a much lighter font color--I was already expecting it to happen (and anticipating the eye candy) from all the other apps I've used that do that.
- nwienert 14y ago
  Thanks for all the feedback and kind words, I will look into them!
_sentient 14y ago
I'm particularly impressed with the responsive design. Did you use one of the responsive frameworks out there, serve different stylesheets, or something else?
- nwienert 14y ago
  Thank you. It's hand rolled, no grid system or anything too fancy either just unfloats a few things and styling on the header/player.
Jonovono 14y ago
This looks really nice. What technology do you use? Where are the songs playing from? Looks like all soundcloud?
- nwienert 14y ago
  Wrote a bit about it on my blog: http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1 http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1 "The stack consists of Ruby on Rails with Postgres, Thin, Nginx, Memcached (with Dalli), DelayedJob, and some other parts. The frontend is hand rolled using Bootstrap, SoundManager2 with a custom music player wrapper, and some minor plugins. The live listening is running through an instance of Thin running Faye and PrivatePub." Songs are also found through regular mp3's on sites, along with SoundCloud.
freeslave 14y ago
hey congrats on the hard work, but this really seems like a clone of ex.fm (http://ex.fm http://ex.fm) and a remarkably similar clone at that - what is different about 2u.fm?
- nwienert 14y ago
  Four comments and links about me cloning them... do you have something personal going on here? One would have been enough. Seems pretty mean spirited to me. There are plenty of things different, biggest being real artist profiles not just a search, filtering by music type on artists, a filtered feed, instant sharing and an inbox, algorithms filter genres by a lot of factors and ways to organize those feeds, responsive design.... I wasn't going to comment until I saw all four or five of your links in here.
graue 14y ago
This looks fantastic. Nothing will play for me, but that's not too surprising since I have neither Flash nor support for MP3s in <audio>. Just curious, which of the two does it use?
collypops 14y ago
This is what stands out for me: "Live listening. While I decided to hide most of the UX I had worked on for launch due to it not being fully baked, if you're friends with someone and you see them "online" in your friends list, you can tune into what they are listening to in real time, and listen to music fully synced together. If they change a song, you change too! This is certainly alpha at this point though, but it generally works." For those who are into 'social' listening, it's worth having a play around with.
- freeslave 14y ago
  again, ex.fm has had this for some time: http://blog.ex.fm/post/24082043603/featured-feature-listening-right-now-we-quietly http://blog.ex.fm/post/24082043603/featured-feature-listenin...
  - nwienert 14y ago
    This is live listening across an entire session, plus live instant sharing when you find one you like. You follow their every song, through playlists or different pages, and it's in sync to the second.
- dshanahan 14y ago
  This is what excited me too. Elements of TurntableFM-like 'social listening' might be interesting in a new environment.
gfodor 14y ago
It's a cool site, and an amazing accomplishment for a side project, but I really, really have to ask: why did you spend your time building something to add to the hyper-saturated, money black hole that is the music listening/discovery app market? I mean, there are, and have been so many sites like this that have either survived on the border of illegality or have been shut down. And we've got a whole host of above-board legal streaming sites now that are dirt cheap and have a wide variety of music to listen to. What's new here and why should I consider using it? Why will this be around in 6 months and not just die after you run out of money to keep it up or get sued? I'm not asking this to be a dick but I really don't understand why I see a new one of these sites get released every few months that seems to do the same thing as all the others except is free (and probably illegal) or thinks that slightly better music recommendations or "social listening" is a sustainable competitive advantage. edit: Ok, read your blog post, but I guess my question still stands. The improvements you list are fairly marginal improvements over existing stuff IMHO and it seems mildly crazy to put in so much effort to replicate existing sites but add things like responsive design or slightly better Facebook integration. Good luck and I hope you end up turning this into an amazing success so if you can turn me into a believer I am listening :)
- baby 14y ago
  I get what you're saying but I don't feel like there are a lot of websites to discover music. Besides hypem, pitchfork and sixtyone do you anymore? And I think they could greatly be improved. Music Discovery is a new thing, before we just had the radio, and it's still not as good as it could be.
  - gfodor 14y ago
    I pay for and use MOG and their recommendations are pretty good. Certainly this could be the case that "everything sucks I am going to execute better than everyone" but it's a sexy problem (not a schlep) and everyone seems to be working on it.
    - chrischen 14y ago
      Their recommendations use Echonest, and as far as I know so do Rdio and Spotify. You can access those recommendations via an API for free!
dominicf 14y ago
Very good. Found some Led Zeppelin I hadn't listened to for a while.
rachbelaid 14y ago
Nice work, nice layout and UI/UX ... Very impressive for a side project.
rob 14y ago
It would be nice if we could import our iTunes artists as followers.
adrianm 14y ago
Very impressed with this and love the concept. One suggestion: I think this just screams mobile app. I want this on my iPhone and think being able to cache playlists and listen to them while I'm on the go would be incredible.
tubbo 14y ago
Really cool idea! It looks amazing and runs very fast. One issue I have with it is the seeming lock-in of the Echonest service. I have a lot of experience building with the Soundcloud API and I think adding Soundcloud streaming capabilities would be a perfect companion to your app. As much as I like Diplo and Jay-Z, I have no trouble knowing when they release new material. I do sometimes have trouble knowing when artists who don't have the publicity powerhouse behind them are releasing new music. This is the untapped market. You have a great start, it looks amazing and is a joy to navigate. But allow NEW artists to really be discovered through your app, and that is where you will find success.
supersaiyan 14y ago
Hey, love the site, ui is smooth, responsive, and data seems to be loading really fast. Incredibly polished. Do you mind sharing what technologies/frameworks you're using in your stack?
zethus 14y ago
You should disable the app once the limit is reached. Simply inspecting the modal/overlay in chrome or firebug will let you delete the node and continue to use the app without ever logging in/signing up.
jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
There is some bug in this song showing Javascript code instead of the description: http://2u.fm/genres/classic-rock#song-38265 http://2u.fm/genres/classic-rock#song-38265 Pretty nice site; would be nice to be able to login using Twitter.
tbundy 14y ago
Looks nice, seems to be some good tracks. Hypem's downfall (in my opinion) was the point where the frontpage started being bombarded with Kanye West songs. Songs like that don't need to be 'discovered', as they're already jammed into our ears at every opportunity mainstream media has. Hopefully 2U can keep a good balance. Well done nwienert, great launch.
lukeholder 14y ago
something seems off here: http://d.pr/i/WPer http://d.pr/i/WPer (screenshot of app with javascript errors on page)
mattwdelong 14y ago
Nicely done, but I would seriously consider updating your daily limit. I did not have nearly enough time to play around to consider converting as a registered user (I was clicking around). I ended up just deleted the site cookies, went into inspect elements and deleted the modal but I am not your average user and most people wouldn't do that to continue testing out your site, let alone know it could be done. After all that, I am pretty certain I will continue to use your app. Nice job!
hkwon 14y ago
Looks nice. I wonder what will be your next step for 2u.fm. I will be trying it out.
instakill 14y ago
Very nice, why no metal as a category?
readme 14y ago
It seems that for every post I read about someone's awesome project there are 5-6 people saying "Your idea sucks, why'd you waste your time" Guys, do yourself a favor and don't post these comments. You're not sharing any profound insights, you're just compensating for some insecurity you have. In OP's case, I don't especially think he cares whether you thought his idea was the next Google. I base this on the fact that: A.) The site is already mature and B.) title says "my side project for over a year" -- so like, 1 year later, your negative comment is going to change his mind? Yeah, I doubt it. If you put a year of effort into a nice webapp like OPs, you will have users, and people will enjoy your service. Also, this site is very impressive, and makes a good portfolio piece for sure. I don't know if anyone is maybe getting the wrong idea. Personally, I don't click Show HN and then pretend to be PG interviewing the guy for a seed round. I click Show HN's to see cool stuff. If you like it, then try it, use it, whatever. But if you don't have anything constructive to say, then you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.
- ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
  I must sympathize with both sides: I get what some users mean when they criticize projects in this manner. They're saying, "You're so smart and this is all you came up with?" It's not so much an insult as it is disappointment of a talented person. Their mentality is "If I had your talent, I wouldn't have wasted my time on this." But it's important to understand that the whole purpose of side projects is to take a journey, learn, experience, and try out random things. It's impossible to tell accurately weather a project succeeds or not so you have to try. I'm sure if Sergey Brin and Larry Page submitted their Google prototype on HN it would have been met with "Why? There's already Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Lycos, Alta Vista... they do search and they're established, Page Rank is just a feature. What's stopping Lycos or Alta Vista from implimenting their own Page Rank algorithm?". Twitter would have been met with "Only 140 characters? That's not going to get anywhere". (all things that a VC would say) I blame this on Hacker News (emphasis on HACKER) having more startup news than projects, inventions, designs, code samples, and hacking articles. The emphasis on success starts to drown out the emphasis on coding for fun even if you fail. Oddly enough in the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At exactly 49:40 Paul says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but after 6 months we changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about nothing but startup stuff."
buster 14y ago
Wow.. it looks really amazing! Love it :)
ksred 14y ago
This is super impressive. Congrats!
vincehofmeister 14y ago
For a side project I will say I am definitely impressed. The layout is cool, and the design/gui is amazing! I hope this site does well, don't worry about people telling you the music space is too crowded. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Point is you had fun doing it and hopefully learned a few things along the way. Congratulations to you.
vincentleeuwen 14y ago
I love the recommendations straight at the top, already found some really cools stuff. As regard to the genres: if you're to expand them, I would love to see genres like Disco (not 80s but happy techno, see 22tracks.com), Relax (lounge) and Techno (Kalkbrenner style) I'm from Amsterdam so might have some different tastes when it comes to dance music :) All in all, a super cool (side) project! Thanks!
synapticism 14y ago
Very impressive. I don't use music discovery sites at all but your single-handed ability to conceive, design, and build a project of this quality is inspirational. I'll be keeping an eye on you for a while yet. What sort of file quality are you looking for from music blog applicants? Can you scrape files out of ZIP archives?
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
Works great and I've even got a flash blocker. BTW, are you using sound manager 2? - I strongly advise you to round the corners of buttons with border-radius:3px; so they look more clickable.
JulianWasTaken 14y ago
I'm unable to change my password. When attempting to do so I see "Current password can't be blank" despite it not being blank.
thekillingtree 14y ago
I see some code in the 1st artist bio: http://i.imgur.com/1DtB5.png http://i.imgur.com/1DtB5.png Otherwise, very neat site. I don't think there can be too many music exploration sites.
gbertb 14y ago
Great job on the site. Really loving the UI overall UX. One small thing is that I kept clicking on the waveform visualization to scrub the track--probably since i've used to soundcloud and such.
milianmoo 14y ago
If this is free and ad free, how do you pay the royalties to the artists?
devinegan 14y ago
Nice work Nate! Don't listen to the haters and keep on building what you are stoked about.
setheron 14y ago
This site is great. My attempt (less cooler in comparison) at scraping hypemachine is here: http://metahypem.com http://metahypem.com

121 points by nwienert 14y ago

Nice concept, but find mostly crapy remixes. I couldn't find even the most popular artists (One Republic, Adele). All of "their" songs are remixes, even those marked as originals..

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nwienert 14y ago
Within 10 minutes you've managed to listen to enough songs to judge they are "mostly crappy remixes"? I'm working on expanding the selection, I'm sure that will be a big point of feedback, but no need to make such a negative snap judgement.
- ScottWhigham 14y ago
  I think you're being a little protective here. How much time do you expect the average user is going to give you? I can promise you it's not 10 minutes. You're being somewhat childish, IMO, by not recognizing that this guy took 10 frigging minutes out of his time to check out your site. Thank him, take note of the feedback, and move on. You will get feedback all the time from people you don't agree with but that's not a reason to be so quick to act this way. I hardly think a 10 minute website look is a "snap judgement". You might want to check out this post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/judging-websites.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/judging-websites.ht...
  - nwienert 14y ago
    First, there is and was on launch both One Republic and Adele on the site. And all of their songs are tagged correctly. Also he commented within 10 minutes of me posting it so including time see the post, listen to songs, and write the comment was certainly almost none especially considering this HN which is a place that has rules for quality of comments and good discussion. I judged his feedback unnecessary and negative, not anything personal, which is more to say than what you did. I've read that post and thats talking about someone judging 300 sites not one.

dools 14y ago

Our only works in modern browsers

hnriot 14y ago
of course?
- dools 14y ago
  Well, aside from the fact that I'm on IE9, there is a typo in the text.

nwienert 14y ago

For anyone looking for a little more insight into the whys and hows of the site: http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1 http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1

phildeschaine 14y ago
I'm a little confused on your use of both genres and tags. For the former, how are they determined? Just in a database, pre-decided by you?
- nwienert 14y ago
  Yes, and they need expansion certainly. I get artist genres through EchoNest and plan to expand my genres to match theirs.

andrewmunsell 14y ago

Impressive-- it's incredibly polished and professional looking, especially for something you call a "side project" :)

Jelte12345 14y ago

Looks really great. Just a thing I noticed, when you need to log in and click on the or log in without facebook link, the link persists and toggles back for some reason.

_sentient 14y ago

That looks great, but I would default with the red on red color scheme (which can be changed by hovering over the logo). As a designer, I find it much more eye catching, which helps pique interest in first-time visitors. Also, two minor interface issues: your hover tooltip arrows don't point directly at the "Playlist" and "Me" icons at the top right. Also, the genre list in the sidebar would benefit from a Google+/Facebook style minimalist scroll bar. It wouldn't clutter the feel much, especially if it appeared only on hover, and would make it easier on people without a mouse wheel. Outside of those very minor issues, this looks great!

cwilson 14y ago

Looks like a much more slick version of HypeMachine (www.hypem.com), which I've been using for years. Competition is never a bad thing, so this is great, I'll be trying it out. Very well done for a "side project".

freeslave 14y ago
it's more of a copy of ex.fm (http://ex.fm http://ex.fm) than a slicker hype machine. ex.fm has been around a few years now too.
- chrischen 14y ago
  Yea but if they mainly aggregate music blogs, then it's more in line with hypem.com.
  - freeslave 14y ago
    ex.fm is a music blog aggregator: http://ex.fm/about http://ex.fm/about
    - Kiro 14y ago
      Thanks to your spam I will never ever use ex.fm.

flexxaeon 14y ago

looks great in the iphone. teeniest bit of left/right scrolling is my only nitpick ;)

andygcook 14y ago

Nice work! It's impressive you were able to stick with a side project of this caliber for over a year without giving up or remaining in the feature abyss. This app works really well for music discovery. I just found a Mumford and Sons track I've never heard before, and I thought I had listened to them all. Solid UX touch by never stopping my music when I move around to different pages too. Where are you pulling the songs from? Youtube and Soundcloud? Just FYI - I wanted to skip through a song to see if it was any good, and I couldn't find the progress bar at the bottom. It took my awhile to realize it was at the top. If I'm not mistaken, most music sites have the progress bar at the bottom of the screen (Rdio, Spotify, GrooveShark). Pandora has it at the top though so perhaps I'm wrong.

nwienert 14y ago
Pulling from blogs that post mp3's or soundcloud. It indexes youtube but I can't play youtube without showing the video. A video's section is on the plate for the next release. Thanks for the feedback, the responsive design has the progress bar at the bottom, though I prefer it all on top.
- dshanahan 14y ago
  Where do you source your blogs?

DigitalSea 14y ago

This is the most impressive side project I have ever seen. Everything feels polished, the UI is delicious and the site works and functions very quickly. Very nice work, I would love to know what programming language you built this in perhaps another blog post detailing the tech side of things?

Jarred 14y ago

This is awesome!

frankdenbow 14y ago

Really like how this looks and feels. Interested in the blogs section, how are you grabbing that info? Thats the part I would likely use the most, picking out the few hip hop blogs I go to regularly and just getting to the music quicker.

hoka 14y ago

Add a 'mix' category and I'll pay you if it's done well! New tracks are all well and good, but the continuity of mixes really helps me get in the groove. I've listened to the Essential Mixes, and follow a bunch of podcasts/dj radio shows, but there's got to be stuff from non-DI.fm/Sirius-XM stuff. Sheepymixes on youtube would be a good example.

nwienert 14y ago
Love the idea. Shouldn't be too hard to do.

rkaplan 14y ago

This is fantastic. The UI is wonderful, site design is responsive, and from what I've found so far it has great content. Kudos for you for committing the time to building such a major project and finally shipping. Initial feedback (major to minor): - Please add a button to let me add songs in my feed to a queue rather than cutting off the current song. - There's a bug where, for some reason, the modal popup that I used to sign up / add artists is still capturing mouse events even though it is now invisible. It's taking away my ability to click in the middle of the screen, which is very frustrating cause I can't use search. Not sure why this is happening. It's Z-index is 201 and opacity set to 0 via CSS, if that helps, and I logged in with Facebook. - My screen is small (11" Air), and some parts of the site are cut off height-wise. For example, the left nav bar's "find friends" button. - When I click on a new song, the artist in the top bar updates immediately, but the title takes a few seconds. - All of the letters in the colored boxes next to song names are too far to the right by one pixel. Again, congratulations on shipping! I'd be happy to provide more feedback if you're interested.

goldfeld 14y ago
- When hovering over the left side menu items, I would highlight the text into a much lighter font color--I was already expecting it to happen (and anticipating the eye candy) from all the other apps I've used that do that.
nwienert 14y ago
Thanks for all the feedback and kind words, I will look into them!

_sentient 14y ago

I'm particularly impressed with the responsive design. Did you use one of the responsive frameworks out there, serve different stylesheets, or something else?

nwienert 14y ago
Thank you. It's hand rolled, no grid system or anything too fancy either just unfloats a few things and styling on the header/player.

Jonovono 14y ago

This looks really nice. What technology do you use? Where are the songs playing from? Looks like all soundcloud?

nwienert 14y ago
Wrote a bit about it on my blog: http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1 http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1 "The stack consists of Ruby on Rails with Postgres, Thin, Nginx, Memcached (with Dalli), DelayedJob, and some other parts. The frontend is hand rolled using Bootstrap, SoundManager2 with a custom music player wrapper, and some minor plugins. The live listening is running through an instance of Thin running Faye and PrivatePub." Songs are also found through regular mp3's on sites, along with SoundCloud.

freeslave 14y ago

hey congrats on the hard work, but this really seems like a clone of ex.fm (http://ex.fm http://ex.fm) and a remarkably similar clone at that - what is different about 2u.fm?

nwienert 14y ago
Four comments and links about me cloning them... do you have something personal going on here? One would have been enough. Seems pretty mean spirited to me. There are plenty of things different, biggest being real artist profiles not just a search, filtering by music type on artists, a filtered feed, instant sharing and an inbox, algorithms filter genres by a lot of factors and ways to organize those feeds, responsive design.... I wasn't going to comment until I saw all four or five of your links in here.

graue 14y ago

This looks fantastic. Nothing will play for me, but that's not too surprising since I have neither Flash nor support for MP3s in <audio>. Just curious, which of the two does it use?

collypops 14y ago

This is what stands out for me: "Live listening. While I decided to hide most of the UX I had worked on for launch due to it not being fully baked, if you're friends with someone and you see them "online" in your friends list, you can tune into what they are listening to in real time, and listen to music fully synced together. If they change a song, you change too! This is certainly alpha at this point though, but it generally works." For those who are into 'social' listening, it's worth having a play around with.

freeslave 14y ago
again, ex.fm has had this for some time: http://blog.ex.fm/post/24082043603/featured-feature-listening-right-now-we-quietly http://blog.ex.fm/post/24082043603/featured-feature-listenin...
- nwienert 14y ago
  This is live listening across an entire session, plus live instant sharing when you find one you like. You follow their every song, through playlists or different pages, and it's in sync to the second.
dshanahan 14y ago
This is what excited me too. Elements of TurntableFM-like 'social listening' might be interesting in a new environment.

gfodor 14y ago

It's a cool site, and an amazing accomplishment for a side project, but I really, really have to ask: why did you spend your time building something to add to the hyper-saturated, money black hole that is the music listening/discovery app market? I mean, there are, and have been so many sites like this that have either survived on the border of illegality or have been shut down. And we've got a whole host of above-board legal streaming sites now that are dirt cheap and have a wide variety of music to listen to. What's new here and why should I consider using it? Why will this be around in 6 months and not just die after you run out of money to keep it up or get sued? I'm not asking this to be a dick but I really don't understand why I see a new one of these sites get released every few months that seems to do the same thing as all the others except is free (and probably illegal) or thinks that slightly better music recommendations or "social listening" is a sustainable competitive advantage. edit: Ok, read your blog post, but I guess my question still stands. The improvements you list are fairly marginal improvements over existing stuff IMHO and it seems mildly crazy to put in so much effort to replicate existing sites but add things like responsive design or slightly better Facebook integration. Good luck and I hope you end up turning this into an amazing success so if you can turn me into a believer I am listening :)

baby 14y ago
I get what you're saying but I don't feel like there are a lot of websites to discover music. Besides hypem, pitchfork and sixtyone do you anymore? And I think they could greatly be improved. Music Discovery is a new thing, before we just had the radio, and it's still not as good as it could be.
- gfodor 14y ago
  I pay for and use MOG and their recommendations are pretty good. Certainly this could be the case that "everything sucks I am going to execute better than everyone" but it's a sexy problem (not a schlep) and everyone seems to be working on it.
  - chrischen 14y ago
    Their recommendations use Echonest, and as far as I know so do Rdio and Spotify. You can access those recommendations via an API for free!

dominicf 14y ago

Very good. Found some Led Zeppelin I hadn't listened to for a while.

rachbelaid 14y ago

Nice work, nice layout and UI/UX ... Very impressive for a side project.

rob 14y ago

It would be nice if we could import our iTunes artists as followers.

adrianm 14y ago

Very impressed with this and love the concept. One suggestion: I think this just screams mobile app. I want this on my iPhone and think being able to cache playlists and listen to them while I'm on the go would be incredible.

tubbo 14y ago

Really cool idea! It looks amazing and runs very fast. One issue I have with it is the seeming lock-in of the Echonest service. I have a lot of experience building with the Soundcloud API and I think adding Soundcloud streaming capabilities would be a perfect companion to your app. As much as I like Diplo and Jay-Z, I have no trouble knowing when they release new material. I do sometimes have trouble knowing when artists who don't have the publicity powerhouse behind them are releasing new music. This is the untapped market. You have a great start, it looks amazing and is a joy to navigate. But allow NEW artists to really be discovered through your app, and that is where you will find success.

supersaiyan 14y ago

Hey, love the site, ui is smooth, responsive, and data seems to be loading really fast. Incredibly polished. Do you mind sharing what technologies/frameworks you're using in your stack?

zethus 14y ago

You should disable the app once the limit is reached. Simply inspecting the modal/overlay in chrome or firebug will let you delete the node and continue to use the app without ever logging in/signing up.

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago

There is some bug in this song showing Javascript code instead of the description: http://2u.fm/genres/classic-rock#song-38265 http://2u.fm/genres/classic-rock#song-38265 Pretty nice site; would be nice to be able to login using Twitter.

tbundy 14y ago

Looks nice, seems to be some good tracks. Hypem's downfall (in my opinion) was the point where the frontpage started being bombarded with Kanye West songs. Songs like that don't need to be 'discovered', as they're already jammed into our ears at every opportunity mainstream media has. Hopefully 2U can keep a good balance. Well done nwienert, great launch.

lukeholder 14y ago

something seems off here: http://d.pr/i/WPer http://d.pr/i/WPer (screenshot of app with javascript errors on page)

mattwdelong 14y ago

Nicely done, but I would seriously consider updating your daily limit. I did not have nearly enough time to play around to consider converting as a registered user (I was clicking around). I ended up just deleted the site cookies, went into inspect elements and deleted the modal but I am not your average user and most people wouldn't do that to continue testing out your site, let alone know it could be done. After all that, I am pretty certain I will continue to use your app. Nice job!

hkwon 14y ago

Looks nice. I wonder what will be your next step for 2u.fm. I will be trying it out.

instakill 14y ago

Very nice, why no metal as a category?

readme 14y ago

It seems that for every post I read about someone's awesome project there are 5-6 people saying "Your idea sucks, why'd you waste your time" Guys, do yourself a favor and don't post these comments. You're not sharing any profound insights, you're just compensating for some insecurity you have. In OP's case, I don't especially think he cares whether you thought his idea was the next Google. I base this on the fact that: A.) The site is already mature and B.) title says "my side project for over a year" -- so like, 1 year later, your negative comment is going to change his mind? Yeah, I doubt it. If you put a year of effort into a nice webapp like OPs, you will have users, and people will enjoy your service. Also, this site is very impressive, and makes a good portfolio piece for sure. I don't know if anyone is maybe getting the wrong idea. Personally, I don't click Show HN and then pretend to be PG interviewing the guy for a seed round. I click Show HN's to see cool stuff. If you like it, then try it, use it, whatever. But if you don't have anything constructive to say, then you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
I must sympathize with both sides: I get what some users mean when they criticize projects in this manner. They're saying, "You're so smart and this is all you came up with?" It's not so much an insult as it is disappointment of a talented person. Their mentality is "If I had your talent, I wouldn't have wasted my time on this." But it's important to understand that the whole purpose of side projects is to take a journey, learn, experience, and try out random things. It's impossible to tell accurately weather a project succeeds or not so you have to try. I'm sure if Sergey Brin and Larry Page submitted their Google prototype on HN it would have been met with "Why? There's already Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Lycos, Alta Vista... they do search and they're established, Page Rank is just a feature. What's stopping Lycos or Alta Vista from implimenting their own Page Rank algorithm?". Twitter would have been met with "Only 140 characters? That's not going to get anywhere". (all things that a VC would say) I blame this on Hacker News (emphasis on HACKER) having more startup news than projects, inventions, designs, code samples, and hacking articles. The emphasis on success starts to drown out the emphasis on coding for fun even if you fail. Oddly enough in the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At exactly 49:40 Paul says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but after 6 months we changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about nothing but startup stuff."

buster 14y ago

Wow.. it looks really amazing! Love it :)

ksred 14y ago

This is super impressive. Congrats!

vincehofmeister 14y ago

For a side project I will say I am definitely impressed. The layout is cool, and the design/gui is amazing! I hope this site does well, don't worry about people telling you the music space is too crowded. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Point is you had fun doing it and hopefully learned a few things along the way. Congratulations to you.

vincentleeuwen 14y ago

I love the recommendations straight at the top, already found some really cools stuff. As regard to the genres: if you're to expand them, I would love to see genres like Disco (not 80s but happy techno, see 22tracks.com), Relax (lounge) and Techno (Kalkbrenner style) I'm from Amsterdam so might have some different tastes when it comes to dance music :) All in all, a super cool (side) project! Thanks!

synapticism 14y ago

Very impressive. I don't use music discovery sites at all but your single-handed ability to conceive, design, and build a project of this quality is inspirational. I'll be keeping an eye on you for a while yet. What sort of file quality are you looking for from music blog applicants? Can you scrape files out of ZIP archives?

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

Works great and I've even got a flash blocker. BTW, are you using sound manager 2? - I strongly advise you to round the corners of buttons with border-radius:3px; so they look more clickable.

JulianWasTaken 14y ago

I'm unable to change my password. When attempting to do so I see "Current password can't be blank" despite it not being blank.

thekillingtree 14y ago

I see some code in the 1st artist bio: http://i.imgur.com/1DtB5.png http://i.imgur.com/1DtB5.png Otherwise, very neat site. I don't think there can be too many music exploration sites.

gbertb 14y ago

Great job on the site. Really loving the UI overall UX. One small thing is that I kept clicking on the waveform visualization to scrub the track--probably since i've used to soundcloud and such.

milianmoo 14y ago

If this is free and ad free, how do you pay the royalties to the artists?

devinegan 14y ago

Nice work Nate! Don't listen to the haters and keep on building what you are stoked about.

setheron 14y ago

This site is great. My attempt (less cooler in comparison) at scraping hypemachine is here: http://metahypem.com http://metahypem.com