Ask HN: Feedback on Mixest, my HTML5 ironic indie Pandora

by DTrejo • 16 years ago

111 107 16 years ago

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

Hi HN, my friends and I have been working on this app for the last few weeks. The audio is handled by jplayer, and we've really enjoyed working with it.

We'd really appreciate any feedback you have for us!

Edit: I almost forgot - the app should work on the ipad and iphone browsers - let us know if it is horribly broken!

paul9290• 16 years ago

Nice job!

So Jplayer works in IE7/8, as well as firefox,chrome, safari and opera? The browsers that do not support <audio> tag it falls back to flash?

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

exactly :)

shortformblog4• 16 years ago

I just tried it on the iPhone and iPad … and while the site loaded, nothing played, even after hitting the play button. The iPhone is on 3.0, the iPad on 3.2.

Edit Got it working, but it took a lot of clicking.

sherb113• 16 years ago

I like it. It's very simple and if I enjoy the music, I can see myself coming here when I want something fresh to listen to.

That being said, the text and icons are really hard to see. They blend into the white background too much.

*edit: The password is showing clear text. Why?

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

We ask for very little information from users, and asking for an email to reset the pass felt like too much.* Thanks for bringing this up as we are probably going to change this and make it more secure.

*when you can see your pass it's harder to forget

SkyMarshal3• 16 years ago

Three fields should be ok - username, pass, confirm pass. Better that than visible passwords. If users want to add their email and other info later, have an Account page for that.

blasdel2• 16 years ago

Please stop paying attention to Jakob Nielsen.

Password masking, along with asking for a password confirmation, is what everyone expects. Any affected attempt at 'simplifying' that UI without a total transformation (like no accounts at all, not shit like openid) leads directly to anger and disillusionment when their plaintext password is staring them in the face.

Use <input type=password>. Use two of them when registering, and one when logging in. It's a basic affordance, don't fuck with it.

alanh2• 16 years ago

I agree 100% with everything Sherb is saying.

I also liked the ajax signup. I was very afraid of the song being killed.

I have to say, I non-ironically LOVE Mixest!

Edit: Slightly irked that Play and Pause are text (a minor quibble, to be sure) — Just a guess: You guys searched for the Unicode play/pause/next icons and, having realized they don’t exist, gave up on that idea for now, right?

Feature request: Last.fm scrobbling. Incredible Pandora doesn’t have this. They aren’t really direct competitors in terms of the use-cases they focus on.

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

We do have hotkeys if that makes things any better :)

Press '?' to get them to show up (just like gmail).

Also there's an easter egg but it's not konami so I don't expect anyone to find it.

pixelcloud• 16 years ago

I agree, change those shades of grey to something a bit more readable.

bjoernw• 16 years ago

Great, I too can see myself coming back looking for new music. One thing: I had to think about 5 seconds to figure the "More Obscure" part out. Maybe I'm just slow but the word choice didn't make it obvious to me right away.

Design-wise I would just like to see the box with the controls and I'm ready to look further below for the "about" and "team" things. The bottom part seems a little crowded right now.

fname• 16 years ago

One thing: I had to think about 5 seconds to figure the "More Obscure" part out. Maybe I'm just slow but the word choice didn't make it obvious to me right away

In FF3, at least, there's a tooltip that explains what it means.

malbiniak2• 16 years ago

is this a personal project, or something you're hoping to get a revenue model behind?

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

This is a personal project, but at some point it would be nice to add a revenue model so we can help artists make money (and maybe a bit for ourselves too :).

dangrossman• 16 years ago

I cannot read anything on your site unless I tilt my screen back. Many laptop screens do not handle contrast between light shades of gray well.

wwortiz• 16 years ago

It is hard to see on my desktop even.

petervandijck2• 16 years ago

Hard to read here too. Contrast please, at least a little.

ericz12• 16 years ago

We are definitely going to improve on the text color contrast

EDIT: We've improved the text color contrast! Apologies to everyone who had to tilt their monitors or squint. The page should be much clearer now.

vog3• 16 years ago

It's still too bright. The text became readable, but the tabs, progress bar and the login fields are still hard to see.

Update: You might want to rethink your overall graphical design. A general rule of thumb states that things should first look good in black & white (no gray, no colors). You shouldn't rely on colors until you get it right without them. If you then add colors, you are quite flexible, and can thus create better looking results.

Also, you then won't require too many colors for your design to work, which is especially important in your case where you rely on too many different gray tones. That seems to be the deeper cause for your trouble. It's easy to pick two good gray tones that have a good contrast to each other (i.e. black, white, gray1, gray2). When you add a third gray tone it's quite hard to pick good ones. Adding a fourth gray tone and you are lost! Well, at least that's my experience, unless you have a very good monitor and are creating a print design rather than a web design.

teye• 16 years ago

Will you have to adhere to the same kind of restrictions Pandora does (limited # of skips/hr, etc.)?

If you're going to have a heart icon, you might as well make pause and next icons too. Or use a word instead of the heart.

Too many different font sizes. The signup form needs a little love. Maybe a little space between the fields?

Good-looking, overall, and works very well in Chrome.

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

I'm going to say no when it comes to limited skips. We don't want to force you to listen to bad music. As for the signup form, our css needs a bit of love. We appreciate the feedback!

petervandijck2• 16 years ago

Doesn't play anything for me?

sridatta• 16 years ago

What browser/OS are you using?

jolan2• 16 years ago

Works fine in Chrome/Firefox/Safari for me. Maybe your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio?

sjs• 16 years ago

Not all the songs play for me in Safari 5 on OS X.

jackowayed3• 16 years ago

A few thoughts:

* Cool idea, I'll definitely use this if the quality of music is high.

* I agree with the comments that having my password show up in the clear is bad. It surprised me. And if I sign in, then hit "log out" before closing the tab, it makes the login form viewable with my password still there. Very bad. While you figure out another solution, can you at least add autocomplete="off" to the <input> tag so that my browser definitely won't remember it?

* This does not work on my HTC Droid Incredible. When it loads there's no song title or artist like there is when I load it on my computer. Then I can hit "Next" to make a song title appear, but it doesn't play.

* How do you get artists? I see the "upload", but how did you get the initial artists, and do you have any plans to incentivize artists to sign up? (You may not need it, a lot of indie bands just like sharing their music, especially if they're not well-known.)

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

Hi jackowayed, at the moment android has trouble with HTML5, so we are building an android app. Our goal is to make it super easy to listen to music on any device. We're also working on an iphone app.

The clearing of passwords after login must have slipped by our testing, thank you for pointing that out. [update: autocomplete has just been turned off]

Our initial set of music was scraped from various indie blogs, but in the future we hope to get most of our music from uploads.

We are thinking of some ways to help artists make money off their music. We may offer high-quality downloads to listeners (and pay artists when the songs are bought). This would be for artist uploads only.

jackowayed3• 16 years ago

>Our initial set of music was scraped from various indie blogs

Is that legal? Was it all licensed under Creative Commons (or similar) licenses that allow commercial use?

adamesque• 16 years ago

You already offer high-quality downloads, to anyone who uses a web inspector to look at your <audio> element's current src attribute! A Chrome / Safari extension would probably make it a one-click process.

Which (speaking as a musician) I think I'm okay with; if you're going to go to that much trouble to swipe it, my gut says you weren't going to be a paying customer to begin with.

zackola4• 16 years ago

I like it a lot. - Where's the music coming from? - I would like a dislike song button though. If I never hear runawaydroid again, I'll have lived a full and happy life.

zackola4• 16 years ago

Also, where are the affiliate links? I want to buy some of the songs I've heard! :)

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

We have not added that yet, though we will figure out a way! Some of the problems we've encountered so far: indie artists don't upload to mainstream sites with complicated sign-ups.

This means it will be tough for us to use amazon affiliate links for example. We are determined! We may even revenue share with artists, who knows.

ericz12• 16 years ago

You can do that with "More Obscure"

zackola4• 16 years ago

I don't want more obscure, I want don't play me fucking runawaydroid.

EDIT: I see. I should hover more often.

twidlit• 16 years ago

VC guy: What problem are you trying to solve? Do you have traction? Whats your business model? Do you have patents?

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

My answer: monetize monetize monetize. No really we are thinking of some things, which I've alluded to in other comments.

_ouxp• 16 years ago

I'm really enjoying it so far. One improvement you could make would be to make hearts stateful for 'just listened' songs. It took me clicking over to the favorites tab to realize it had saved the first time.

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

Yes, you have a good point. We are considering moving the two next to each other so it is more intuitive. Thanks for pointing that out

ericz12• 16 years ago

When I click the heart on "just listened" it is stateful, in that it turns red. Unless I'm interpreting that wrong.

carbon8• 16 years ago

    -          <input id="password" autocomplete="off" tabindex="2" type="text"> 
    +          <input tabindex="2" type="password">

I'm looking forward to trying it out next time I'm working. Resist the temptation to add too much stuff; you're on the right track so far.

zackola4• 16 years ago

The other issue with not using a type="password" is that my phone puts caps lock on for filling out that field.

Also, on my iPhone the <3 for favoriting a song does not show up, however it is great that the music keeps playing in the background.

byw• 16 years ago

Looks/works great, though more info or a link to the artist's website would be nice.

edit: oh, and when I bookmark it, I have to manually delete the song name from the title.

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

Hmm, the bookmark issue is one we need to work on.

For artist uploads we plan to have links to their personal sites (artist upload not yet implemented). Glad you like it :)

mtodd2• 16 years ago

* if I have music playing in the background, the music should automatically start instead of requiring me to switch back to the screen and manually restart it * make the password field a password type input element * optionally allow anybody to switch password to a regular text input field

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

We've had reports of safari needing focus in order to continue playing. We're looking into a fix - this is safari correct?

mtodd2• 16 years ago

Correct! The most recent version.

pstinnett• 16 years ago

Looks good although I would increase the contrast a bit (hard to read on my laptop - others have already said this though).

I'd be careful where you're pulling the music from. Maybe look into other sources for getting tracks. I made an application (http://www.pitchforked.com) that scraped Pitchfork for best new music albums/artists and then grabbed tracks from 8tracks.com. They have a (fairly) easy to use api that you could take a look at.

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

hey pstinnet, I really like it - I have no trouble seeing anything on your app. We're definitely going to take inspiration and thanks for the tip about 8tracks!

imagii• 16 years ago

-there isn't enough contrast between #ddd and #fff

-Disable keyboard navigation while registering/logging in (I'm in Opera, so it could just be that)

Otherwise this is really great! I like the minimalism.

phil• 16 years ago

Turns out <audio> elements work on the iPad: the music keeps playing when you've switched to other tabs (though the javascript to set up the next song doesn't fire until you switch back).

But, I'm finding starting a song buggy: I have to tap pause, then tap play for it to start playing.

ericz12• 16 years ago

Hi,

I'm David's friend and a dev for Mixest.

iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch's mobile Safari does not allow auto playing of music unless it's triggered from a user event (like clicking the Play button). That's why you have to click play you first load the page and when it loads the next song.

"But, I'm finding starting a song buggy: I have to tap pause, then tap play for it to start playing."

This was fixed for iPhone and iPod Touch. I forgot to include iPad into the mix!! Thanks for the bug find

coryl• 16 years ago

Those username/password forms were confusing

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

Could you explain a bit more? Our goal is for nothing to be confusing, so more information would be super helpful

adbge• 16 years ago

Speaking from my own experience, the form was a little disorienting because the contrast on the grey/white was low enough that I didn't notice the text right off. I'm just guessing that the parent experienced a similar moment of confusion.

panic• 16 years ago

This is really great; I'd love to see an iPhone app!

ericz12• 16 years ago

Thanks! We're working on one. For now though, the website works in mobile Safari

volare• 16 years ago

I need a volume control (especially when using multiple applications with audio).

todayiamme• 16 years ago

Do you intend to analyze the users taste/preferences?

This is just a suggestion and in all probability you guys must have thought about this. So I'm sorry if I am wasting your time.

Why don't you make a desktop application like last.fm that analyzes the music lying on a user's hard-drive using local resources and then uploads the info to you? I think that it may be possible for you to take a speech recognition API and modify it to recognize patterns in songs instead. Something like Pandora's music genome but automated, and then as User data builds up you can use it to predict what the user would like on your end.

Thus, this way you save server load by using the user's PC for some of that heavy lifting (i.e. analyzing their library) and analyzing the music on your server using your scheme would be a one off effort. You could make something like custom info files denoting details about a song that can be picked up when you run the app. It would be so cool to have a service like this.

P.S. - Thanks to you guys I am now in love with Yael Naim.

SkyMarshal3• 16 years ago

If you do that, make it optional. I kind of like just 'Nexting' through a random list, since I feel like it is exposing me to music and genre's it wouldn't had it known my current playlists.

Also, a search feature for me to find Yael Naim on mixest would be nice too :).

Otherwise, so far so good. Like the simplicity. Question: Is the only thing that 'More Obscure' does is to suppress songs you've heard before or don't want to hear again? The words imply a little more.

Only complaint is the registration password field needs to be obscured, instead of plaintext. Always disconcerting to type my password and actually see it, even in the privacy of my home PC.

ericz12• 16 years ago

More Obscure does more!

The algorithm is not plainly random. It factors in how many times people have clicked more obscure for a particular artist!

tldr; When you click More Obscure, the song won't play again for you. The entire artist will play less for everyone.

thefool• 16 years ago

Not logged in, when I mouse over the "like" button in ie8 it keeps flashing.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

As much as I love the idea of a button labeled "More Obscure", and I do love it, it doesn't really have the function that name implies.

ericz12• 16 years ago

I'm glad you like the button =P

there IS one thing it does which isn't advertised: we actually use the "More Obscure" click data in our algorithm to select which song plays next. So by clicking More Obscure you're helping us fine tune our library so that everyone only hears more obscure music =]

We'll definitely improve on communicating that aspect of it.

empire292• 16 years ago

I agree - there doesn't seem to be a correlation between obscurity and me liking/not wanting to listen to something. There is plenty of extremely obscure music that i do enjoy on a personal level.

I dont know how your algorithm works, but it doesnt seem like it would be collecting accurate data if i click "more obscure" for music i just "dont like" (this might be just be part of the cute irony of the site though) .. anyhow - good idea and execution.

lugia• 16 years ago

love it! elegant

_exec• 16 years ago

Love it!

Are you planning on releasing a desktop application?

Also:

1. Username / password fields are a bit confusing 2. Do let the users know that registering won't pause / stop the music 3. Icons Icons Icons!

Otherwise, nice job :)

DTrejo17• 16 years ago

At the moment there are no plans for a desktop app - though we are going to make it super easy to run on iPhone and Android (and iPad).

shortformblog4• 16 years ago

This is a great idea. The use of AJAX to keep everything on one page is kinda like how MSNBC has made its article pages require as little clicking as possible. Except less maximalist. For what it's worth, I put it on my blog and referred to it as "A pretty badass HTML5 take on the Pandora model."

I'm going to try this on the iphone. I like how the design is clearly made with that in mind, while still being perfectly usable on the desktop.

eam• 16 years ago

Just tried it on my iPhone. It works pretty awesomely!

malbiniak2• 16 years ago

i'm curious -- what part of this is a great idea? for example, is it the html5 execution (and flash rollback), or the music library, etc.?

shortformblog4• 16 years ago

The dead simplicity and versatility. Pandora is nowhere near this lightweight. Most music services are way more complex than this. The way it uses HTML5 is pretty sweet and well-thought-out.

mcritz• 16 years ago

The site works amazingly well!

The logotype is very tightly letterspaced. Some letters overlap. Maybe try a different font face to try than Voluptua.

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

You say HTML5, but the music doesn't play until I enable a Flash object in the corner. Firefox 3.6.6.

ericz12• 16 years ago

Hi Tor,

One problem we encountered with development was Firefox's HTML5 <audio> not supporting MP3, so we have to use a flash player as a fallback for FF.

Hopefully we'll have a better solution for this in the future :)

Edit: This page has more info about HTML5 <audio> support: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/

doublec• 16 years ago

If you plan to go commercial while using MP3, don't forget the licensing requirements for streaming MP3 and encoding:

http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/#4

(not saying you need a license, just pointing out that you might need to check)

aw3c22• 16 years ago

I am with Opera 10.60 on Linux. HTML Audio is well supported. Yet your site does not play anything, does not display an error. It also prompts me to install Flash at the top of the screen which I find weird on a "We are HTML5!" page. Contrast is very low. No sane no-javascript fallback.

ericz12• 16 years ago

Sorry about that. The problem with Opera 10 is that it doesn't support the MP3 codec for HTML5. Right now our solution to the two major browsers (FF, Opera) that don't support HTML5 and MP3 together is to use a Flash fallback, hence you see the Flash message. We've found that this solution works for a majority of listeners. Unfortunately certain setups will escape support.

Hopefully we can find a better solution in the future.

aw3c22• 16 years ago

I thought Opera on Linux used gstreamer and all its available plugins. Might be wrong though. Anyways apparently your customer support is nice and great. ;-)

ashoknayar225• 16 years ago

Love it. The Username/Password fields need to be more identifiable though, it wasn't that easy to recognize where the fields really are (with the "We're New" thing looming).

How do you curate content?

sjm• 16 years ago

The player is fantastic – excellent job there. I think there's still some issues with the colours/contrast though; the white on very light blue is a bit distracting. I would probably also try some different fonts, but that's just me.

Apart from that, I really like it. I love the minimalism, and again, seriously impressed with the player.

messel• 16 years ago

What's the advantage of this over a site like Pandora or Last.fm where I can easily program music I prefer?

I read some more The algorithm is social crowd filtered as opposed to individually tuned. That's pretty interesting.

I can enjoy the simplicity of the design and interface, but at this level why not go all app since there's no network effects to leverage with a web interface?

stuaxo• 16 years ago

Definitely submitting tunes to lastfm would make this for me.

maw• 16 years ago

It doesn't work if flash is blocked (Chromium 6.0.451.0 (51013), FlashBlock - Version: 0.9.30). I think because there's not enough room for the override button to show.

Nice music so far, though. And I like the minimalist interface too.

phreanix• 16 years ago

Great site. I hope you are able to address the privacy issues brought up by the others here but otherwise I'm totally enjoying it. You might want to put in a couple of buttons to quickly share the site and/or a particular song on facebook/twitter as well.

autarch• 16 years ago

You don't know what the word "ironic" means. That's my feedback.

Ironic does not mean sarcastic.

ynd• 16 years ago

Love it. One minor detail: on the ipad it doesn't automatically switch between songs, you have to press play each time. I don't know if that can be fixed though.

xpaulbettsx• 16 years ago

The 2nd song you played was by Joanna Newsom. Sold.

shortformblog4• 16 years ago

Tip for you guys: You should link every artist to an Amazon (or eMusic) page for the artist using a referral code. Instant revenue stream.

robgough• 16 years ago

Nice. Would like to reiterate Last.FM scrobbling requests.

Also, could you log my last 20 played tracks, or tracks listened to in the past 24-48 hours, so that if I leave the site and come back later I don't keep hearing the same track. Listened to 3-4 songs, accidentally left the page -- returned, and then got a repeat straight away.

Would also be nice to see a history of tracks, but Last.FM integration would solve that neatly.

edit: and a back button please, tracks can be slowed to load (pre-load the next track?) and sometimes I click next as I think it's stalled, but with hindsight it hasn't and misses the track.

texasice• 16 years ago

Nice site. Love that the proxy at my work doesnt block it.

Sephr• 16 years ago

Mind making it save a cookie so I don't have to enter my password every single time I go to mixest?

Ask HN: Feedback on Mixest, my HTML5 ironic indie Pandora

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