Show HN: Bandhiking (Unofficial Bandcamp Radio)

https://bandhiking.isandrew.com/

by rendaw • 4 years ago

20 9 4 years ago

bandhiking.isandrew.com

rendaw4• 4 years ago

Author here, if anyone's interested I'd be glad if you'd give it a try. Some preemptive answers:

How is music selected?

Randomly from the first two pages or so of the top lists. They're scraped very gently daily, so if you listen to everything you'll get yesterday's tops, etc.

Why no recommendation algorithm?

Piggybacking off work hosting, I only have like 2gb of storage. Preventing manipulation seems hard, and I know nothing about recommendation algorithms.

It'll take forever to find new music listening to whole songs.

I'd like 30s samples (maybe a few seconds from different parts of the song) too, but this was easy to implement. It's just supposed to be better than manually clicking through the player on the front page. Basically you'd put it on (like the real radio) while you do other things.

That said, I typically find one or two amazing albums a month, and probably a handful of decent albums a week. After disabling a few genres locally, songs I dislike enough to skip only come on rarely.

Is this ethical?

It's designed so you never listen to a song more than once and subsequent plays must be done through the Bandcamp site. And I think most artists would like more exposure.

Texas isn't a country (yet)

The locations provided by Bandcamp seem to be free text, including some nonsense.

csw-001• 4 years ago

This is such a neat idea! I’ve been doing this manually for years… I’m surprised Bandcamp hasn’t done something like this on its own. The Bandcamp weekly show is cool, and I appreciate curation, but a simple random walk through the best sellers as “radio” is what I’ve always wanted.

Thanks!

politelemon• 4 years ago

I really like this idea, good effort to make it. I do like Bandcamp, and many artists I've bought from tend to be there, so this should help me with discovering even more of what I like.

I think I've run into some weird issue maybe you can tell me what I'm doing wrong. I unchecked all the top level options. Then I went to Rock and under that I chose Post Rock only and unchecked every other item under Rock. Now when I try to go to the play section, there's nothing I just get a black box. Also when I refresh, the genres section seems to be slightly messed up.

https://i.imgur.com/mXmtDCb.png

https://i.imgur.com/BMpLL8o.png

Was I too specific?

Also I'm not clear if the top level items, whether they need to be checked or unchecked.

rendaw4• 4 years ago

Sorry about that, I'll check this out later today/tomorrow! The three top levels (Rank/Genre/Country) are an intersection, so you need at least one thing checked in each... I'm not sure if you did that but it may have lead to no tracks.

And yeah... it should be showing the Electronica header there. Hopefully I can reproduce this, and the code isn't that complex.

If you have one thing in Rank checked, one thing in Country checked (All), Rock checked, and within Rock Post Rock checked that should be a valid filter. There _is_ a possibility that no post rock music has topped charts in a month (which is about all the scraped tracks I can store in 2gb) so it's just not finding anything to show you. If you press the next button it may say something like "No tracks found".

Edit: Probably just really need more space. But maybe in the meantime I could show hints about the number of tracks in each subcategory after the category name...

vladstudio2• 4 years ago

Excited to give it a try!

It took me some time to uncheck all genres except "Ambient" :-) but now I got myself a nice background music station for programming.

Caduceus1• 4 years ago

Love it! Bit like Musicovery but with way better music! Will you keep developing/supporting this? I will definitely use this a lot!

rendaw4• 4 years ago

I've had it up for 2.5 years now with minimal changes. I'm not sure there's any low hanging fruit for improvements but I hope to keep it alive and make bug fixes here and there if there are any!

vladstudio2• 4 years ago

OK here is some feedback (or is it better to use GitLab for that?)

* no one ever reads instructions :-) If user makes any changes to settings (genre, etc), I'd suggest to show an overlay saying something like "advance to the next track to apply changes"

* any chance for keyboard shortcuts? Space to pause/resume, right arrow for next.

That's all so far! Music is power.

rendaw4• 4 years ago

This works! Good points, I'll look into adding a note.

This is a hack around the Bandcamp embedded player, injecting code in a weird way and reverse engineering some stuff -- I actually tried to hook it up to the "media control api" for play/pause/next/volume but I wasn't able to get it to work properly.

I'm +1 for the feature though, if I can figure out how to get it to work. I'm a keyboard person too.

Show HN: Bandhiking (Unofficial Bandcamp Radio)

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