Show HN: Banger.show – Create colorful visuals for your songs in seconds

by samokhovets • 3 years ago

84 65 3 years ago

I made an app for music producers to tease their music in a fancy way. Something that looks better than this: https://twitter.com/eprombeats/status/1647072160547246081

hideo• 3 years ago

i have the inexplicable urge to whip a llama's ass

justzisguyuknow• 3 years ago

Seriously though is this app a joke? WinAmp was doing way more "stunning" visualizations than this back in 1998...

autoexec2• 3 years ago

For free too! Whatever happened to making cool stuff and sharing it because it was cool?

LadyCailin2• 3 years ago

This is neat, but no way in hell would I pay $8 a month for it. I’d maybe be fine using credits, but not a subscription.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey, thanks for feedback! Yeah, I've been considering this type of pricing. For example, you buy X amount of seconds and use them whenever you want. I'm curious, are you a musician?

LadyCailin2• 3 years ago

I am, yes, and such a service is in principal interesting, but I don’t produce enough music per month to want have a monthly subscription - at any price point.

immy• 3 years ago

Curious to hear what you learned so far in doing market research with artists

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey! I'm still learning and testing, but here's some of my thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36622992#36623549

ugh1232• 3 years ago

If I decline the collection of cookies via your popup, then I can't view the site? I believe that's in violation of something, and also really lame.

Edit: Here's the actual text from the GDPR rules (EU)

"The emphasis on “specific website content” clarifies that websites should not make conditional “general access” to the site on acceptance of all cookies but can only limit certain content if the user does not consent to cookies (e.g.: for e-commerce websites, whose main purpose is to sell products, not accepting (non-functional) cookies should not prevent a user from buying products on this website)."

https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

I think you just saved me, sir. Thanks for pointing it out, I just forgot about that "quick fix" I left at the development stage. Fixing!

ugh1232• 3 years ago

Cool thanks and awesome project =)

BLKNSLVR• 3 years ago

ProjectM is the spiritual successor to Winamp's visualiser:

https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Looks cool! But the point was to provide a fast way to make vids. It's not about git cloning, building from source etc. It's about compromise between good UX and how output looks.

TehCorwiz• 3 years ago

It's on Steam. Works on Linux too. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1358800/projectM_Music_Vi...

Meph5042• 3 years ago

did you look at the repo, there are several binaries that don't require anything more than download and install.

pbronez• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing this! I loved music visualizers back in the day and have been missing them. I wonder if there’s a way to package this into a TVOS app…

m3kw92• 3 years ago

Looks like a practice site for Saas, seriously, what was the market research like to see if someone would pay for this service?

zerkten• 3 years ago

I suspect that's their point, or maybe that of their client. Following the footer you find that it's built by a company that focuses on MVPs:

"A small team of high-skilled product developers has created and launched mini-startups for the last 5 years. We will build and help to validate your product idea in 30 days."

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

In this case, that's our product. Managed by musician (me) :)

Sorry for being offtopic, but you can find my artist page if you search for "Tequila Funk". I make electronic music.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey, there's was no specific "market research" or anything like that.

I run a music project called Tequila Funk (you can check Spotify).

I noticed a lot of musicians just record their phone screen with Dropbox app player (because they're exporting snippets to Ableton Live) or recording their DAW (which requires setup). Some examples:

https://twitter.com/littlesnakexoxo/status/16470785687852277... https://twitter.com/eprombeats/status/1647072160547246081 https://twitter.com/nyptane/status/1669404466083143680 https://twitter.com/jayjaytet/status/1639613178412670980 https://twitter.com/staynsdubs/status/1664496810268688384

All I wanted is to provide a way to pick a file from Dropbox and get a video to post in your socials in around ~60 seconds. And do this from your phone!

I see people telling that there's a lot of open source visualizers, Winamp and all that jazz. Yeah, sure. But for me personally it's tough to setup all these. All I wanted is to make videos fast, even without using a computer. Most musicians can't clone github repo or setup audio routing lol

57FkMytWjyFu• 3 years ago

What's tough for me is finding a reason to give you 8 dollars a month. All that other stuff you talk about is pretty easy. This is not an audience of people who are intimidated by github or audio routing.

twosdai• 3 years ago

Great response, love your project. I'm a big music nerd and did a bunch of work in radio for a while.

Personally I think that this project is really onto something, I can see music visualization being a really great integrated feature into a lot of different pieces of software, such as in a spotify player, or ableton, youtube etc...

I think that your idea is in the right place but your go to market motion needs some work as other people pointed out. I don't know if you're going to find a lot of solo producers, or individual devs willing to pay 8$ a month for this.

I could see there being a generous free tier and then having it scale as the use of the product increases. There are also other options for changing monetization.

If you want to talk about this more, I work with companies a lot to discuss pricing strategy and gtm motions. Feel free to ping me my contact info is in my profile.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

I like that the idea is easy to get, and it seem very very niche but the pricing 8/m seem like a sticker shock effect. Are you getting good subscription increases?

97-109-107• 3 years ago

Contrary to most commenters, I'd believe there might be an audience for this.

All the rivalry and shady tricks on Spotify suggest that the competition to get attention as an emerging artist is huge.

What you mentioned about dropbox and screen recording was a great observation. I would double down on the niche and see how else are artist trying to gain an edge when promoting.

I think we here don't really appreciate how narrow the average online producers' technical expertise is.

social_quotient• 3 years ago

For those asking who would pay for this. I’d pay for an api that did this. We have a platform that gets a lot of audio files and it would be cool to run them through something like this to generate the video viz for it.

I think the term is audiogram but minus the transcript.

While writing this reply I found this https://getaudiogram.com/ So maybe it’s something to check out. (I’m not affiliated)

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey, we've coded internal api that takes three params:

1. Audio file URL 2. Duration in frames 3. Frame rate (FPS)

And outputs a .mp4 video file to S3 bucket.

So it's quite easy to make a REST API version. Let's keep in touch if solution mentioned above does not satisfy you. My email: igor@tequilafunk.com

npollock• 3 years ago

(disclosure: affiliated)

we have an API for converting audio into video - https://getaudiogram.com/api/

it's not self-serve at the moment, we manually onboard new clients

bob-09• 3 years ago

None of the visuals are loading for me. SSL errors for both yandex and your CDN on my network.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Strange.. if it's Yandex and you're from USA/Canada it's expectable I guess, but CDN is just AWS Cloudfront US East 1. I'll try to investigate this.

valevk• 3 years ago

Looks nice, but are there any other visuals than the three you demoed? Also, is your user name in any way related to the bulgarian mobster that got killed in Amsterdam?

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey, thank you for feedback! At the moment, there's only three:

1. CDJ 3000 2. Specre 3. Circle

But I was working on another two and decided not to include in the first version:

4. Trip (https://cdn.banger.show/visuals/160-Tequila-Funk-Drop-The-Bo...) 5. Perimeter (https://cdn.banger.show/visuals/1579016767_flux-pavilion-i-c...)

Be careful if your internet traffic is limited, videos are not compressed/optimized and 150-300mb both.

whatatita• 3 years ago

Out of all five you've shared here (the three built in and these two), Trip is my favorite. The visualization seems fuller, maybe because it uses the whole width/height. It grabs my attention more than the others.

Cool project.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

And about the username – nope, it's not related. It's my last name :)

chaosprint• 3 years ago

Cannot try unless I accept the cookies.

noizejoy• 3 years ago

As a music maker, I’m very hesitant to upload my songs to a new cloud service until after they’re published.

This doesn’t invalidate this new service, but it might limit its competitiveness compared to self hosted apps.

Eduard• 3 years ago

As a movie maker, I'm very hesitant to upload trailers to YouTube until I realize no one pays for and watches my movies without marketing or promotion.

joenot443• 3 years ago

$8/mo? For a widget? Compared to what folks are doing on ShaderToy, the visualizations you've got here are pretty elementary. I like the spirit, but I think you need to reconsider what you're charging for what you're actually offering.

mplewis• 3 years ago

Are you planning to add more visualizations? The stuff on here is pretty rudimentary compared to what I'm already seeing producers put on my Twitter and YouTube timelines.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Yeah sure, the hardest thing is to render cool 3D graphics at scale so it’s simple 2D visuals now

infinitezest• 3 years ago

Did you consider using an existing visualizer like ProjectM to generate the visuals and then record the output to a file? I have no idea if their license would allow you to monetize that though.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Not yet, seems like it's a lot harder than I do it right now. It might require coding a thing that screen captures the visualizer itself, which is really unstable.

All the visuals are done by HTML/CSS and Web Audio API now.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Pretty negative response from the commenters.

danfarrelly• 3 years ago

I've seen the demo of this and it's pretty slick! It looks super easy to use and it uses Inngest under the hood which is awesome (I'm one of the co-founders of Inngest [https://www.inngest.com] so it's always very cool to see fun and creative projects like this launch with our product - also Sam is great!

goodoldneon• 3 years ago

Yea! We got a sneak peak of this in the Inngest community server :)

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey Dan! Thanks for the feedback and your product, it's never been easier to build background-processing things with Inngest.

appleflaxen• 3 years ago

I miss Winamp

boredemployee• 3 years ago

Man, I love the idea.

But: 1) It's expensive for most music producers that can't make a single dollar out of their music

2) If you want to reach rich producers the visuals need to improve by A LOT. It looks really amateur, being honest here.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm reconsidering things right now, free trial and more cheap, usage-based billing are coming.

eek2121• 3 years ago

I actually kinda wished HN had a separate category for free vs. paid HN stuff. Don't get me wrong, I've no issue paying for a product, but to click on something that is seemingly interesting only to find out it is overpriced for what it offers? huge turn off. Many of these projects (not necessarily this one...haven't looked yet) simply wrap open source into a 'cloud' offering and charge $X for Y.

I do hope we can get some type of filter for these things, or if not, HN should start charging a ton of money for these types of posts.

uean• 3 years ago

I don’t really get it. How is this better (or needed) when compared with MilkDrop?

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Hey, the main purpose of the tool is not to enjoy visualizations yourself, but to share with your audience if you're musician. Specifically for teasing your songs that are work-in-progress (snippets).

1. You don't need a computer to make a visualizer video 2. You (obviously) don't need Winamp and video/audio capturing software to make a video.

Meph5042• 3 years ago

I blows my mind how people who make any random thing see it as something worthy of a subscription. Really $8/month there have been free products doing this since the early 90s.

autoexec2• 3 years ago

I also had winamp

pdntspa• 3 years ago

No worries fam ZGameEditor got you covered and you get FLStudio with it for one flat fee

unconed• 3 years ago

Sad that a feature that used to be part of the music player is now a thing people bake into videos so it can be posted to social media.

And these visualizations are ass. Yes, I'm allowed to say that.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Yep, maybe those visualizations from Winamp looked better, but again – it's all about balance between the good user experience for non-techie musicians and the output.

I wish there's was cool built-in visualizer for iOS player, but here's how it usually looks these days:

https://twitter.com/killthenoise/status/1661428160125366273

deliriumchn• 3 years ago

8 bucks a month for exactly 3 visualisers, something that was free from 90s, not to mention that free[1] and more functional alternatives exist? I think its worth to think about your pricing strategy and adjust prices based on value provided at this moment, not in future years.

1 - https://vizzy.io/

MattRix• 3 years ago

This is a neat idea, but I feel like you’re missing the key thing that DAW recordings (and even soundcloud playback) have, which is the ability to see the song structure and anticipate what is coming (the drop etc).

If you can come up with a visualizer that shows the entire song/clip at once, I think that’ll be much stronger.

samokhovets22• 3 years ago

Thank you! That's a unique idea tho, I'll consider it.

Despite the fact that DAW recording is technically more difficult to do, sometimes it looks really cool - when you open a bunch of VST visualizers (like iZotope Insight, Minimeters and others), and also people use custom themes for their DAW (for example in the case of Abeton. I often see this), which distinguishes the artist and the video and captures attention.

Here's a camera setup that I really like: https://twitter.com/RichardDevine/status/1676377851468103681...

ryaneager• 3 years ago

10/10 URL

Show HN: Banger.show – Create colorful visuals for your songs in seconds

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