Show HN: Plug, the best way to discover new music on Mac

http://www.plugformac.com/

by alex_marchant • 13 years ago

8 11 13 years ago

A year ago I approached a designer on Dribbble about using his design (http://dribbble.com/shots/595176-Hype-Machine-Mac-App?list=u...) to learn Objective-C and maybe create a cool way to use the Hype Machine on OSX.

We've come a long way since then. Glenn (@glennui) has done some incredible work on the design (check out the iterative improvements: https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/1O1Z193I0i0J1y0R2a3X/...) and we think it's one of the best ways to find new music out there.

If you're not familiar with the Hype Machine, here is a quick summary of what's going on http://blog.plugformac.com/post/63340578035/introducing-plug....

We just released a public beta. It's free during the beta, so check it out and let us know what you think.

xcubic• 13 years ago

This is the first app you made to learn obj-c? Not bad! Congrats.

jamesk14022• 13 years ago

I just started using this, I have never used the hype machine before. The app interface is beautiful and intuitive. This is awesome and I love it.

sarreph• 13 years ago

This is awesome — I, like another commenter, too had not used the Hype Machine before. Plug is a beautiful way to explore music.

I'm an iOS developer, and notice that they have an official iOS app; do they have a public API? If not, what did you use to get the music data?

alex_marchant4• 13 years ago

They do have a public API http://hypem.com/playlist/popular/3day/json/1/data.js. Though if you want access to the mp3 url's you need an API key. We've worked closely with them to make this happen.

bwilliams• 13 years ago

First time using Hype but that UI is awesome. Really makes me want to pick up Cocoa again.

buzzkillr2• 13 years ago

FWIW hypem does not support SSL so you must turn off your https everywhere or make an exception in order to sign up for an account.

johnw• 13 years ago

This is amazing. The UI is absolutely gorgeous. A few minor things I noticed:

-Scrolling seems very laggy when scrolling with the mouse wheel, although dragging with the scrollbar seems fine. This only seems to be happening in the Popular (Now), view. This is under 10.9.

-When I favorite songs, they don't show up in the favorite section although they did after relaunching the app.

-It would be nice if when you moused over a song in the list if it scrolled the full song name into view - at the moment they get cut off and you can't see the full name.

-The song list scrollbar on the right is obscured by the controller at the bottom. I like what you've done with having the songs scroll underneath the slightly transparent controller but the scrollbar should really end where the controller starts.

-I don't seem to be getting notifications from the app even though it's listed in the Notifications app list under the Notifications section of System Preferences.

alex_marchant4• 13 years ago

Scrolling seems very laggy when scrolling with the mouse wheel, although dragging with the scrollbar seems fine. This only seems to be happening in the Popular (Now), view. This is under 10.9.

OK, we'll check it out.

When I favorite songs, they don't show up in the favorite section although they did after relaunching the app.

The app doesn't auto-update favorites yet. For now you can manually update via pull-to-refresh.

It would be nice if when you moused over a song in the list if it scrolled the full song name into view - at the moment they get cut off and you can't see the full name.

Agreed, we're working on this one.

The song list scrollbar on the right is obscured by the controller at the bottom. I like what you've done with having the songs scroll underneath the slightly transparent controller but the scrollbar should really end where the controller starts.

Good point, i'll have to look into that.

I don't seem to be getting notifications from the app even though it's listed in the Notifications app list under the Notifications section of System Preferences.

If the app is out of focus you should get a notification popup. We don't store notifications in notification center though, since it doesn't seem useful to keep a history.

Thanks for the feedback. Hit us up @plugformac if you want to get in contact with us in the future.

racbart• 13 years ago

The app doesn't auto-update favorites yet. For now you can manually update via pull-to-refresh.

Just to let you know: I favorited a song (using menu bar) and then pulled to refresh in my favorites view. The song was shown twice on the list. Same after another refreshes. After restarting the app the song is shown only once, but after pulling to refresh it's doubled again. The second copy appears slightly after the first, so it's probably some list populating launched twice.

The app is awesome and I loved it at the first sight. Thank you! I didn't know Hype Machine before, but they seem to serve some good music.

You should provide links to iTunes & Amazon to allow easy purchases if someone would like to add songs to their music library.

Show HN: Plug, the best way to discover new music on Mac

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