Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#31

Post by circa » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 4:15 AM UTC

hazelcough wrote: post #2

Mixest was a project I built this summer because Pandora is too mainstream and Spotify isn't random enough. I wrote a scraper and crawler in node.js that constantly searches for new blogs and adds new music to the radio. Instead of an account system, I used HTML5 local storage to keep track of favorite songs and recently played songs. You may have seen Mixest on HN 3 years ago, back when it was written in PHP. Its da…

this is great. I've discovered songza earlier this year and have been using that. well done man!

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#32

Post by ammmir » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 4:28 AM UTC

awesome, i love the simplicity!

i'm curious, how are you seeding your crawler and determining attributes for the next song recommendation? from my understanding, pandora has a team of musical experts and it takes them 30 minutes to gather data for each song (attributes/input to their recommendation algorithm).

i'm building http://cloudplay.fm a multi-source music player, and would love to have an API to Mixest. the world does need more niche'd Pandoras :)

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#33

Post by SquareWheel » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 4:29 AM UTC

I definitely prefer it to Grooveshark radio. Nice and simple. The interface is a bit confusing, I pressed the music button thinking it was broken. Maybe add tooltips? Also, using the URL for playing certain songs is interesting. If a user bookmarks the page though, doesn't that mean they'll get the same song every time?

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#34

Post by ryanpers » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 4:30 AM UTC

sounds too much like mixincest

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#35

Post by Cyranix » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 5:32 AM UTC

hazelcough wrote: post #2

Mixest was a project I built this summer because Pandora is too mainstream and Spotify isn't random enough. I wrote a scraper and crawler in node.js that constantly searches for new blogs and adds new music to the radio. Instead of an account system, I used HTML5 local storage to keep track of favorite songs and recently played songs. You may have seen Mixest on HN 3 years ago, back when it was written in PHP. Its da…

I had emailed you previously when the first incarnation of the site died -- so glad it's making a comeback! (EDIT: Or maybe I had emailed the original authors? Not sure on the timeline I guess.)

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#36

Post by notatoad » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 5:43 AM UTC

It's a play button, and when you press it it actually just starts playing cool music? I didn't know that sort of straightforwardness and intuitiveness was even possible. Why can't the whole Internet be like this?

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#37

Post by stollercyrus » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 5:54 AM UTC

This is awesome. Good work. It'd be cool if you added some keybindings. space = start/stop, right arrow = next

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#38

Post by DigitalSea » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 5:56 AM UTC

This is awesome, I've been using it for the last couple of hours now really nicely done. Would love a blog post explaining the development process and the choices you made.

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#39

Post by msutherl » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 5:59 AM UTC

Love the music so far, but it seems biased toward indie rock. Is that by design? I prefer electronic music, am I out of luck?

Re: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

#40

Post by Matt_Cutts » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 6:13 AM UTC

Great stuff! I've really been enjoying this--the interface is clean and it's a great experience. If you write up more about how you find the songs or the tech under the hood, I'd enjoy reading more.

Also, I'd love to see buy/download/more info links. It would be a lot of work to canonicalize band/song names, but might provide some good ways to monetize if you wanted to make this a bigger project.

Way to go!