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Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

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Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#21

Post by 10ren »

kolis wrote: post #19
10ren wrote: post #17

Does it really infer them using DSP from the mp3 - or does it look them up? If the former - that's very cool, though I wonder about the accuracy. It would be good to have way to try it out online. Making it a webapp would make it much easier to trial, it wouldn't be narrowed to one app (winamp) - and piracy goes away. On the downside, you'd doing all that DSP on the server instead of spread over the clients.

We actually analyze the mp3, no need for Winamp DSP at this stage. WE need DSP to mix chords to song, so you hear exact place. we are working on some web based application, down side is that you have to be connected.

Cool. I was thinking you sell both a webapp (free trial + normal price) and download (super-premium price!).

Uh... why don't you make your own webapp player? For the download version, you could setup a server on the user's computer, thus reusing the same server and client code (but the user doesn't have to be connected).

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#23

Post by Chickencha »

mstefff wrote: post #16

just chords or notes? just chords seems pointless in my opinion. plus anyone who really plays the guitar will use something like guitar pro and just download free tablature - which is probably the best solution out there.

Chords will help you figure out the notes if you know your arpeggios and scales.

Guitar Pro tabs are user generated and vary in quality. And good luck if you want to find an obscure song.

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#25

Post by anigbrowl »

Your target market is musicians. As said above, the iTunes model will work - indeed, so might an iPhone app.

But also, consider making it a VST plugin (VST = virtual studio technology, free SDK from Steinberg) It's the industry standard for non-pro users and works with all music recording/editing platforms on both Mac and PC. These kinds of users have no problem downloading & installing, and are more likely to pay - your pricing is quite reasonable, and moving what you do to VST shouldn't involve much overhead, the DSP will be the same. Make an option to output the chords to MIDI, which should be trivially easy. Better yet, make lite and pro versions - lite version maybe only does major chords or doesn't output MIDI.

3 websites (kvr, sonicstate and createdigitalaudio) will reach 90% of the plugin community. I'm at work so I can't test it out (and gave up using WinAmp long ago anyway) but I wonder how it copes with techno or orchestral music? I like making electronic stuff, but I just don't have a very good ear for chords and would love to have this as an analysis tool. Feel free to email.

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#26

Post by transmit101 »

This would be a real money spinner, if it could be made to work. The problem, assuming you are using an analysis algorithm to attempt to extract the harmonic information, is that you are attempting to solve the problem of polyphonic transcription, which is one of the holy grails of computer music research - and is definitely an unsolved problem, especially when the analysed song is complex or unpredictable (jazz chords, hendrix tunings etc.), or when there is a lot of noise, as is the case with almost all popular music.

It is quite straight-forward to use a Fourier transform to discover the energy contained at certain audio frequencies, but extracting musical structure from this data is terribly difficult, partly because of the perceptual ambiguities in the human hearing system, and partly because it is basically impossible to confidently separate the identity of the constituent instruments within the audio spectrum. What instrument emitted this or that harmonic at 1800hz? The answer is crucial to identifying the chords, and nobody really knows how to reliably and programatically determine that, on an arbitrary recording, just yet...

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#27

Post by kolis »

transmit101 wrote: post #26

This would be a real money spinner, if it could be made to work. The problem, assuming you are using an analysis algorithm to attempt to extract the harmonic information, is that you are attempting to solve the problem of polyphonic transcription, which is one of the holy grails of computer music research - and is definitely an unsolved problem, especially when the analysed song is complex or unpredictable (jazz chor…

You are right that this task is not solved yet. You may read about our technology at http://www.music-ir.org/mirex/2008/abs/cbms_cover_song_id.pd...

Our tests showed that 92% of the time we show correct chords, which is obviously not a 100%.

If you will have a time, give it a try, it works really well.

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#28

Post by kolis »

anigbrowl wrote: post #25

Your target market is musicians. As said above, the iTunes model will work - indeed, so might an iPhone app. But also, consider making it a VST plugin (VST = virtual studio technology, free SDK from Steinberg) It's the industry standard for non-pro users and works with all music recording/editing platforms on both Mac and PC. These kinds of users have no problem downloading & installing, and are more likely to pay -…

Thank you for information. We hadn't considered this path.

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#29

Post by kolis »

kolya3 wrote: post #24

I just asked a friend to review it for you: http://chords.fm/Chords!/forum/topic/53/future-direction-of-...

Thanks. He wrote very useful comment.

Don't know him personally, but based on what he wrote sentence "found it do an 'interesting' job determining the chords of the song" sounds like we are doing pretty good in chords extraction, right? :)

Re: Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!

#30

Post by sharpn »

Good start on a great idea. You could add a signup for email updates option on your homepage to keep those of us who would definitely buy a more developed version (ie more exotic chord recognition) &/or different format informed about new releases - I'd signup to that. I actually browsed the apple app store in vain for something like this yesterday.
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