

Show HN: What's New? Music - an enterprise coder's first ever website - lifebeyondfife
http://whatsnewmusic.com/

======
lifebeyondfife
Full details of how someone who knew almost nothing about web development
managed to piece this thing together:
<http://lifebeyondfife.com/98-what%27s-new-music.html>

This side project though nothing revolutionary has been a bit of an obsession
and labour of love for most of this year. I would just like to thank the HN
community because, whether or not I read any of your blog posts, links or
comments, coming here and getting motivation and mental stimulation has really
dragged me up and kept me going. Cheers.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
Just realised, the comments section is broken for that link:
<http://lifebeyondfife.com/98-whats-new-music.html>

------
famousactress
Neat! This is one my oft-mentioned longtime broken use cases when talking to
friends about where technology is failing me. With all the "genius" services
that recommend new music to me I still find it infuriating that there's
software that knows how often I listen to the last Neko Case record, but
_won't dependably tell me when a new one comes out!_

Also, don't be discouraged by comments w/ links to other services. That's not
an indication this is a solved problem, it's validation that it's a problem
worth solving... I think that's much more valuable than taking the only bite
at an apple that may or may not be worth eating.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
I always take critism constructively, regardless of how it's presented.
Comments like this help from getting me down though, thanks.

~~~
girasquid
I second this - I built one of the competing services (shameless plug:
<http://beathound.com>), and it seems like every day I find a new one (or a
new one gets announced - like yours!).

I gave this a shot, and it's pretty cool - but it seems like some of the
javascript is a bit superfluous, and I was confused by the interface. On this
page: <http://d.pr/i/e0hN> \- why are there no thumbnails? I was expecting
that box to have a picture inside it (and I was expecting clicking it to take
me somewhere).

On the New Music! page, I expected clicking on the album boxes (not just the
thumbnails) to load up the albums for me to take a look at. It took me a
second to figure out I needed to click on the thumbnails - and having to wait
for something to load (Ajax, I'm guessing?) was a bit strange. I was expecting
that click to be near instantaneous.

I'm sure the slow bits are just because you're getting hammered today - cool
service, and good luck!

------
zerovox
I currently use <http://www.albumreminder.com/> for this. It imports your
artists from last.fm or itunes, and provides you with an RSS feed and/or email
notifications of new artist releases.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
I wish I'd known about this a year ago ;)

------
jrajav
For those interested in a non-signup-for-something solution, I've been
tracking album releases for a long time with
[http://www.metacritic.com/browse/albums/release-date/new-
rel...](http://www.metacritic.com/browse/albums/release-date/new-
releases/date) (I believe there is an RSS feed, but I don't use it).

There is also the New Releases tab on Last.fm if you already use that.

~~~
girasquid
This page seems really light on data - do you know how they decide which
artists/albums get listed?

~~~
jrajav
I'm sure it's correlated to artists/albums that get featured in major review
publications, since Metacritic is about aggregating the results of those
reviews.

------
TheMonarch
Tried but it didn't seem to work. I'm using Chrome, and I typed in Atmosphere.
It took me to another page asking me to enter the artist name again. After 3
tries it finally showed an empty box for "Atmosphere", with a very slow
resizing animation. Nothing ever loaded inside the box for "Atmosphere" (by
the size of the box I'm assuming it would show an album cover?), and no data
ever displayed.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
The first tab is for your username, the second is where you add the artists
you want to follow (that's where you add Atmosphere), the third is where the
recent releases are shown.

A UI fail though, is my fail. Possibly more work required.

------
eeMZed
Had a hard time finding artists with "common word" names, such as "copyright"
for instance. And when it did find the accurate artist, the songs where much
older than what I would have expected. Though the idea is great, because I'm
tired of checking each artist manually or on SoundCloud to know what's coming.
Again, great idea.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
Thanks. I knew I had some issues with data (artists and albums) so that's
going to be a future development area if this takes off.

------
GotAnyMegadeth
So anyone can add bands to anyone else's list? And remove them? What's to stop
me adding my band to everyone's list?

Also it can only find 3 albums for Slayer, none of which were released this
millennium...

Other than that this is a great idea and nice looking website.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
The FAQ addresses some of these points. If you keep your username sufficiently
unique and secret then no-one can edit your list. I wanted a really low
barrier to entry for trying out the site i.e. no email addresses or login via
a social media service.

The service shows you albums from the last 5 years but that could also include
re-releases (which might explain the Slayer weirdness).

Thanks for trying it out and the compliments.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
It's certainly worth a try, but don't you think finding an unguessable
username is more of an entry barrier than the usual username/password combo?

You are right, it links to what looks like 2009 re-releases for those 3
albums, but it still doesn't have their 2009 actual release...

That's ok, keep up the good work, will be even better when you integrate
last.fm!

~~~
lifebeyondfife
An image upload site I know of used the same approach to 'login' and I quite
liked it - I suppose the ideal configuration would be to give the user a
choice. I had to nail down on feature creep at some point or I was never going
to ship anything.

I'll look into the missing album though, edge cases like that are handy to
know about for data quality.

