
Show HN: Muki, music streaming from MIDI and chiptunes - tomaspollak
http://muki.io
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tcdent
The actual experience is way more compelling than the animated intro. Ditch
the explanation (which isn't even worded very well) and bring users right into
the experience.

If you want to have an animated intro, make it interact with your actual UI;
introduce options, start playing immediately, show cues for discovering
additional features.

Also, it doesn't feel natural to have to click the 'hamburger' icon on the top
right, when the first introduction to the navigation is invoked automatically
and spans the entire width. I keep going back to it to change settings and
it's not intuitive.

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tomaspollak
Thanks for the feedback. The intro was thought as a way to onboard users that
don't know much about MIDI (or MOD or NSF or VGM), but it can definitely be
improved. I'll play around with a more integrated version as you suggest. :)

The reason why the menu is automatically shown is precisely to let the user
know, on start, what options are hidden behind the hamburger menu. Do you mean
the positioning is weird or that it shouldn't be shown automatically?

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tcdent
What about introducing users to specific qualities each track has in the
player panel? "8 bit", "MIDI", etc. Get them into the content, and then answer
their questions about what it is and why they should care.

I think showing the menu automatically is great, just that when I go to re-
open it myself, the button at the top right does not feel natural. I know
there was a panel there, so my natural tendency is to scroll or move the mouse
cursor in search of it.

You've only got a few core features, so you've got more creativity available
in how you present them: On desktop you could reveal the nav when the mouse
cursor is in the top 100px, and on mobile show it when the user scrolls to the
top. No clicks or taps necessary, because there's nothing that would conflict
with that behavior. Consider something similar for the player/info panel at
the bottom. When the user stops interacting for a second or two, slide the
panels away and show only the visualizer.

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tomaspollak
Very helpful insight, thanks again mate.

Curiously, I don't normally click on the hamburger icon because hitting the
ESC key also toggles the top menu, so I completely agree with you that it
doesn't feel natural.

I've been tempted to put more information on the player panel but have forced
myself not to do so to keep the UI as clean as possible (mainly thinking in
mobile browsers). I guess I _could_ put in some icons, though, that would give
hints to user as to what's actually going on behind the scenes.

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sepharoth213
Wow, this is sick. Quite a wordy intro, however. I kept thinking that most
people would ctrl+a backspace rather than try to delete the whole thing by
holding backspace, especially considering that it doesn't 'accelerate' like
holding backspace actually would.

Minor problem though, since you can skip the intro.

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tomaspollak
Good point! And this is actually the _short_ version of the intro, the first
one was like twice in length... :)

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seivan
I noticed a slick purple loading bar at the bottom of the page, but it's very
thin, it could use some larger height so it's more clearly visible. I'm
running Safari on Yosemite.

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tomaspollak
Will keep that in mind. Thanks!

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peapicker
Contrary to the intro, Seems to me that I recall most old games using MOD and
other tracker formats instead of MIDI.... but the point is that it was
sequenced samples, I suppose.

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neckro23
As far as I can remember, using MOD music was pretty rare for MS-DOS-era PC
games. The only exceptions I can think of were either Epic MegaGames titles
(Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball) or games that originated in the
demoscene (Zone 66).

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dpc_pw
Very interesting project, but intro is way too slow.

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faraggi
Very sleek site that brings back old memories.

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tibbon
So I get you're using MIDI (instruction source), but what's the sound source?
Just whatever samples your browser uses these days? Or is it using a sample
set from a soundcard from that era (Yamaha YM3812, YMF262 or similar found in
the Soundblaster 16)?

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tomaspollak
It's a mixture of patches from different soundfonts, the primary being the
amazing Arachno. Playback is done via libtimidity, and old C library that was
ported to JS through Emscripten.

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gabamnml
Such a great idea with a huge potential. Me feels like a vintage man.

~~~
tomaspollak
Hehe, me too. Thanks!

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nothrows
Aha, thank you very much for this. :) I quite enjoyed it.

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tomaspollak
Thank you very much sir!

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coroxout
Is there a way to bring back the voting prompt after it auto-disappears?
Personally I'd rather hear more of the song before voting good/bad.

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tomaspollak
Not for the moment. I wanted the voting popup to be as least annoying as
possible -- that's why it automatically disappears after 10 seconds. I'll add
a keybinding to the R key so you can manually toggle it. Thanks!

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Paul_S
Neat! How did you clear the music with copyright owners?

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tomaspollak
Thanks!

This is actually a long topic because Muki contains a mixture of ripped vs
sequenced tunes, etc. I've contacted some of the authors of sequenced tunes
for permission, and also taken great care of crediting both the source where I
got each one plus the company who holds the rights for the original tune. You
can see this by clicking over a song's name when playing.

That said, I'm definitely not an expert on copyright so if there's something
I'm missing please let me know! There's also more info about this if you click
on the "about" link.

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Paul_S
I'm no expert either, though I'm sure theoretically you can't do this. But in
practice I think you're safe.

Is there a way to disable the dots so the browser stops murdering my CPU?

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tomaspollak
Yup, just hit the "V" key.

I guess you're right. YouTube already hosts a ton of game music videos and
they don't seem to have any problems.

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Paul_S
Thanks! Maybe a help page that shows all this hidden functionality would be
useful to others?

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tomaspollak
Yes, as well as a volume control! You can also hit [tab] as a shortcut to
toggle the sidepane with the active playlist.

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cphoover
Love it!! Need a way to share songs however.

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tomaspollak
Y-E-S! This is definitely number 0 on the to-do array.

