
Show HN: 2u.fm is a social music discovery site, my side project for over a year - nwienert
http://2u.fm
======
readme
It seems that for every post I read about someone's awesome project there are
5-6 people saying "Your idea sucks, why'd you waste your time"

Guys, do yourself a favor and don't post these comments. You're not sharing
any profound insights, you're just compensating for some insecurity you have.

In OP's case, I don't especially think he cares whether you thought his idea
was the next Google. I base this on the fact that: A.) The site is already
mature and B.) title says "my side project for over a year" -- so like, 1 year
later, your negative comment is going to change his mind? Yeah, I doubt it.

If you put a year of effort into a nice webapp like OPs, you will have users,
and people will enjoy your service. Also, this site is very impressive, and
makes a good portfolio piece for sure.

I don't know if anyone is maybe getting the wrong idea. Personally, I don't
click Show HN and then pretend to be PG interviewing the guy for a seed round.
I click Show HN's to see cool stuff.

If you like it, then try it, use it, whatever. But if you don't have anything
constructive to say, then you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
I must sympathize with both sides:

I get what some users mean when they criticize projects in this manner.
They're saying, "You're so smart and this is all you came up with?" It's not
so much an insult as it is disappointment of a talented person. Their
mentality is "If I had your talent, I wouldn't have wasted my time on this."

But it's important to understand that the whole purpose of side projects is to
take a journey, learn, experience, and try out random things. It's impossible
to tell accurately weather a project succeeds or not so you have to try.

I'm sure if Sergey Brin and Larry Page submitted their Google prototype on HN
it would have been met with "Why? There's already Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft,
Lycos, Alta Vista... they do search and they're established, Page Rank is just
a feature. What's stopping Lycos or Alta Vista from implimenting their own
Page Rank algorithm?". Twitter would have been met with "Only 140 characters?
That's not going to get anywhere". _(all things that a VC would say)_

I blame this on Hacker News (emphasis on HACKER) having more startup news than
projects, inventions, designs, code samples, and hacking articles. The
emphasis on success starts to drown out the emphasis on coding for fun even if
you fail. Oddly enough in the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At
exactly 49:40 Paul says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but
after 6 months we changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about
nothing but startup stuff."

~~~
readme
Hilarious point about what HN would have said about Google.

------
gfodor
It's a cool site, and an amazing accomplishment for a side project, but I
really, really have to ask: why did you spend your time building something to
add to the hyper-saturated, money black hole that is the music
listening/discovery app market? I mean, there are, and have been _so many_
sites like this that have either survived on the border of illegality or have
been shut down. And we've got a whole host of above-board legal streaming
sites now that are dirt cheap and have a wide variety of music to listen to.
What's new here and why should I consider using it? Why will this be around in
6 months and not just die after you run out of money to keep it up or get
sued? I'm not asking this to be a dick but I really don't understand why I see
a new one of these sites get released every few months that seems to do the
same thing as all the others except is free (and probably illegal) or thinks
that slightly better music recommendations or "social listening" is a
sustainable competitive advantage.

edit: Ok, read your blog post, but I guess my question still stands. The
improvements you list are fairly marginal improvements over existing stuff
IMHO and it seems mildly crazy to put in so much effort to replicate existing
sites but add things like responsive design or slightly better Facebook
integration. Good luck and I hope you end up turning this into an amazing
success so if you can turn me into a believer I am listening :)

~~~
baby
I get what you're saying but I don't feel like there are a lot of websites to
discover music.

Besides hypem, pitchfork and sixtyone do you anymore? And I think they could
greatly be improved. Music Discovery is a new thing, before we just had the
radio, and it's still not as good as it could be.

~~~
gfodor
I pay for and use MOG and their recommendations are pretty good. Certainly
this could be the case that "everything sucks I am going to execute better
than everyone" but it's a sexy problem (not a schlep) and everyone seems to be
working on it.

~~~
chrischen
Their recommendations use Echonest, and as far as I know so do Rdio and
Spotify. You can access those recommendations via an API for free!

~~~
parbo
Spotify does not use Echonest for recommendations.

~~~
chrischen
[http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/16/echo-nest-is-the-man-
behi...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/16/echo-nest-is-the-man-behind-the-
spotify-radio-curtain/)

Not true anymore?

~~~
parbo
For recommendations, we use our own algorithms. For radio, we use Echonest in
some cases, but mostly our own stuff.

------
andygcook
Nice work! It's impressive you were able to stick with a side project of this
caliber for over a year without giving up or remaining in the feature abyss.

This app works really well for music discovery. I just found a Mumford and
Sons track I've never heard before, and I thought I had listened to them all.
Solid UX touch by never stopping my music when I move around to different
pages too.

Where are you pulling the songs from? Youtube and Soundcloud?

Just FYI - I wanted to skip through a song to see if it was any good, and I
couldn't find the progress bar at the bottom. It took my awhile to realize it
was at the top. If I'm not mistaken, most music sites have the progress bar at
the bottom of the screen (Rdio, Spotify, GrooveShark). Pandora has it at the
top though so perhaps I'm wrong.

~~~
nwienert
Pulling from blogs that post mp3's or soundcloud. It indexes youtube but I
can't play youtube without showing the video. A video's section is on the
plate for the next release. Thanks for the feedback, the responsive design has
the progress bar at the bottom, though I prefer it all on top.

~~~
dshanahan
Where do you source your blogs?

------
nwienert
For anyone looking for a little more insight into the whys and hows of the
site:

<http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-fm-1>

~~~
phildeschaine
I'm a little confused on your use of both genres and tags. For the former, how
are they determined? Just in a database, pre-decided by you?

~~~
nwienert
Yes, and they need expansion certainly. I get artist genres through EchoNest
and plan to expand my genres to match theirs.

------
cwilson
Looks like a much more slick version of HypeMachine (www.hypem.com), which
I've been using for years. Competition is never a bad thing, so this is great,
I'll be trying it out.

Very well done for a "side project".

~~~
freeslave
it's more of a copy of ex.fm (<http://ex.fm>) than a slicker hype machine.
ex.fm has been around a few years now too.

~~~
chrischen
Yea but if they mainly aggregate music blogs, then it's more in line with
hypem.com.

~~~
freeslave
ex.fm is a music blog aggregator: <http://ex.fm/about>

~~~
Kiro
Thanks to your spam I will never ever use ex.fm.

------
collypops
This is what stands out for me:

"Live listening. While I decided to hide most of the UX I had worked on for
launch due to it not being fully baked, if you're friends with someone and you
see them "online" in your friends list, you can tune into what they are
listening to in real time, and listen to music fully synced together. If they
change a song, you change too! This is certainly alpha at this point though,
but it generally works."

For those who are into 'social' listening, it's worth having a play around
with.

~~~
freeslave
again, ex.fm has had this for some time:
[http://blog.ex.fm/post/24082043603/featured-feature-
listenin...](http://blog.ex.fm/post/24082043603/featured-feature-listening-
right-now-we-quietly)

~~~
nwienert
This is live listening across an entire session, plus live instant sharing
when you find one you like. You follow their every song, through playlists or
different pages, and it's in sync to the second.

------
rkaplan
This is fantastic. The UI is wonderful, site design is responsive, and from
what I've found so far it has great content. Kudos for you for committing the
time to building such a major project and finally shipping.

Initial feedback (major to minor):

\- Please add a button to let me add songs in my feed to a queue rather than
cutting off the current song.

\- There's a bug where, for some reason, the modal popup that I used to sign
up / add artists is still capturing mouse events even though it is now
invisible. It's taking away my ability to click in the middle of the screen,
which is very frustrating cause I can't use search. Not sure why this is
happening. It's Z-index is 201 and opacity set to 0 via CSS, if that helps,
and I logged in with Facebook.

\- My screen is small (11" Air), and some parts of the site are cut off
height-wise. For example, the left nav bar's "find friends" button.

\- When I click on a new song, the artist in the top bar updates immediately,
but the title takes a few seconds.

\- All of the letters in the colored boxes next to song names are too far to
the right by one pixel.

Again, congratulations on shipping! I'd be happy to provide more feedback if
you're interested.

~~~
goldfeld
\- When hovering over the left side menu items, I would highlight the text
into a much lighter font color--I was already expecting it to happen (and
anticipating the eye candy) from all the other apps I've used that do that.

------
vincentleeuwen
I love the recommendations straight at the top, already found some really
cools stuff.

As regard to the genres: if you're to expand them, I would love to see genres
like Disco (not 80s but happy techno, see 22tracks.com), Relax (lounge) and
Techno (Kalkbrenner style)

I'm from Amsterdam so might have some different tastes when it comes to dance
music :)

All in all, a super cool (side) project! Thanks!

------
DigitalSea
This is the most impressive side project I have ever seen. Everything feels
polished, the UI is delicious and the site works and functions very quickly.
Very nice work, I would love to know what programming language you built this
in perhaps another blog post detailing the tech side of things?

------
frankdenbow
Really like how this looks and feels. Interested in the blogs section, how are
you grabbing that info? Thats the part I would likely use the most, picking
out the few hip hop blogs I go to regularly and just getting to the music
quicker.

------
_sentient
That looks great, but I would default with the red on red color scheme (which
can be changed by hovering over the logo). As a designer, I find it much more
eye catching, which helps pique interest in first-time visitors.

Also, two minor interface issues: your hover tooltip arrows don't point
directly at the "Playlist" and "Me" icons at the top right. Also, the genre
list in the sidebar would benefit from a Google+/Facebook style minimalist
scroll bar. It wouldn't clutter the feel much, especially if it appeared only
on hover, and would make it easier on people without a mouse wheel.

Outside of those very minor issues, this looks great!

------
adrianm
Very impressed with this and love the concept. One suggestion: I think this
just screams mobile app. I want this on my iPhone and think being able to
cache playlists and listen to them while I'm on the go would be incredible.

------
supersaiyan
Hey, love the site, ui is smooth, responsive, and data seems to be loading
really fast. Incredibly polished. Do you mind sharing what
technologies/frameworks you're using in your stack?

------
mattwdelong
Nicely done, but I would seriously consider updating your daily limit. I did
not have nearly enough time to play around to consider converting as a
registered user (I was clicking around). I ended up just deleted the site
cookies, went into inspect elements and deleted the modal but I am not your
average user and most people wouldn't do that to continue testing out your
site, let alone know it could be done.

After all that, I am pretty certain I will continue to use your app. Nice job!

------
_sentient
I'm particularly impressed with the responsive design. Did you use one of the
responsive frameworks out there, serve different stylesheets, or something
else?

~~~
nwienert
Thank you. It's hand rolled, no grid system or anything too fancy either just
unfloats a few things and styling on the header/player.

------
vincehofmeister
For a side project I will say I am definitely impressed. The layout is cool,
and the design/gui is amazing! I hope this site does well, don't worry about
people telling you the music space is too crowded. Maybe it is, maybe it
isn't. Point is you had fun doing it and hopefully learned a few things along
the way. Congratulations to you.

------
hoka
Add a 'mix' category and I'll pay you if it's done well! New tracks are all
well and good, but the continuity of mixes really helps me get in the groove.

I've listened to the Essential Mixes, and follow a bunch of podcasts/dj radio
shows, but there's got to be stuff from non-DI.fm/Sirius-XM stuff. Sheepymixes
on youtube would be a good example.

~~~
nwienert
Love the idea. Shouldn't be too hard to do.

------
tbundy
Looks nice, seems to be some good tracks.

Hypem's downfall (in my opinion) was the point where the frontpage started
being bombarded with Kanye West songs. Songs like that don't need to be
'discovered', as they're already jammed into our ears at every opportunity
mainstream media has. Hopefully 2U can keep a good balance.

Well done nwienert, great launch.

------
andrewmunsell
Impressive-- it's incredibly polished and professional looking, especially for
something you call a "side project" :)

------
synapticism
Very impressive. I don't use music discovery sites at all but your single-
handed ability to conceive, design, and build a project of this quality is
inspirational. I'll be keeping an eye on you for a while yet.

What sort of file quality are you looking for from music blog applicants? Can
you scrape files out of ZIP archives?

------
zethus
You should disable the app once the limit is reached. Simply inspecting the
modal/overlay in chrome or firebug will let you delete the node and continue
to use the app without ever logging in/signing up.

------
thekillingtree
I see some code in the 1st artist bio: <http://i.imgur.com/1DtB5.png>

Otherwise, very neat site. I don't think there can be too many music
exploration sites.

------
gbertb
Great job on the site. Really loving the UI overall UX. One small thing is
that I kept clicking on the waveform visualization to scrub the track--
probably since i've used to soundcloud and such.

------
rachbelaid
Nice work, nice layout and UI/UX ... Very impressive for a side project.

------
graue
This looks fantastic. Nothing will play for me, but that's not too surprising
since I have neither Flash nor support for MP3s in <audio>. Just curious,
which of the two does it use?

------
ChrisNorstrom
Works great and I've even got a flash blocker. BTW, are you using sound
manager 2?

\- I strongly advise you to round the corners of buttons with border-
radius:3px; so they look more clickable.

------
Jelte12345
Looks really great. Just a thing I noticed, when you need to log in and click
on the or log in without facebook link, the link persists and toggles back for
some reason.

------
setheron
This site is great.

My attempt (less cooler in comparison) at scraping hypemachine is here:
<http://metahypem.com>

------
buster
Wow.. it looks really amazing! Love it :)

------
Jonovono
This looks really nice.

What technology do you use? Where are the songs playing from? Looks like all
soundcloud?

~~~
nwienert
Wrote a bit about it on my blog: <http://natewienert.com/introducing-2u-dot-
fm-1>

"The stack consists of Ruby on Rails with Postgres, Thin, Nginx, Memcached
(with Dalli), DelayedJob, and some other parts. The frontend is hand rolled
using Bootstrap, SoundManager2 with a custom music player wrapper, and some
minor plugins.

The live listening is running through an instance of Thin running Faye and
PrivatePub."

Songs are also found through regular mp3's on sites, along with SoundCloud.

------
devinegan
Nice work Nate! Don't listen to the haters and keep on building what you are
stoked about.

------
JulianWasTaken
I'm unable to change my password.

When attempting to do so I see

"Current password can't be blank" despite it not being blank.

------
hkwon
Looks nice. I wonder what will be your next step for 2u.fm. I will be trying
it out.

------
milianmoo
If this is free and ad free, how do you pay the royalties to the artists?

------
rob
It would be nice if we could import our iTunes artists as followers.

------
dominicf
Very good. Found some Led Zeppelin I hadn't listened to for a while.

------
lukeholder
something seems off here:

<http://d.pr/i/WPer> (screenshot of app with javascript errors on page)

------
instakill
Very nice, why no metal as a category?

------
ksred
This is super impressive. Congrats!

------
flexxaeon
looks great in the iphone. _teeniest_ bit of left/right scrolling is my only
nitpick ;)

------
dools
Our only works in modern browsers

~~~
hnriot
of course?

~~~
dools
Well, aside from the fact that I'm on IE9, there is a typo in the text.

------
freeslave
hey congrats on the hard work, but this really seems like a clone of ex.fm
(<http://ex.fm>) and a remarkably similar clone at that - what is different
about 2u.fm?

~~~
nwienert
Four comments and links about me cloning them... do you have something
personal going on here? One would have been enough. Seems pretty mean spirited
to me. There are plenty of things different, biggest being real artist
profiles not just a search, filtering by music type on artists, a filtered
feed, instant sharing and an inbox, algorithms filter genres by a lot of
factors and ways to organize those feeds, responsive design.... I wasn't going
to comment until I saw all four or five of your links in here.

------
Jarred
This is awesome!

------
jQueryIsAwesome
There is some bug in this song showing Javascript code instead of the
description: <http://2u.fm/genres/classic-rock#song-38265>

Pretty nice site; would be nice to be able to login using Twitter.

------
jakozaur
Nice concept, but find mostly crapy remixes. I couldn't find even the most
popular artists (One Republic, Adele). All of "their" songs are remixes, even
those marked as originals..

~~~
nwienert
Within 10 minutes you've managed to listen to enough songs to judge they are
"mostly crappy remixes"? I'm working on expanding the selection, I'm sure that
will be a big point of feedback, but no need to make such a negative snap
judgement.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I think you're being a little protective here. How much time do you expect the
average user is going to give you? I can promise you it's not 10 minutes.
You're being somewhat childish, IMO, by not recognizing that this guy took 10
frigging minutes out of his time to check out your site. Thank him, take note
of the feedback, and move on. You will get feedback all the time from people
you don't agree with but that's not a reason to be so quick to act this way. I
hardly think a 10 minute website look is a "snap judgement".

You might want to check out this post:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/judging-
websites.ht...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/judging-
websites.html)

~~~
nwienert
First, there is and was on launch both One Republic and Adele on the site. And
_all_ of their songs are tagged correctly. Also he commented within 10 minutes
of me posting it so including time see the post, listen to songs, and write
the comment was certainly almost none especially considering this HN which is
a place that has rules for quality of comments and good discussion.

I judged his feedback unnecessary and negative, not anything personal, which
is more to say than what you did. I've read that post and thats talking about
someone judging 300 sites not one.

