
Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music - hazelcough
http://www.mixest.com
======
hazelcough
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 data was destroyed last year by a PHP virus, so I rebuilt it from scratch.

I've been using it as my hacking playlist, and I hope you guys will enjoy it
too!

~~~
drunken_thor
Didn't you do this about 2 years ago? I remember people had to submit content
to it though, I even offered to help develop but you said you were fine.

~~~
hazelcough
The old developers never rebuilt the site after it was hacked, but I offered
to take over the project.

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bryanh
Woah, blew my ears off. I did not expect it to start playing instantly.

Awesomeness past that. Simple. Quick. No bullshit. I usually don't use
services like this but I find myself still listening.

You should offer a link to where you got the track, the artist title and song
name are great starts.

~~~
loceng
Thanks for the warning

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ooobo
Great execution, no barrier to playing. If I understand what you are doing
correctly (scraping mp3 blogs), most of the music is provided to the blogs by
artist (or PR) for purposes of promotion, so legally it's relatively solid.

I'm curious to know what blogs you are scraping, and how the crawler is moving
on to new blogs? I chase a lot of music blogs and host one myself, and know
how inconsistent they can be design and format-wise!

Also suggest linking to the original blog the song was found from, somewhat of
a courtesy to the blogger, but even more as a means to find more information
about the artist (without you having to input that data yourself)

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Matt_Cutts
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!

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tsurantino
The site is incredible. I love the design and the extraordinary simplicity in
functionality.

To make a side comment, this seems like an ideal MVP. It gets all the core
functionality well-implemented, with enough polish to make it captivating.

Some users mentioned that user accounts, despite the use of HTML5 to store
user-specific info, is something that would still be useful. I agree, and it
makes it an ideal part of your next revision.

Keep up the good work! This is definitely bookmarked.

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51Cards
Love this, already found a great new artist I love. Well done. Another vote
for a little more info on where the track was found so information on the
artist can be chased down.

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kunle
+1 for this. More background info in general (site where you found it,
artist(s), album(s) and song) would go a long way. Nice alternative to my hype
machine addiction.

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notatoad
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?

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chime
Very good execution and a good choice for the domain name. The design
(green/white/red/hearts) reminds me of <http://hypem.com/> \- you should check
it out if you haven't. It's got a similar theme (crawl indie blogs for music)
and has a pretty big following.

~~~
jordn
This looks really great.

The big problem with hypem I've found is that the popular tracks is completely
under crowd control and wheres I used to use the service to find music that
aligned well with my tastes (I discovered Phoenix and some incredible dance
remixes of music I love through the service for example), now that the site's
got more popular the music has following the American trend of Skrillex like
'dubstep' that not even the 'no remixes' setting can remove for me.

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mbell
I love it. I really wish there was a link to more information about the artist
or at least to where the crawler found the audio. I'm sure the artists would
appreciate it also. On that topic, how legal is this? Is all the music public
domain?

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bbarrows
Awesome site. Im curious as to how you defined your heuristics? Finding good
obscure music seems like a hard thing to do programmatically.

It seems like you would want to find "good" music (which maybe could be
determined by how many unique references link it) but thats the opposite of
obscurity.. So how did you determine the quality of the "obscure" music you
crawled? By hand?

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hardik988
I'm loving every single song it's selecting for me. Is there a way I can login
and save my loved songs (apart from scrobbling) ?

So I liked a song, then I clicked scrobble , it redirected to last.fm - fine,
but when it returned to mixest, it started playing another song, and also lost
all my previously loved songs :(

~~~
hazelcough
Ah, that's because www.mixest.com and mixest.com are technically different
domains :(. I'll get that fixed up, but your loved songs should appear on one
of the two domains.

~~~
hardik988
You were right. They were on www

A small bug : sometimes when I click Next, nothing happens, so I clicked Next
many times. That ended up in the song history becoming like this :
<http://i.imgur.com/yUcj5.png>

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monty_singh
Guys/gals in need of ideas to hack together: this is a perfect example of what
to aim for. A minimal, easy to use app that draws a passionate niche.

Easier said then done, I know. But this is really outstanding execution of a
light app for music lovers. Great work.

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thelettere
I love this. There's a particular song that I absolutely can't get enough of,
but it isn't labeled correctly (says "Track 4 by New Artist"). I've "loved" it
but do you have any suggestions for finding out what it is?

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DigitalSea
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.

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squiggy22
Can you give any details on how you determine the music found is Indie? Are
you looking for just Indie keywords or cross referencing a database?

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a3_nm
I have fond memories of discovering nice indie music with something called
Indy, which was released in 2005 by Ian Clarke (of Freenet fame)
<[http://blog.locut.us/2005/04/17/indy/>](http://blog.locut.us/2005/04/17/indy/>);
and featured a nice recommendation engine. Sadly, it seems to be dead now...

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SquareWheel
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?

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ealize
A link to download/buy the music or even Artist's profile would be helpful.
Love the colors, and the minimalistic UI.

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

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chelmertz
For the lazy ones, here's a copy-paste to add a download-link:

    
    
      $('#extras').append("<a href='"+$('#player').data('jPlayer').status.src+"'>Download</a>");
    

(Only for the currently playing song, there's probably an event to hook it up
to the playlist switching songs.)

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tbjohns
Bookmarked it and shared with a few friends. Just don't put too many ads on
there, and I'll probably be coming back a few times.

Maybe you can make the ads themselves entertaining by scraping the web for the
most unusual of those as well...

Anyway, nice work!

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ojiikun
In both Firefox(ESR) and Chrome(v22) I am getting a message that I don't have
the latest Flash installed. When I click on the message, adobe says I already
have it. (no flash blockers enabled)

~~~
ojiikun
Okay, fought this for 10-15 minutes and discovered that it was my security
settings in Firefox and my c-t-p settings in Chrome that were breaking things.
Please switch to HTML5 or make the flash element visible.

And now that I have it up . . . how do I say this politely? This is the music
of my nightmares. What genre is this? I know I've been stuck in a hole
listening to classic jazz and hip-hop recordings for 10+ years, but this just
sounds like dissonance and apathy. Most of the tracks I've found are less than
3 minutes long, about as tonal as Shostakovich and a bit croony?

Though, now that I typed all that, a single, solitary hip-hop track popped up
after 20+ songs, and it's rather nice. So confused.

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aw3c2
What do you mean by "indie"? Creative Commons and other free music? Did you
include the big free sites' catalogs?

It would be great if it work without Flash but I understand that this would be
a major change.

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noonespecial
Works on iphone (without autoplay of course). Oddly the skip and play icons
are reversed, but the functionality is not? Almost made me give up thinking
iOS might not be supported.

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ammmir
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 :)

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johnnyg
This is truly outstanding. Please allow me to create an account so I can come
back to my favorites (or make the UI clearer as to what is saved for me and
what's not).

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zenocon
Nice job, like hypem-lite. My only minor gripe is that the "more obscure"
needs to be "more more obscure" for my taste...but, that's probably just me.

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hansef
Kept hitting the next button until I realized it was not, in fact, the play
button. Nice concept and work though! Would eat again.

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purephase
I love this. Thanks for putting it together! I'm not sure it will replace my
beloved 3WK, but it is always great to pick-up new artists.

Well done.

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msutherl
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?

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darkdefender
Love it. The last.fm scrobble is a nice touch. Makes this site all the more
awesome to use.

Simple, effective design too.. Love it.

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thiagodotfm
I absolutely love mixest, I've used it when it was launched here on hn 3 years
ago... <3<3<3

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flexxaeon
great execution for all the reasons already mentioned.

since it's layout is already simple and modular, a couple of meta tags and
@media styles in your CSS would be good to make it collapse down on phones for
easier access to the controls

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gianpaj
Where is the music coming from? Blogs? or Mixest is hosting the mp3?

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_void
Awesome stuff ! Would be nice to have volume control though..

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MaxwellM
Awesome. I hate indie rock, but I still love Mixest. Kudos.

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studyro
Super love to it. Beautiful interface and beautiful songs.

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seanlinehan
The UI/UX is great. The music is great. Triple thumbs up!

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madmikey
Awesome!!! i have left it in bg.. man,, nicely done!!!

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andale
This is absolutely amazing - I'll be sure to share!

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durkie
this is awesome! simple and excellent idea, clean (and fast!) interface, and
just well done overall. what are your plans for it?

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brador
How would you monetize something like this?

~~~
brandoncapecci
I'd say with the quality of music I've seen, people would be willing to pay
(month/year) for the service provided he develops it a bit further. Another
possibility would be to have referrals to purchase the music like turntable.fm
does.

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Dilan
Is there any way to change the volume?

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mrnil
Do you plan on releasing the code?

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danbmil99
How do I select "less obscure"?

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chaostheory
Music selection is good.

Simple to use.

Good stuff man

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duanbingnan
it's good :-) music is good too

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noirman
Love it.

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PhilipDaineko
mobile version is needed!

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elliott99
amazing!

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johanisma
love it!

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ryanpers
sounds too much like mixincest

