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!
PS - your design work looks great (on both versions of mixest as well as your portfolio)
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 :(
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
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mixest.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mixest.com/$1 [R=301,L]
... just without the double spacing. HN was turning it into one line if I didn't double space.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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?
Easier said then done, I know. But this is really outstanding execution of a light app for music lovers. Great work.
$('#extras').append("<a href='"+$('#player').data('jPlayer').status.src+"'>Download</a>");
Maybe you can make the ads themselves entertaining by scraping the web for the most unusual of those as well...
Anyway, nice work!
It would be great if it work without Flash but I understand that this would be a major change.
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 :)
Well done.
Simple, effective design too.. Love it.
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
Simple to use.
Good stuff man