* Cool idea, I'll definitely use this if the quality of music is high.
* I agree with the comments that having my password show up in the clear is bad. It surprised me. And if I sign in, then hit "log out" before closing the tab, it makes the login form viewable with my password still there. Very bad. While you figure out another solution, can you at least add autocomplete="off" to the <input> tag so that my browser definitely won't remember it?
* This does not work on my HTC Droid Incredible. When it loads there's no song title or artist like there is when I load it on my computer. Then I can hit "Next" to make a song title appear, but it doesn't play.
* How do you get artists? I see the "upload", but how did you get the initial artists, and do you have any plans to incentivize artists to sign up? (You may not need it, a lot of indie bands just like sharing their music, especially if they're not well-known.)
Hi jackowayed, at the moment android has trouble with HTML5, so we are building an android app. Our goal is to make it super easy to listen to music on any device. We're also working on an iphone app.
The clearing of passwords after login must have slipped by our testing, thank you for pointing that out. [update: autocomplete has just been turned off]
Our initial set of music was scraped from various indie blogs, but in the future we hope to get most of our music from uploads.
We are thinking of some ways to help artists make money off their music. We may offer high-quality downloads to listeners (and pay artists when the songs are bought). This would be for artist uploads only.
You already offer high-quality downloads, to anyone who uses a web inspector to look at your <audio> element's current src attribute! A Chrome / Safari extension would probably make it a one-click process.
Which (speaking as a musician) I think I'm okay with; if you're going to go to that much trouble to swipe it, my gut says you weren't going to be a paying customer to begin with.
We don't make any money at the moment. Only artist music uploaded directly to mixest would be available for high quality* paid download. That's the idea anyway.
Edit: *High Quality flac or 320kbps mp3. For the audiophiles our there!
Hm, I'm not sure about the terms of the CC non-commercial license, but as an endeavor that hopes to make money, I think you may count as "commercial" anyway.
But the music was all CC licensed at least (or similar)?
It appears I could upload some obscure music to the site via the Upload tab. I assume that your team has to vet that the music I upload is 1) what i say it is and 2) that covered by a CC license.
Can you play back non-CC music you 'own' because you're streaming it (ala a radio station) rather than allowing user's download it?
I love the site, but it seems scary having something like this in today's litigious world.
It's still too bright. The text became readable, but the tabs, progress bar and the login fields are still hard to see.
Update: You might want to rethink your overall graphical design. A general rule of thumb states that things should first look good in black & white (no gray, no colors). You shouldn't rely on colors until you get it right without them. If you then add colors, you are quite flexible, and can thus create better looking results.
Also, you then won't require too many colors for your design to work, which is especially important in your case where you rely on too many different gray tones. That seems to be the deeper cause for your trouble. It's easy to pick two good gray tones that have a good contrast to each other (i.e. black, white, gray1, gray2). When you add a third gray tone it's quite hard to pick good ones. Adding a fourth gray tone and you are lost! Well, at least that's my experience, unless you have a very good monitor and are creating a print design rather than a web design.
Interesting idea! I'll definitely keep that in mind for future designs.
For now I have reduced the text color scheme to use only two shades of gray. I tried to pick two shades that have good contrast but with neither being unreadable on white.
> I have reduced the text color scheme to use only two shades of gray
Did you? I'm counting at least 4 gray colors, 3 of which are competing: The background, the text, the login field's text and the login field's background. Maybe there are even more different gray tones, I didn't check thoroughly.
>> I have reduced the text color scheme to use only two shades of gray
> Did you?
Yes I did. The "4 gray colors" you mention are not part of the text color scheme.
I'm sorry that you despise the design so much. I've tried to remedy the stylesheet in response to your suggestions, but if you're going to suggest I lied, then I don't know what else to do.
> The "4 gray colors" you mention are not part of the text color scheme.
Sorry, I overlooked the "text" part. That's why I was wondering.
I didn't expect that you would just fix a part of the design and ask for further advice, because, well, the further advice is obvious: Fix the rest of the color scheme, too. :-)
The text part was definitely improved, by the way. But in order to see whether the colors are good, we need to have a look at the fixed overall design. Judging such things from only a part is something that only very good artists are capable of, maybe not even those.
Hi HN, my friends and I have been working on this app for the last few weeks. The audio is handled by jplayer, and we've really enjoyed working with it.
We'd really appreciate any feedback you have for us!
Edit: I almost forgot - the app should work on the ipad and iphone browsers - let us know if it is horribly broken!
I just tried it on the iPhone and iPad … and while the site loaded, nothing played, even after hitting the play button. The iPhone is on 3.0, the iPad on 3.2.
Edit Got it working, but it took a lot of clicking.
This is a great idea. The use of AJAX to keep everything on one page is kinda like how MSNBC has made its article pages require as little clicking as possible. Except less maximalist. For what it's worth, I put it on my blog and referred to it as "A pretty badass HTML5 take on the Pandora model."
I'm going to try this on the iphone. I like how the design is clearly made with that in mind, while still being perfectly usable on the desktop.
The dead simplicity and versatility. Pandora is nowhere near this lightweight. Most music services are way more complex than this. The way it uses HTML5 is pretty sweet and well-thought-out.
I also liked the ajax signup. I was very afraid of the song being killed.
I have to say, I non-ironically LOVE Mixest!
Edit: Slightly irked that Play and Pause are text (a minor quibble, to be sure) — Just a guess: You guys searched for the Unicode play/pause/next icons and, having realized they don’t exist, gave up on that idea for now, right?
Feature request: Last.fm scrobbling. Incredible Pandora doesn’t have this. They aren’t really direct competitors in terms of the use-cases they focus on.
I discovered the play/pause hotkey (space — great choice, by the way — can’t believe Windows Media Player doesn’t support this!) by accident as I tabbed onto the "Register" button and attempted to trigger it with my spacebar.
We ask for very little information from users, and asking for an email to reset the pass felt like too much.* Thanks for bringing this up as we are probably going to change this and make it more secure.
Password masking, along with asking for a password confirmation, is what everyone expects. Any affected attempt at 'simplifying' that UI without a total transformation (like no accounts at all, not shit like openid) leads directly to anger and disillusionment when their plaintext password is staring them in the face.
Use <input type=password>. Use two of them when registering, and one when logging in. It's a basic affordance, don't fuck with it.
I've been favoriting tracks but it's not clear that it has any effect on what gets played. You're saving the tracks I fave, but then I can't do anything with them except delete them — which should absolutely not use the same heart icon you use for creation. I clicked it thinking it would play that track again, and POOF.
Three fields should be ok - username, pass, confirm pass. Better that than visible passwords. If users want to add their email and other info later, have an Account page for that.
Turns out <audio> elements work on the iPad: the music keeps playing when you've switched to other tabs (though the javascript to set up the next song doesn't fire until you switch back).
But, I'm finding starting a song buggy: I have to tap pause, then tap play for it to start playing.
iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch's mobile Safari does not allow auto playing of music unless it's triggered from a user event (like clicking the Play button). That's why you have to click play you first load the page and when it loads the next song.
"But, I'm finding starting a song buggy: I have to tap pause, then tap play for it to start playing."
This was fixed for iPhone and iPod Touch. I forgot to include iPad into the mix!! Thanks for the bug find
Do you intend to analyze the users taste/preferences?
This is just a suggestion and in all probability you guys must have thought about this. So I'm sorry if I am wasting your time.
Why don't you make a desktop application like last.fm that analyzes the music lying on a user's hard-drive using local resources and then uploads the info to you? I think that it may be possible for you to take a speech recognition API and modify it to recognize patterns in songs instead. Something like Pandora's music genome but automated, and then as User data builds up you can use it to predict what the user would like on your end.
Thus, this way you save server load by using the user's PC for some of that heavy lifting (i.e. analyzing their library) and analyzing the music on your server using your scheme would be a one off effort. You could make something like custom info files denoting details about a song that can be picked up when you run the app. It would be so cool to have a service like this.
P.S. - Thanks to you guys I am now in love with Yael Naim.
If you do that, make it optional. I kind of like just 'Nexting' through a random list, since I feel like it is exposing me to music and genre's it wouldn't had it known my current playlists.
Also, a search feature for me to find Yael Naim on mixest would be nice too :).
Otherwise, so far so good. Like the simplicity. Question: Is the only thing that 'More Obscure' does is to suppress songs you've heard before or don't want to hear again? The words imply a little more.
Only complaint is the registration password field needs to be obscured, instead of plaintext. Always disconcerting to type my password and actually see it, even in the privacy of my home PC.
Ah, so it sounds like 'More Obscure' means 'Make this artist more obscure in the playlist'? I interpreted it as 'drill down into even more obscure, less known, less listened-to artists'.
Looks good although I would increase the contrast a bit (hard to read on my laptop - others have already said this though).
I'd be careful where you're pulling the music from. Maybe look into other sources for getting tracks. I made an application (http://www.pitchforked.com) that scraped Pitchfork for best new music albums/artists and then grabbed tracks from 8tracks.com. They have a (fairly) easy to use api that you could take a look at.
hey pstinnet, I really like it - I have no trouble seeing anything on your app. We're definitely going to take inspiration and thanks for the tip about 8tracks!
Great, I too can see myself coming back looking for new music. One thing: I had to think about 5 seconds to figure the "More Obscure" part out. Maybe I'm just slow but the word choice didn't make it obvious to me right away.
Design-wise I would just like to see the box with the controls and I'm ready to look further below for the "about" and "team" things. The bottom part seems a little crowded right now.
One thing: I had to think about 5 seconds to figure the "More Obscure" part out. Maybe I'm just slow but the word choice didn't make it obvious to me right away
In FF3, at least, there's a tooltip that explains what it means.
Nice. Would like to reiterate Last.FM scrobbling requests.
Also, could you log my last 20 played tracks, or tracks listened to in the past 24-48 hours, so that if I leave the site and come back later I don't keep hearing the same track. Listened to 3-4 songs, accidentally left the page -- returned, and then got a repeat straight away.
Would also be nice to see a history of tracks, but Last.FM integration would solve that neatly.
edit: and a back button please, tracks can be slowed to load (pre-load the next track?) and sometimes I click next as I think it's stalled, but with hindsight it hasn't and misses the track.
I like it a lot.
- Where's the music coming from?
- I would like a dislike song button though. If I never hear runawaydroid again, I'll have lived a full and happy life.
We have not added that yet, though we will figure out a way! Some of the problems we've encountered so far: indie artists don't upload to mainstream sites with complicated sign-ups.
This means it will be tough for us to use amazon affiliate
links for example. We are determined! We may even revenue share with artists, who knows.
What's the advantage of this over a site like Pandora or Last.fm where I can easily program music I prefer?
I read some more
The algorithm is social crowd filtered as opposed to individually tuned. That's pretty interesting.
I can enjoy the simplicity of the design and interface, but at this level why not go all app since there's no network effects to leverage with a web interface?
I'm going to say no when it comes to limited skips. We don't want to force you to listen to bad music. As for the signup form, our css needs a bit of love. We appreciate the feedback!
The player is fantastic – excellent job there. I think there's still some issues with the colours/contrast though; the white on very light blue is a bit distracting. I would probably also try some different fonts, but that's just me.
Apart from that, I really like it. I love the minimalism, and again, seriously impressed with the player.
* if I have music playing in the background, the music should automatically start instead of requiring me to switch back to the screen and manually restart it
* make the password field a password type input element
* optionally allow anybody to switch password to a regular text input field
I am with Opera 10.60 on Linux. HTML Audio is well supported. Yet your site does not play anything, does not display an error. It also prompts me to install Flash at the top of the screen which I find weird on a "We are HTML5!" page. Contrast is very low. No sane no-javascript fallback.
Sorry about that. The problem with Opera 10 is that it doesn't support the MP3 codec for HTML5. Right now our solution to the two major browsers (FF, Opera) that don't support HTML5 and MP3 together is to use a Flash fallback, hence you see the Flash message. We've found that this solution works for a majority of listeners. Unfortunately certain setups will escape support.
Hopefully we can find a better solution in the future.
I thought Opera on Linux used gstreamer and all its available plugins. Might be wrong though. Anyways apparently your customer support is nice and great. ;-)
Great site. I hope you are able to address the privacy issues brought up by the others here but otherwise I'm totally enjoying it. You might want to put in a couple of buttons to quickly share the site and/or a particular song on facebook/twitter as well.
It doesn't work if flash is blocked (Chromium 6.0.451.0 (51013), FlashBlock - Version: 0.9.30). I think because there's not enough room for the override button to show.
Nice music so far, though. And I like the minimalist interface too.
I'm really enjoying it so far. One improvement you could make would be to make hearts stateful for 'just listened' songs. It took me clicking over to the favorites tab to realize it had saved the first time.
Love it. The Username/Password fields need to be more identifiable though, it wasn't that easy to recognize where the fields really are (with the "We're New" thing looming).
Love it. One minor detail: on the ipad it doesn't automatically switch between songs, you have to press play each time. I don't know if that can be fixed though.
there IS one thing it does which isn't advertised:
we actually use the "More Obscure" click data in our algorithm to select which song plays next. So by clicking More Obscure you're helping us fine tune our library so that everyone only hears more obscure music =]
We'll definitely improve on communicating that aspect of it.
I agree - there doesn't seem to be a correlation between obscurity and me liking/not wanting to listen to something. There is plenty of extremely obscure music that i do enjoy on a personal level.
I dont know how your algorithm works, but it doesnt seem like it would be collecting accurate data if i click "more obscure" for music i just "dont like" (this might be just be part of the cute irony of the site though) .. anyhow - good idea and execution.
Speaking from my own experience, the form was a little disorienting because the contrast on the grey/white was low enough that I didn't notice the text right off. I'm just guessing that the parent experienced a similar moment of confusion.
This is a personal project, but at some point it would be nice to add a revenue model so we can help artists make money (and maybe a bit for ourselves too :).
* Cool idea, I'll definitely use this if the quality of music is high.
* I agree with the comments that having my password show up in the clear is bad. It surprised me. And if I sign in, then hit "log out" before closing the tab, it makes the login form viewable with my password still there. Very bad. While you figure out another solution, can you at least add autocomplete="off" to the <input> tag so that my browser definitely won't remember it?
* This does not work on my HTC Droid Incredible. When it loads there's no song title or artist like there is when I load it on my computer. Then I can hit "Next" to make a song title appear, but it doesn't play.
* How do you get artists? I see the "upload", but how did you get the initial artists, and do you have any plans to incentivize artists to sign up? (You may not need it, a lot of indie bands just like sharing their music, especially if they're not well-known.)