Comment by lyricism
3 years ago
I've been using this yesterday and today and love it! Others in this thread have mentioned similar services but I hadn't heard of most of them so I'm excited to try digs for awhile. I'm an avid last.fm user but am pretty much using it for data on my current listening. The social aspect has pretty much died on there, and is off to a great start on digs. Their recommendations are ok, but I like the idea of recommendations from friends rather than algorithms. I may not be your typical user (do not use streaming services, buy music on Bandcamp or buy physical CDs and rip them) but do fall into what I perceive to be your general target audience: I tend to be a full album listener and am always looking for new music. One thing I have used it for so far is adding albums I have already purchased on bandcamp but haven't had a chance to listen to yet to "Want to Listen", as well as albums that are brand new to me that I see on other's feeds.
- One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?
Example:
https://music.einavjackson.com/album/--2
- Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.
Examples:
I tried to look up "tUnE-yArDs w h o k i l l". It wasn't case-sensitive, but I ended up having to type all those spaces in the album name.
Hot Chip has a new album called "Freakout/Release". I tried to type "hot chip freakout" and it couldn't find it, but once I added "/release" it came up.
- I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications or notifications through the browser extension would be perfect.
- This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code. I found the browser extension on Github but it would be fun to see all of it, and I would definitely contribute to development given the chance.
Anyway, thanks for the cool site, I've had a lot of fun with it so far and can't wait to get a few more friends and start getting really good recommendations.
Hey, thanks for the amazingly kind words. That's very encouraging to hear!
> One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?
I didn't know custom domains were a thing with Bandcamp. I've added a ticket to tackle this somehow (seems like they all CNAME to dom.bandcamp.com, so that could be useful).
> Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.
Searching is something that could be improved a lot. Thanks for that specific example, it really helps. This'll be prioritized soon.
> I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications
Yeah there's already a ticket for that. I totally agree with making it opt-in. I myself despise notification noise I didn't explicitly asked for :) This will be definitely done short-term.
> This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code.
This is something I occasionally considered a few times myself. To be frank, the code is far from a point that I'd be comfortable releasing at this point. I haven't considered monetization yet (not even remotely), but I would like leave that option open.
Perhaps I could start small, and release some code I've written to wrap the MusicBrainz database and make it available as a Rails model.
This definitely needs more consideration - not something that's likely to be done soon, since there are other things I'd like to focus on (like those you suggested, polishing and bug fixes).
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Thanks a lot for the amazing feedback!
> One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain.
Just a heads up, this is now fixed.
Awesome, thank you! Any plans to allow you to put a little note about why you want to listen to an album/where you heard about it/etc? Also maybe if you click "want to listen" from someone else's post, show that somewhere? I'm starting to get a pretty long queue to listen to, it would be nice to see a little info to help me decide what to try next.
That's what the "Notes" text field in My Lists (make sure you switch to the table view) is for. Have you seen it?
Also, you can add tags to your items, as a means to organize them however you see fit.
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