Alternatives
Products that do what Pentaton LP – a music streamer with an LP sleeve sized display does
Hey HN! I always liked to see and touch the cover artwork of the CDs and LPs I bought in the past, but in the end the convenience of digital streaming won me over and I accepted no (or stamp-sized) artwork. Lately I’ve been missing this more and more and ultimately decided to try to do something about it. So I built a streamer from the ground up. Happy to answer any questions, this is my first PCB design and 3D model all in one project.
- 1A2
It's been a long slow hog and I almost gave up a few times (more than a few) but when covid hit this year it gave me some time to really focus on my product. There were stupid user journey things that I knew needed fixed. There were some features I knew needed added. And I knew the pricing was wrong. I spent some hardcore time working on these things back in March / April and since then my MRR has continued to grow. My product is SongBox (https://songbox.rocks) - it's an alternative to things like bandcamp and soundcloud for creators who need to share audio files privately.…
2020
- 2IM
Hey HN! A few years ago, I left my cushy big tech job to make hardware. And made the device I always wanted - an automatic piano recorder! I usually play piano improvisationally, and manually hitting record never meshed well with that. But there are always moments I wish I recorded, and now they are! Hopefully it scratches a similar itch for some of you as well! A few of the tech details: * built on an esp32-s3 * custom injection molded enclosure * BLE comms, sd card storage, DS1302 RTC * android & ios apps with Flutter * Shadertoy vfx support for video sharing - Chip
2024 · jamcorder.com
- 3IC
Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video…
2025 · pimosa.app
- 4

- 5PA
I have a large collection of music files gathered over the years, so I was sorely missing a decent offline music player that can serve as a frontend for the collection. I tried several Mac apps over the years, but since streaming music is mainstream now, there aren't good offline music players that meet my needs. So I spent the last 3 months building Petrichor! The idea is to solve my problem and learn Swift UI development along the way, while giving back to the community with this open-source project! Here's a list of features it has, with more getting added in future; - Everything you'd…
2025 · github.com
- 6ZA
Having read several comments in other threads about frustrations with digital music and streaming, I thought this could potentially be interesting to some of you. It's a very small attempt at bringing back an experience that we seemingly lost when going fully digital. When I was looking around whether something like this already existed, I could only find some commercial (and discontinued) attempts, but nothing based on open standards. So I made a draft of what I think an open single-file music album format could look like. It is very simple, and basically just a specification of how to…
2022 · zipped-album.github.io
- 7IJ
Hey HN! I've been working on Muxamp for over a year now, and I decided that there's no point in keeping the source closed. (I never planned on making money from it.) I've learned a lot since I started, and I hope others can benefit from its release--and perhaps teach me a thing or two as well :)
2013 · github.com
- 8IM
1 minute screencast: https://youtu.be/AmDL2QtkoJ4 If you'd like play with it, please send a note with your name and email to [email protected] and I will send you an invite (via TestFlight). If you're the kind of person who listens to albums cover to cover, or would like to manually arrange your records instead of going through a boring alphabetized list, or are just really annoyed with the iOS Music app (like I am), you should check this out!
2017
- 9IM
This is our entry in the "spontaneous event creation" ring. I'd love to hear what HN readers think!
2011 · shoutfast.com
- 10WD
I know mentioning Michael Seibel is almost cheating, but this week he demonstrated the "leaky pipes" concept to me. Not that I know the guy, but in one of his videos he says something on the lines of "If you are unsure if you app is ready to be launched, just launch it. It's like a house with leaky pipes, just open the main, grab your tools, and start fixing wherever water is leaking". So we did it, we launched drummy earlier this week on /r/InternetIsBeautiful and we got very close to 10k users in just one day! Survived the hug of death, learned a ton, and made changes all around.…
2022 · drummy.io
- 11IJ
Hey all. For the last few years, I have been developing a software synthesizer as a side project. It's taken longer than I both hoped and feared, but earlier this week I finally shipped 1.0. Details about the synth itself are up on my website, https://lhiaudio.com/. For those who are unfamiliar, in music production, there are host applications (such as Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or REAPER) in which most of the work (such as recording or sequencing MIDI data) is done. These applications generally have some built-in tools for the actual generation and processing of audio data, but…
2018
- 12AL
A buddy and I decided to hack on this little project this weekend, putting in about 12 hours. It's running Ruby on Rails, deployed to Heroku. We tried to keep things super lean with different gems handling user accounts, mailchimp for an email list and super lean styling/layout. Everything should work well enough on mobile devices, too, so give it a look! Right now the magic all happens via the Soundcloud API (of course), but we're exploring different ways to make this appeal to a broader audience of music listeners. We'd love your feedback! Here's the site:…
2014
- 13MMixcastr▲5
URL: http://mixcastr.com/ The end of the weekend is here, and my project (roughly 15 hours) is done. It's called Mixcastr, and it uses the Sound Cloud API to serve songs from their platform, based on user queries. So yeah, it's really just a glorified search interface - but I had fun making it. Hopefully next weekend I'll expand on its functionality/utility. Breakdown: Sinatra, Twitter Bootstrap, SoundCloud JavaScript SDK, and Heroku, Polymorphs, CloudMade
2011
- 14PA
Hey everyone, I've built a multiplayer audio recorder/looper for songwriting in your browser. It started as a side project in March last year but 3 months ago I quit my job to work on it full-time. I wanted the simplicity of a Portastudio and the utility of a loop station to serve as an easy way to get song ideas together without needing to send files back and forth, or get lost in the complexity of traditional DAWs up front - just record or upload your ideas and share the link with whoever you want to collaborate with. Would love to hear what you think of it! Any feedback, thoughts, or…
2023 · prototape.fm
- 15MW
http://imagestash.org/ Kind of like Instapaper for images. While surfing at home one evening I found the perfect desktop background ... for my work machine. I got to pondering the quickest way to save a random image so I could get to it on all of my devices, got a wee bit carried away with the technical possibilities, and this was the result. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!
2011
- 16PC
I had a silly idea for awhile, making actual cassette mixtapes from MP3s. I thought it was a bit obscene, and it amused me. So I built a static site with Cactus then plugged in a Jotform that handles media uploads and payments. Designwise I opted for mid 90s brutalism, down to midi music (on desktop it starts playing smoke on the water) you can check it out at 420verload.com
2016
- 17PU
After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
- 18CS
Hey all, I created http://cueued.com that works as a remote for a collaborative spotify queue where the users can upvote and downvote music they want to hear next. Only the person who is playing the music needs to have spotify premium! And if you're far from your friends (and have premium) and want to listen together, you can go to the settings and click Connect to Room, and you all can listen to the same music remotely. Let me know what y'all think about it, and any improvements as well. And if anyone's interested in how I built it let me know as well.
2023 · cueued.com
- 19M4
Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012
- 20IM
Hey everyone, I built a Sonic Pi MCP to create music with just prompts and jam with Claude I've linked a demo of me asking Claude for a rock beat, and then for some D minor chords that sound like Pink Floyd Let me know what you think!
2025 · twitter.com
- 21MH
Just a fun lil experiment with headless chrome + nano banana to take a screenshot of your GH contribution graph and then apply a 2-pass AI image filter to create a cool billboard featuring your GH graph. 100% open source & free :) tho I would appreciate any sponsors on github if you like it since API costs can add up.
Sep 2025 · myheartisopensource.com
- 22IV
Hi - I'm part composer, part engineer and big fan of reading blogs where people learn out loud or with the garage door up by sharing their notebooks or journals. I've been doing this in Moleskines for years (going back to the 80s) but made it a new year's in 2024 resolution to post SOMETHING everyday, so long as I created the sound. I have a big archive of demos and seeds of ideas, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to do something with those in the process. Being so steeped in programming for the last 30 years, a healty chunk of this material is made via coding with Csound, TidalCycles, some raw…
2025 · listenfaster.com
- 23

I'm a 23yo solo dev from Spain with a passion for UI/UX and I built Gramola, a music dock for macOS that is there when you need it. No more opening a music app to change what you're listening to; just move your mouse to the edge of the screen, and all your music is there in a gorgeous CoverFlow style, or ready to be instantly searched. Fully usable with a mouse, but also fully usable with keyboard, accessibility built in, and both Spotify and Apple Music support as well as local tracks via the Music app. Free to try for 7 days! I would love to know what you think :) Please feel free to…
16d ago · apps.apple.com
- 24IB
Im a software engineer, but I actually fully "vibe coded" this. fully functional, used bolt.new + a little claude code. nano banana pro made it possible.
Dec 2025 · alwayswith.us
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →