I don’t mean criticising, merely expressing some disappointment/frustration as to the future of what I considered the best music-related website on the internet.
Dear developers, are there any concrete plans on pursuing all this?
You have (had) an extremely promising website, I use it more than any other chord/music platform, but I would like to have some information on the following points.
I have been giving ideas/contributing songs etc. for more than two years, and yet the most requested features are still missing: No signs of the missing chord types, no social networks integration (seriously, what website of 2015 doesn’t even have a Facebook button?), etc.
The only major updates we have seen are a virtually useless mixer (I think 95% of people are here to learn about music theory and analyse their favourite songs, what is the point of that mixer except adding unwanted complexity?).
And now for a while there are no news, no updates, no more videos, no sign of life at all from the developers - Should I conclude the site is dead?
Do you have any plans for the posterity and not losing the enormous amount of work that went into this and the priceless amount of analyses that are here?
I am sure there is a lot of people out there wanting for some news - and an AWFUL lot of people who would love to even get to know your website, which as I already said, is great and only wants some promotion to take over the web. (Seriously though - if it only had some more polished functioning and some PUBLICITY, why would people ever want to go back to ultimate guitar when here you get not only the chords but rhythms, melody, theoretical understanding, sheet/tabs export, and so much more?)
I am a Computer Science student and would love to contribute to this (btw, in case you didn’t notice we’re in 2015: Flash Player is BAD. No one uses it anymore. For good reasons.)
We really appreciate your concerns and are glad you’re care enough about Hooktheory to voice them. We’re working really hard behind the scenes right now, and I’m happy to give you an update on some of the things we’re working on.
• Book 2 has been a tremendous undertaking, and we’re finally getting close to getting it out. This has been our biggest priority the past few months.
• We’re well aware that Flash is dying and working on a “fix” for that. You can probably imagine that this is a huge project and not something that is going to result in a lot of visible changes in the short term. Some of this process is already visible though. For example, we recently ported our entire playback engine to not rely on Flash (it’s live on the website now and has also made things much faster). We also ported the entire YouTube integration/playback/syncing to run on the Javascript API instead of Flash (which is being deprecated early next year). There’s still a ton of legacy code Flash that needs to be ported before we’re completely Flash free, but we are well on our way.
• We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback regarding the mixer but understand that it’s not something that everyone is going to find useful. Hooktheory is used by an extremely broad group of people for different purposes and not every feature/capability is going to be useful for all. For example, a huge effort this past year has been setting up our education platform. We built a really powerful framework for teachers to manage classes of students and projects being written in Hookpad.
• In terms of publicity we’ve got some cool ideas in the works (that we prepping around the next book release). We agree that we could be more active on our Twitter/Facebook accounts (there is a facebook button at the bottom of every page). Our basic strategy has been to concentrate on making really cool things that people want to naturally share themselves.
When I talk about social network integration, I don’t mean the little “F” that’s hiding at the end of each page - more about the possibility to share compositions/analyses, but especially to up/downvote and request analyses - I’m sure it would be a huge incentive for people to analyse more songs if there was some sort of peer recognition.
And yes - hoping for people to share is good, I certainly did already, but then there’s some limitation to the amounts of people you can hope to reach that way. Also because HookTheory is slightly less intuitive than, for instance, basic guitar chords websites, I think you’d need the extra step to help people realise it’s value…
Anyhow, happy to know you’re still working there - can’t wait for the new features to come.
According to the interview, the team consists of three developers working part-time on multiple products, so development would be really slow. That means, if we really want a better music analysis platform, either the developers should open-source the project so we can make contributions, or we’d have to make one of our own. @ldorigo, if you’re interested in making a better music analysis platform, send me a message, and we can compete with these guys
A stand-alone app of HookPad would be awesome. I would even pre-order now if possible!
I hope that a new HookPad could include rythmic presets for the harmony/chords, with different possible combinations.
Thank you for your software! It made a difference for me in writing my ideas!
