Originally launched in 2011, discchord has become the defacto community and news site for any music maker that owns a phone or tablet. This is a great time to get into music production. It has never been easier, nor cheaper, to start! It is amazing how much you can do with a collection of apps that average around $10 each. That might sound expensive for apps, but these apps tend to be a tenth the price of their VST/AU desktop counterparts. At this reduced price they are still just as powerful! It never ceases to amaze me how much power we have in a modern phone!
I am most proud of the community that has been fostered at discchord. Several thousand people from all over the world come to the site every day, and they all manage to treat each other with respect.
A staggering amount of apps are on the App Store, but few of them are worth your time and money. discchord only covers the ones that are worthwhile! I don't feel the need to fill the news feed with garbage.
Let's Play with Music Apps is a video series that features the latest apps in an informative way. It's a fun opportunity for me to share my love for making music, by teach others to do the same!
discchord was written from scratch in 2016. The site uses Flask with Python, and MongoDB for the backend. The frontend is a combination of Angular-Material with a lot of custom JavaScript. It took me 8 months to complete the site, and was a hell of a challenge to single-handedly write my own Content Management System (CMS).
The effort was worth it though! There are a lot of advantages to having my own entirely customized CMS, designed to meet discchord own unique needs. This includes special front-facing features; like integrated contests in comments, and the ability for readers to share presets and other related files. There is also a huge section of the site that acts as a catalog for music apps. This is complex enough to be its own standalone site. Instead of spinning it off, the app catalog is tightly integrated into other discchord facets.
There are also a number of idiosyncratic customizations in the backend that help me keep the site news coming. I've integrated the backend with APIs from YouTube and iTunes to both find and share relevant content, with a very rudimentary form of Machine Learning in place to weed out the garbage and highlight the good stuff. This content discovery was one of the first features I worked on and it has been a huge success. As soon as I started it up, it began to find great stuff for me to showcase on the site!
The choice to use Angular for the frontend is something that I both regret and cherish. Angular V1 is a pile of shit, and it crushed my soul to deal with its endless bugs and bloat. However, it also forced my design into something that I'm very proud of today. I tend to design things to be compact and tiny, while Angular-Material wanted to make everything way too fucking big. The whole time I was working on it we were fighting each other, and where we met in the middle was a solid compromise. I'll never use Angular again, but I am grateful for what I learned from its design philosophy.
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