Ask HN: Advice on my application (iCue)
One day when I was listening to music from a recorded radio show I realized that I had no way of knowing what the individual songs were that were playing. I'm a big trance music listener so I regularly download and listen to A State of Trance, Global DJ Broadcast etc. All these mixes come as single file mp3s usually over 2 hours long. So whenever I hear a good song I have to go look up the track list and guess what I'm listening to.<p>I decided to remedy this for myself. I mostly use iTunes on my Mac to listen to these sets. So I wrote a Mac OSX cocoa application that takes advantage of CUE Sheets which are usually released with single-file mp3 sets. My application hooks into iTunes and displays Growl notifications when a new song inside a set starts playing. You can even skip between songs, inside the giant mp3. I find it quite useful and I haven't found anything at all that is functionally similar.<p>Anyway to my question.<p>At the moment I have released the application as freeware and submitted it to Apple downloads. The response has been great, a lot of people are downloading it and it has climbed to the top 20 (#7) most downloaded applications in the iTunes section.<p>I was wondering how easy it would be to monetize the application/website. Have any of you accomplished something similar? Is it doable?
I realize that I would need a richer feature set before I can charge for the application, I'm just trying to see how far I can take this project.<p>I currently have a single adsense banner on the website but obviously nobody clicks. I'm thinking of replacing it with a donate button. Do donate buttons work?<p>I would appreciate any and all suggestions and comments about the application or the website.<p>iCue - http://icue.suprak.com