Audiomack

Audiomack is the place for artists to effortlessly share their music and for fans to discover and download free songs and albums.

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I’ve been using Audiomack for a few years now and have found some great songs by not-so-well-known artists as well as the more popular. The site was always pure gold when it came to finding new music in the electronic or hip-hop space. 1 Who doesn’t like finding out about great artists before they hit the mainstream, just so you can brag like “I knew such and such before they were mainstream.” Shout out Ramriddlz. I’ve been putting people on for years thanks to Audiomack.

It wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows however. There were always some issues that the world of Audiomack users and myself had when using the site.

Media Keys

Personally I’d consider myself a power user when it comes to a lot of things computer related. I like to be efficient. Therefore I want to use my media keys to control the music on the site. Why break from working on something just to switch back to the browser, find the Audiomack tab and sift through songs and albums. I should mention this was never an issue with Audiomack as much as it is an issue with how websites and browsers work in general. Since Audiomack doesn’t have a desktop app like Spotify or iTunes, there had to have been another way. 2 After searching around I came across BeardedSpice which lets you control a variety of different sites with your media keys. I quickly added Audiomack support and I was on my way. 3

BeardedSpice was my first interaction with building for Audiomack up until about a year ago where I got the opportunity to rebuild Audiomack’s web experience from the ground up. Starting with the mobile site, I converted the legacy site which was running on an old version of Zend Framework to a more modern stack on top of Node, React, & Webpack. The Node backend doesn’t do much beyond serving requests. The team wanted this to be a more API centric project. Since most of the mobile site features have a lot of parity with the desktop, I’ll be showcasing the improvements via desktop screenshots since that’s easier.

Persistent Player

If you were listening to music on the site, you did not want to try and browse. Since the page loads were completely fresh with every click of a link on the site, your music would stop. This was in my opinion, one of the biggest issues with the site before. If you wanted to look around the site, you’d have to open a new tab or window to browse while the music played in a separate context. A sample of the old interaction can be seen below.

Fast-forward to the new single page app version of Audiomack, you can see beyond the new facelift below that this proves to not be a problem anymore. Browse on!

More updates coming soon!

In the meantime, check out Audiomack.


  1. It still is pure gold.
  2. Yet
  3. I’ll have to submit a patch for the new Audiomack site