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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion.

Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and that sorted under P, just like all it sorted the Beatles under B.

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Grooveshark was the only music streaming service I’ve been ever using. The way Grooveshark was slaughtered was despicable and turned me down to pay any subscriptions to the online music hienas. Years long curated playlists lost unrecoverably with the shutdown of the service :’(

I might be able to help! If you have the same browser your playlist is store in html5 local storage. I was able to pull mine about 6 months after the service shut down.

> The way Grooveshark was slaughtered was despicable

Well, maybe they should have licensed the content they offered. They streamed unlicensed music - what did they expect?

My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.

The ability to quickly spin up a "radio broadcast" in Grooveshark for friends was amazing. With a small group of five friends we set up a Friday DJ rotation where one person would queue songs all day and the others listen in. All the "broadcasts" got saved as playlists, which you could "favourite" from your own account and go back to whenever you wanted. People could make requests when they had a "next track" that would segue well with what you were already playing. It was really fun!

I have never had a period of more high quality music discovery and I sorely miss those playlists, many of which featured obscure/rare/live tracks that simply aren't available in today's music services.

You might like https://jukebox.today/ for listening with a group.

There was a good episode of the podcast Startup about the Grooveshark story. They didn't quite understand how strong the UX was. Too much of the episode's focus was on the exhaustive free library. But it was still cool to hear about it and made the loss sad again.

I brought a premium account, even though I was a student at the time. They had some music tracks that I still haven't found anywhere else. Groveshark introduced me to filk making fun of Scifi I didn't know existed.

Paying for music isn't an issue, but it sucks when copyright is used to control music.

I have google music, and it is good, the music they have is generally of higher quality, but the selection does not compare.

Their "radio" generation from a playlist of relatively few tracks was also out of this world, in contrast to spotifys ““daily"" which only gives me a new list every two years or so. Despite using the desktop application an hearting the living bejeezus out of it...

Have you tried Google music? It can do the same and I can't complain about the quality.

The only extra I wish for would be the last.fm's slider between "mainstream" and "obscure".

I use Google Music now and it still pales in comparison to Grooveshark and Songza

Rockbox's latest release was in May 2017 with a ton of changes and features added and the last change in their git repo was from today (Oct 15) with additional commits over the past few weeks, so not totally dead. However since music players as a whole are practically out, I don't know how much good that'll do you.

If you don't mind me asking, I'd be curious about your setup, I'm considering installing it on an old Sandisk e200 I have around.

Mine was definitely one the 200 series SanDisks! I can't say for certain which device I used. I got the device from my roommate, who got it in a woot.com "bag of crap" that included a couple refurbed mp3 players.

I remember the default firmware being extremely slow to use. It spent cpu time it couldn't afford to render animations between "apps" that added nothing. I think it may have been extensor picky about which codecs it supported, though I wouldn't have had much that wasn't mp3s.

I really loved rockbox. I liked how configurable it was, and how minimal it was. I'd previously used sdd based mp3 players. A dell dj (I was crushed when they canceled that line, and more so when the Seagate hard drive failed) and the first gen video ipod.

Rockbox worked very well for music, which is all I used it for. I always used windows explorer to transfer files to /from, and that worked well.

I found installing rockbox very easy. More so than installing ddwrt or homebrew on a wii. I don't think I ever updated rockbox. I probably used it for a year and a half, max.

I only stopped using it when I got a smart phone. I would certainly still be using it today.

I have a ~5 year old Sandisk Sansa Clip with Rockbox. I use it almost every day. I remember the first time I tried Rockbox on it; when it didn't take 5 minutes to boot because it was scanning every file (like the stock firmware did), I loved it immediately. When 3.14 came out last year, I got excited when I discovered that I could play Opus files on it. (Before, it crashed hard every time I tried.)

I got one for my dad last year, and was surprised that Sandisk discontinued the Rockbox compatible models, and used players were going for $~50, presumably because of their Rockbox compatibility.

Same! I threw a 128gb microsd into mine, and it works perfectly. It a very solid mp3 player overall, and the Opus support is fantastic for podcasts. Also Doom support.

I used the Sansas hard for about 6 years, and bought all my kids one. Rockbox had the best interface of any music player ever (along with WinAmp), and even though having all my music in the cloud is great, neither Amazon nor Google seem to have taken into account that you might actually have a large music collection when designing their Android players. Both are often insanely slow.

Grooveshark was the best. There had also been a similar Chinese service I used (it was not that pretty and all in Chinese but this is not a problem as soon as you learn where to click, no need to actually understand what's written there) but they have banned access from non-Chinese IPs one day.

I miss grooveshark, don't forget that semicolon. There wasnt a good replacement afterwards. Just a bunch of people playing shitty songs from games pretending to DJ

iTunes sort of has the sort thing: if you open up the track info window, you can specify sorting versions of the various pieces of metadata

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