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Comment by porkloin | Hacker News Reader

It seems like calling this "Popcorn Time" for music isn't necessarily a great comparison.

PT allowed streaming playback of torrented movies and was very clearly piracy and illegal.

Meanwhile, this seems like an aggregator for existing free sources of music (Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud).

That said, it looks like a cool hobby project and a great alternative for folks who want/need a multi-source music client. Google Play Music was my go-to service for a long time since I could not only get streaming access but also upload my own local files to their servers for playback anywhere. Most of that local music came from Bandcamp.

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I think everyone is tired of being ripped off by out of date copyright laws and industry shenanigans. The music industry is full of blood thirsty lawyers, big ticket prices, unjust YT algorithms, and death by a thousand cuts with all the monthlies from music streaming services. I for one am fed up with this oligarchy and am happy to see services like this pop up from time to time to remind me that technology will continue to displace these brokers until it murders the middle man entirely. I look forward to that day.

A little while back, a project named Supportify was posted here. It looks at your most played tracks, and tries to find Bandcamp links for the artists, so you can support them directly.

https://tomduncalf.github.io/supportify/

At the same time though, it normalizes the term "PT" away from piracy and that's not necessarily a bad thing either.

Is ripping videos from YouTube (even not for permanent storage, just to show in a different interface) legal?

youtube-dl exists, and seems to get around this issue by scraping the page rather than using the API.

Page scraping is generally frowned upon by the host. Its seams like the volume of people using youtube-dl is just so low comparatively its not on the "radarr" at youtube.

Restrictive APIs are frowned upon by technical users.

> Its seams like the volume of people using youtube-dl is just so low comparatively its not on the "radarr" at youtube.

youtube-dl breaks all the time (but fixes get pushed upstream quickly). I don't know if this is intentional or accidental, and I won't speculate. However, it's a constant game of cat and mouse.

The screenshots make me nervous. All of the bands shown certainly sell/pay stream their music online.

Now I haven't checked if those bands are sharing free promotional material on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, etc. but something feels a bit iffy about this.

I'd be a lot happier if the artists featured were clearly releasing music under Creative Commons or something like that. Right now this makes me think that if I use it the music streamed would be against the artists' wishes.

calling this Popcorn Time for music suggests that this is very against artists' whishes

I was trying to be generous to the developer and was hopping the intention was to support peer to peer music streaming rather than just ripping people off.

Just like with software, FOSS is better for everyone than just pirating commercial software.

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