Open source music search/play app for all OSes | Hacker News Reader

Open source music search/play app for all OSes

mielophone.github.com

35 pointsyamalight25 comments

Cool in principle, but the usability and latency of the app are ruining it for me at the moment. Still I'm sure these will be fixed. Would be good to get some recommendations in there somehow too.

For reference, just annoying me at the moment are 1) menus on side are barely noticeable, 2) menu on side is hard to click, 3) when trying to click menu I end up clicking outside the app more times than not due to latency on show 4) not obvious how to navigate app, 5) whenever I click anything it may or may not happen, and may happen 30 seconds later while I'm doing something else, 6) I'm not sure if the Download button is working, nor where it is downloading to if it does. On the plus side, when I did eventually get a song to load it played the correct song so could be a cool YouTube alternative.

Thanks for your feedback :) 1-4. ok, that seems to be the biggest problem, everyone is not happy with it >_> 5. hm. can you provide more precise example? may be even create an issue in github? 6. it's not implemented yet, sorry. will be enabled in next update :)

1-4, I'd suggest just leaving the left menu up all the time for now as a stopgap until you can play around with some new ideas (e.g. I might then start with a smaller menu / expanding to bigger on hover, rather than just a hint of purple). The UI looks pretty cool, but it has to be usable. I think there's a search box too, as it popped up now and then. I'd try making that always visible for a bit and see what people think.

I think 5 is perhaps a latency issue, and because there's no feedback when things are happening it seems non-responsive For instance, if it's buffering a song ready for playing, a progress bar or even a spinning circle would be nice, rather than me clicking Play a few times because I'm not sure what's happening. Likewise, when I click a song to open up the "Play or Download" right menu, nothing tends to happen a lot of the time, and I'm not sure if it has ignored my clicks, or whether it's just doing it's thing and catching up (I suspect the latter). Ideally, if you can open up the right menu (the Play or Download one) as soon as I click a song, even if you then have to do loading stuff before play works it would seem more responsive. Just remember the user needs feedback to know something is happening.

Regarding download button, perhaps "grey it out" for now, and put a "coming soon" near it or something?

Anyway, these are nitpicks that are easily fixed, I think the app itself is a pretty awesome effort.

okay, noted. thanks a lot for this piece of feedback :)

Awesome app. I've been thinking of an app like this in the back of mind for a while. Since I'm usually too cheap to buy music, I often hit youtube to listen to specific songs, but it's always a bit of a pain to listen to music that way. This should make things much easier :)

<Edit> After playing with it for a little bit, I've got some suggestions:

- Not the most intuitive interface...took me a little bit to figure out where some things are.

- Since the songs are mostly streams from various sources, things can be slow...could use some sort of feedback when a user has activated an event or clicked a button

I'm finding Youtube great for listening to music. It has a bunch of features I never used for video, that I do now for audio like playlists.

When active listening I love the serendipity of listening to a song and having 10 semi-random choices to jump to, plus the ability to read the comments and find out about covers or other versions or other artists to check out, definitely the best place to find new music even if it's not ideal for syncing with iPods.

I've also got it hooked up to XBMC so that I can route the playlists through my home theatre setup.

thanks for the feedback :) I've already been blamed for UI almost by everyone, so I'm absolutely going to look for ways to make it better :D Indication for actions is a good idea, I'll think about it, thanks :)

Very nice app, tried it out on Kubuntu 11.04 without problems. The streams run pretty fast for me, so that's a plus.

Hopefully you'll work a bit on the user interface, as others have mentioned. Good luck!

thanks for feedback. will do my best :)

The author seems to be Russian; I don't understand why it doesn't dip into vk.com music database. It is vast, and combined with well-groomed metadata databases from other services, it would rock.

There are apps which do - for example, "last.fm free music player"

http://www.lastfm.ru/group/Last.fm+free+music+player+users

actually one of the plugins does use vk.com :)

Or even YouTube or grooveshark.

youtube support will be added in v0.2.0, and grooveshark guys said I should come to them again when I have more users

How critical is the Adobe AIR technology to the functioning of this app?

I'm not sure if it is a good thing to rely on since it seems to be laggy and Linux support was discontinued: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime#cite_n...

it's done completely using actionscript 3 and adobe flex. if you remove all stuff like file downloads you can run it in browser, but for it to work as a desktop app air is a must.

Nice effort, and working w/o problems on Linux!

Two comments/suggestions 1) Not very intuitive interface - on aspect of navigation, can't figure out how to get back from screen to screen. 2) Maybe adding support for playing songs from filesystem as well will be good.

2. that's a nice idea, thanks :)

Does the fact that it's open source make it harder to shut down? Seeqpod was also an mp3 search engine like this but it was shut down.

Echonest also provides an mp3 search via its api.

I hope so. I mean, app itself only searches the web for public sources. I assume you cannot really call this piracy or pirate software since it doesn't hacks anything :)

i like the look of your tool.

my top feature request: playlists! and i think you need to increase feedback for the user. e.g. when i click 'play all' i see nothing that tells me that the click worked and that it will begin playing in a few seconds.

keep it going!

thanks! already was told several times about more feedback, will try to improve this :)

What sources does the app use? Plugins are all compiled SWFs :(

there's sources for plugins on github here: https://github.com/mielophone/ and here: https://github.com/mielofan/

Seems nice but would I want to use this and Spotify?

in some countries spotify doesn't work

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