A better way to search YouTube for music | Hacker News Reader

A better way to search YouTube for music

tunesicles.com

28 pointsJonovono32 comments

Some criticism and suggestions, in no particular order:

- If I click in the main search field when there is already something in there, my input disappears.

- What is the Ti column in the playlist? If it is the play time then there is something broken: I see 388, 0:0, 4:6, among sensible times.

- The playlist is seems non-interactive, I found double-click and drag-and-drop functionality by accident.

- The player controls are missing, took me a while to see them on the bottom of the screen.

- No full screen for video.

- The on/off button in the corner needs at least a label.

- The menu items About and Contact don't change the cursor to a pointer.

- The sidebar with explanations disappeared after a reload.

- All sorts of misalignments and layout oddities, like height of the playlist, see this screenshot http://i.imgur.com/Sy8RP.png

- Clicking two separate "add to playlist" links for to albums, the individual tracks are intermixed, also some track numbers are duplicated.

PS: I wrote this comment hours ago, could only submit it now.

Thanks for the feedback. And yeah TI stands for track length. The others will be added. Thanks!

A nice feature to add would be a highlighted or bold title for the official music video. Youtube video titles are often misleading, sometimes titles even include "Official" when they are actually dubstep remixes or cover versions.

I honestly can't think of how this could be automated though. Maybe integrate some sort of crowd-curation with Official videos being verified by users of the site.

If the user of the video is <usernam>VEVO, then it is official. There are other copies of "official" videos out there. Those will have to be crowdsourced like you say though.

But again you may not want to listen to anything from VEVO even if it is official. Every track they upload starts with a full minute advertisement for me.

Hmm yeah. That would be good. I was thinking of including the thumbnail from youtube. That may work?

For the lazy I also mashed up last fm database & youtube .. http://fmix.heroku.com .. enter artist or artist and song.

Out of curiosity, where do you get your album and artist information (http://tunesicles.com/autocomplete/daft%20punk, for example)? It looks like you are using MusicBrainz and Last.fm in your "About" modal.

Have you found you need to take an aggregate of the two?

How does the quality and completeness of each database compare?

Yes so if you do a search you will see that there is an option for "view top songs". That data comes from last.fm. Everything else comes from musicbrainz (http://musicbrainz.org/). I have fount that service pretty complete. There are a few others but MB is pretty large and has a good API.

Is there really anything better for searching youtube for music than just using google?

Well, yes. The poor thing about youtube is you cant search for songs while one is playing without having a bunch of tabs. So I just made it so all can happen in the dropdown.

I'm going to shamelessly plug my YouTube Audio streaming app on the store for your iPhone or iPod Touch, as some of you may be interested: http://youtuneslive.com/download

Nice. That is what I was gonna call my application originally :P

@Jonovono How do you ensure that your search is constrained over music videos only?

I don't really. I can't remember if I am able to only search music videos from the youtube API or not. I'll check it out now and edit. But right now I basically just search youtube with the song name, artist and album and use the time.

The view is broken on Safari (OS X, and I believe other platforms). Also I found this app very confusing, there are so many details/features and I couldn't figure out what to do with this app. The point is not made clear.

Thanks for the heads up. And did you watch the demo video? :P. I tried to make it fairly friendly. And the point I guess is to be able to get a bunch of songs playing so you can search for new ones and add them without stopping the music which you can't on youtube.

Site appears broken in Chrome on Android ( http://i.imgur.com/Y9178.png)

Can't scroll to the right at all.

Yeah, have no optimized for mobile. I think id make an app if anything for mobile phones.

http://www.youtify.com/ does Youtube + Soundcloud with a nicer UI.

Cool. Doesn't do the artist / album thing though. But I want to implement Soundcloud too.

Widgetpocalypse! http://db.tt/dOgE9XtO

hah that looks amazing :P. I admit, need to work on mobile. I think the easiest would just to have an app for it though.

Name sounds like testicles, which is fitting since the site looks like balls in chrome.

My first thought was creamsicle[1]/popsicle[2]/icicle.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creamsicle [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popsicle

Are you on Android? I am on Win7, Chrome 20 and things work great and look in order.

It is all jacked up in Chrome 20 on a mac lion.

Interesting. Im on Chrome on Snow Leopard. Ill see what I can do.

ha. It's so hard to find domain names. No one else has ever said sounds like Testicles but I can see it. I thought it was a decent name though. And I know, does not look the best. I am hoping to meet some web designers :)

Nice.

It's funny to think that two years ago, while in a travel to Sweden, Youtube had a similar feature (not for music, but you could search without stopping the current playing video). When I got back home the feature was gone, so I assume they were testing the feature in different countries?

Does anyone recall this?

Interesting I did not know this. Do you recall how it was executed?

If I recall correctly, I did a search while a video was being played. Then, when I pressed enter on the query, a list of results appeared on top | bottom of the video.

If I selected one of the videos on the search results, they were auto-added on a right playlist. If you wanted to move to the next video, you could select it on the right playlist.

I found it really intelligent and useful, but at the start it felt a little weird.

My assumption was that it was too difficult for everyone, and Youtube decided to keep playlists as they were.

As for in which period of time I remember this, I was in Uppsala from 28 Apr 2010 to 04 May 2010

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