Show HN: YouFM - A new way to listen to music on Youtube
youfm.org
youfm.org
Something to keep in mind, eventually YouTube will start blocking certain videos from being played on your site. This took a while and mainly started happening when traffic picked up. Theres no good way to pickout blocked videos, heres a function I use to weed through some of the blocked videos: https://github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr/blob/master/app/assets...
Also, all of Tubalr's codes in github if you're interested: http://www.github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr
Good Luck!
Thanks for the link to the js to avoid blocked youtube vids. It'll definitely be a lot of help.
No prob, shoot me an email cjstewart88@gmail.com if you need anything.
That's too bad because such a "music mode" is something I would love to see on YouTube. It's not that I constantly listen to music on YouTube, that would be a waste of bandwidth, but I use YouTube almost exclusively as a music/artist discovery platform, then I download the musics I like once and for all. But I would still appreciate a lot to be able to actually have a working playlist/queue feature on YouTube, and also to be able to desactivate the video display (and download) to only keep the sound.
EDIT: I guess the best service of this type I've seen yet is http://roll.io/ (which works for me on top of that). I was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665090
About your second point, I didn't ask for "letting users download the music or the video", when I said that I download the music it can be from many sources, most of the time .zip or .rar files that the artists put on mediafire or some services like this.
The interface seems sketchy though. Sometimes clicking on a song in the results list doesn't do anything. Other times there's a little flash, but it doesn't switch to playing that song. Sometimes it selects the song and the video appears to load, but it doesn't actually start playing. In general, the UI is frustrating because it looks clean and polished, but a gesture has the desired effect only about 75% of the time.
Another issue I found is that sometimes I get what seems to be the wrong video—it's not the song listed, and appears to be completely unrelated. Several times I got a video of somebody narrating a Dickens novel, and once an Asian game show of some kind. It could be wrong metadata on the YouTube side, but it happened often enough that I doubt it.
If you sort out these issues, this could be awesome.
The wrong video issue is simply the result of the first video result from youtube being wrongly tagged. I can't really do anything about it.
Another way is to use some API to look for the song title and duration, and match it with the duration of youtube video with +-10 seconds.
Not so much like the fact that it's pretty much Spotify's interface copied to the smallest detail.
I guess it might be a link from their desktop app to their website that she followed, but at least they could redirect to a clean url after having authenticated the user, it's okay that she sent that link to me (it was just to show me the prices of Spotify's monthly subscriptions), but what if she shared it publicly on Twitter or Facebook?
Having a spotify/itunes-esq UI for youtube is a great idea, but this is just ripping off Spotify a bit too closely IMHO.
However, I seem to remember that a German competitor for Spotify has done almost the exact same UI copy - so maybe Spotify aren't that bothered by it. It's not as if their UI is that ground breaking (as someone else comments, it much like iTunes), it's the backend tech that makes Spotify so good.
As soon as you implement the playlist feature, I plan to use it.
One question: What sort of limits do you have on the searching? I have a song I listen to on YouTube and when I type in the song or artist, it doesn't come up.
Sometimes iTunes does not have a song, or the query doesn't return the correct video.
I'm trying to figure out a way to solve these cases, but haven't come up with a decent solution yet.
Thanks for the clarification. This site is awesome.
EDIT: Also, sometimes people combine multiple songs into one youtube video, for example http://youtu.be/J0FawK4G_AY They seem to show up in your player as only the first song. This is a lot more complicated then my first suggestion, but some sort of detection of that (and maybe the possibly more common case of full album videos) would help save some confusion when users play one song and get another one for free. (BONUS!)
EDIT2: Also, allowing only one video for any given song has issues, for example, when the first result is a live video or otherwise bad quality. Maybe just a right click menu that lets you select "See alternate videos"?
With all these new YouTube music apps coming out recently you'd think 2012 is the year when YouTube reigns supreme for music listening.
I searched for "The Who" and almost 90% of the songs weren't by The Who, but instead song titles with "who". "Bob Dylan" worked fine.
Please, add support for lyrics, that would be simply awesome, and something Grooveshark is lacking.
Some songs just don't play, not sure why.
The search box is like "broken", I can't select with the mouse.
But it's great!
Sometimes if you click on a song before the javascript for the music player loads it doesn't work. I'll do my best to fix it soon.
I love the UI but search results can be improved IMO. Maybe you could utilize Last.fm API for search?
I didn't use Last.FM for the main search, because I couldn't get the album name directly from the keyword search (the JSON has the title and artist only). Getting the album name would require querying the API for each search result which again I tried but takes about 30 sec for the results to appear.
I am considering using Spotify's API though since iTunes gives strange results sometimes.
Perhaps make the area below the video player clickable so that it makes the video appear in a larger area above the song list.
I am very impressed. Great work Ashraful!
I finally decided to try my hand at coding and this is the result of about 2 weeks of learning. I decided to skip the tutorials and books and jumped straight into coding. The code's mess but it works and that's great.
I still have a lot to learn, but I do plan on adding three features:
1. Have new searches not interrupt the current song. 2. Make the video resizable. 3. Add playlists. I actually asked a fellow HN-ers to help out with this because I don't think I'll be able to handle databases yet.
Glad you liked it.
1. I initially clicked the song and the first thing I noticed, before I the music played was the "this might take 90 seconds dialog" and I was ready to kill the tab thinking.
2. Just the fact that it says this might take a long time, is a 'downer', its better to make that view visible when it is ready so that user doesn't have to ever know of the fact that you have a process that takes 90 seconds.
So this is my project. I just picked PHP (because it seemed to be simple enough - just drop <?php ?> into the HTML), and decided to code this concept. Lots of stackoverflow and github searches later I finally have a working version.
Would be nice to know how popular a particular tune was, i.e. at minimum Youtube Views and preferably also Likes/Dislikes as columns so you could order by them.
This is useful for many reasons, e.g. someone recommended a band and you do not know the easiest way to get into it.
I tried some Bon Jovi tunes, every one I tried worked but Blaze of Glory, No. 34 on your list, odd.
Nice idea and site!
The video is played using Youtube's Chromeless Player.
Similar results are displayed using Last.FM's API.
I also made something similar that allows you to easily make playlists from YouTube videos: http://instadj.com
Is the code available somewhere? I'd love to take a look at how the search and the playlist thing works.
this will be perfect for you and will perfectly match the design: http://jamesflorentino.github.com/nanoScrollerJS/
edit: next to "time" column pls put the "# of views" -- this will help me discover whats popular in my search.
Screenshot of Spotify http://i.imgur.com/Um0HM.png
I'll redesign the entire UI before launching the update version though.
Apologies to anyone who got offended at the Spotify ripoff.