Show HN: Napster.fm, Napster reimagined for the modern Web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Napster.fm, Napster reimagined for the modern Web

napster.fm

39 pointsbuu70034 comments

This wont last very long. Youtube is serious about enforcing the size limit on their videos. They actively contact people who do this type of thing and block their IP/API access.

They find out about it in 2 ways: 1: When a youtube employee notices it manually 2: When automated API's detects there are no ad clicks.

Also, using the napster brand is stupid. That company still exists and would be thrilled to take your domain : http://www.napster.com/

How would they do this for client-side applications? I made a desktop application that essentially streams & rips (to mp3) Youtube videos but doesn't show any of the video data at all-- never had any issue with blocking or limits.

To do so would mean blocking regular browser access too (since the app behaves like a browser, even to the level of requesting other page resources). I imagine it would be difficult to tell the difference using heuristics.

It does not work for desktop applications, since all the requests come from clients IP. If your product got popular enough, I am sure they would send you with legal motivation to stop.

Pretty sure not displaying the video is a violation of the YouTube API TOS: https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms

Also have a feeling the owners of the napster trademarks won't like your domain name much!

So then it is exactly like the original Napster, reimagined for the web.

Haha this was so good.

Perhaps you could build something like this using a social network known to be pirate-friendly, e.g., VK.com, as the music source?

So... you're saying it's like Napster because it's open source? No matter how you want to package it, when you build something on top of a centralized system or content source, it's called building a castle on sand.

So... you're saying it's like Napster because it's open source?

Well, no; I didn't say that. Napster wasn't open source, as far as I know.

Ryan, I would strongly encourage you to rename this. For obvious reasons.

So to show it's more modern, you take the name add .fm...

Alright then

So to show it's more modern, you take the name add .fm...

No, I don't believe that there is anything about the .fm TLD which in and of itself implies modernity.

I don't see how this is reimagined. It offers nothing that spotify or soundcloud doesn't. It's also slower, but you're on the front page of HN, so that's forgivable, but I wouldn't wait 10 seconds for something to load if I wanted to use it regularly and there were great alternatives (check out soundcloud). There are much much more important features in a music player than real-time syncing.

Grooveshark is also good

I get this blue ball spinning and spinning and nothing happens... Chrome 26.0.1410.63 on Ubuntu 12.04.2.

Also, the name is not really fitting.

That's odd; I've actually been primarily developing/testing this on Chrome/Ubuntu. How long did you wait for the application to fully load? It usually takes ~5 seconds.

(I'm hoping this ends up being better feedback on my UX than my performance, because the site randomly not loading at all would definitely be a problem.)

The name was chosen because Napster.fm is meant to be a very close approximation of the Napster UI design and feature set (and then some).

I too am nostalgic about my Napster days. But if what others are saying is true, that either YouTube or Napster will come after you, I think you could've been a bit smarter about this.

Also, have you considered using the Grooveshark API?

https://www.youtube.com/disco works a lot better at this point

Looks interesting, thanks. I'll have to look more into that and see if it could be a useful path to adding in "radio" functionality (one thing I'd really like to see in Napster.fm at some point).

I don't know about that. Click on Eminem, which is one of their options, and you see "No results found for 'Eminem'."

locked my firefox, concerned brow, and pressed back as fast as I could.

Sorry? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but the application does usually take ~5 seconds to fully load.

Just fyi, this is 100% broken on my galaxy s3.

Yep, that's my bad. I forgot to put in a redirect for mobile devices to another page explaining that they weren't yet supported, but I'll throw something up now.

I'd call it video-free youtube

did we all just get rick-rolled like that?!!!

Yes.

The title should be:

"Rick-rolling, reimagined for the HN crowd."

You can select other songs; the default when you first start is a rickroll.

I tried looking for "22" by Taylor Swift, song not found.

I guess not every song is in its database. "Human After All" by Daft Punk worked for me.

The 'Database' is just a youtube search with no visual video player, no?

Correct.

Not exactly; as mentioned in the About section, the database I'm using is actually Discogs: http://discogs.com/. YouTube is only used as a source of music.

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