Show HN: Blynde – A new way to listen music on Youtube (user:demo, pwd:123456) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Blynde – A new way to listen music on Youtube (user:demo, pwd:123456)

blynde.com

118 pointsjeremylevy92 comments

I looked into doing a similar project, but just FYI you might want to take a read through youtube's TOS: http://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

Particularly section 4, General Use of the Service—Permissions and Restrictions.

What you've got is way cool though.

Thanks. I use the Youtube API. I read Youtube's TOS, YouTube API's TOS : https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms and Branding Guidelines https://developers.google.com/youtube/branding. Please, tell me if you think I didn't comply with any of this .

I think hes talking about 4D in his link. You appear to have no way to monetize such a thing due to that clause. Its really beautiful though, good job!

Thanks ! :) Yes, of course, but ads are displayed by YouTube and iTunes links aren't affiliated.

maybe he could sell it to websites that wants to show their youtube channel in a cool way, vevo has somehting similar www.vevo.com

Yes, of course, but money was definitely not my goal when I built this. :)

yes was just to reply to the commennt that you can't monetize :) impressive job btw, it looks so much better than the vevo one!

Really great piece of work. UI is neatly polished.

Youtube's recommendation list sucks. They only auto-play your lists not their recommendation lists. That sucks even more.

It will be great if you can add channels like house music, electronic, trans etc then you can pose threat to Spotify :-)

I had same idea as your's but for android. My friends disagreed with me saying it won't work but I will still do it :-)

We can use youtube as a database to create great interfaces which suck less to listen to music in pain less ways.

Would you mind sharing your tech stack?

Again, great job. Execution done with brilliance

Thanks ! I will see for channel :). For, tech stack: DEBIAN, PHP, NGINX, MYSQL, REDIS, JQUERY, JQUERY-UI, BACKBONE.JS.

Thanks for sharing details. Did you use REDIS to store user playlists, search history and other user data?

For the moment, only country top are stored to REDIS for 24 hours. Search history and other user data are loaded once at startup and given by MySQL. The call to external APIs (to search, to retrieve playlist and so on) are made directy through your browser. (thanks to JSONP) :)

Overall it's really good. I'm going to have this running in a tab for a while :)

Some thoughts: - A couple of times the audio dropped. Each time I noticed the mute button was engaged and even unmuting the audio did not come back. Not sure what happened. - The progress bar caused a usability issue for me. It's so instinctual to hover at the bottom of the video and I didn't realise why nothing was responding. - Is it possible to have thumbnails for the videos in the playlist? - How do I scroll in the playlist? I could not figure that out.

Thanks, for this ! Can you tell me your OS / Browser version ? You think video thumbnails should replace album covers ? You don't see the black scrollbar next to playlist ?

Windows 7 with Chrome (Version 28.0.1500.52 m - latest version). I cannot see the scroll bar: http://imgur.com/bkHWj9d

Maybe album covers are better in general. It's just that on the OK Computer playlist most of the videos were imitations and it would have been easier to see if I could preview them (http://en-us.blynde.com/#!ok-computer)

Good luck with it!

The scroll bar is there, but it's black.

I agree that you should do something with that. Other than the minor issues this whole project is pretty perfect. It works exactly as I could imagine that I'd want it to, and there's no fluff. Beautiful execution.

I think you should get a new logo, the "cloud" logo is already used by tons of companies, and this doesn't really have anything to do with clouds or cloud storage. Regardless of that though it seems very well done. I'm a little confused with the top thing. It's on US I click it and it goes to UK. Though it looks like a select menu.

When you click HD, what happens? It would be cool if you could select the levels like you can on youtube (240 to what ever)

Thanks for the feedback ! When you click HD, I order the player to load all the videos in the best quality available.

Also, when you right click on a video it pauses it. I was trying to find a way to get the youtube URL.

click on the Youtube logo, bottom right of the player, goes for all embedded Youtube videos.

Is awesome, as everyone has said.

It's like minimal groove shark... Just a few minutes ago I was thinking of building something over groove shark to get a similar minimalistic interface, but TOSes would probably prevent that.

Well done on this project again though, very nice

Thanks ! Proud you liked it :)

Cool service. I'll have to use this instead of Youtube's auto-generated playlists.

I'm not sure if it's a bug but...I was streaming a local radio station and searched for the artist I was listening to. Blynde search autosuggested the song to which I was already listening (it's a very popular song). In the playlist, this same song is showing up every 2-3 songs -- not even remixes of the same tune, but the same original mix of the song.

I'm on the 2nd time around of this song, and I'll hear it again in ~3 minutes, ~9 minutes, ~12 minutes, and ~18 minutes.

Edit: re-searching (searching again) seems to have cleared this up.

Fantastic - I mainly use YouTube for music and this is way, way better than the standard YT interface in almost every possible respect.

Cavils: I would like to sign in with my Google account (because it's important for me to know that the NSA understands my taste in music), and I can't find a way to search on the channels of YouTube users who have especially good music collections - ie I search by a channel name I know and like, but get nothing or the wrong stuff.

Edit: BTW, I'm also not sure about clicking in the video causing it to pause, but I can see how some people would like that.

Thanks :) ! If you search for a specific channel, you get nothing or wrong stuff ? Hum... It seems that it's a bug. I will inspect this. Thanks for the report.

Oh, also you might want to cross-reference search results with Youtube. For example, I like a technoa rtist called Orion, so I search for a favorite track using 'orion cynabs'. But I also get a lot of results to do with Orion rockets and some pop music kid who uses the same stage name. YouTube is better at presenting recommendations from the same artist rather than just going by name.

Awesome, very nice interface! One thing I've been looking for for a while is last.fm support (while watching youtube videos). Any chance that could be possible?

Thanks ! I use last.fm for biography, and artist image. What features would you like to see ?

Really only to be able to scrobble the tracks you listen too. For example other music services (Grooveshark / Hypem) let you connect your account and keep track of everything you listen to.

+1 for scrobbling.

http://www.last.fm/api/scrobbling

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lastfm-scrobbler/h...

This is the coolest thing I've seen on HN all month! Discovering stuff by genre or even a suggestion feature would make this even better. Great work!

Thanks ! I will see for the "discover touch". :)

This thread is a great counterexample to the argument that HN always disses Show HNs.

Constructive criticism: Overall, great work! A "new" way to listen to music on Youtube is not nearly descriptive enough. I don't want a new way to listen to music on Youtube, I want a better way. And much more importantly, how is it better? A landing page would do wonders for you. But again, awesome work!

A "new" way may well be a "better" way, you're picking at straw fella. What do you think Apple said when they introduced the iPhone. "This is a new phone experience." Likewise, "This is a new YouTube experience".

Thanks ! You are right for the description. I will see for the landing page.

It says "Edit my profil" everywhere instead of "Edit my profile".

Really cool service though dude, I shall be using it if it stays live.

Will you post this on your github profile soon? Would love to see how you approached this.

A suggestion is to be able to search for playlists to.

Really nice work. I love that the HD button stays active and loads all videos in HD. I also like the arrows shortcuts for next and previous video. Makes it much easier to skip tracks.

One minor recommendation: when the video is in full screen, the full screen arrows from the icon should be pointed inwards. Just being picky :)

Great Youtube implementation. Congrats.

Thanks ! I keep your idea for the full screen icon. :)

Reminds me of http://8tracks.com/ -- you should definitely add SoundCloud support. Also you should let people make their own playlists/vote on playlists/etc.

Cool idea. I'm not sure how you could monetize it, though.

Thanks ! For SoundCloud and playlist support, why not. Money was definitely not my goal when I build this. I build this, firstly for me, because I love listen songs on YouTube and I wanted to improve my experience. :)

I don't say this lightly, but this is fucking awesome!!

Wondering how hard it would be to implement a function that would search for all the variations of a particular song. Lets say I want to see all the remix versions of Lykke Li - Little Bit, as an example...

Thanks ! How do you see this "remix function" ? Directly in the search bar ? In the playlist ?

Nice work! The UI is simple and focussed on the music, feels fast and responsive.

One thing I can't easily tell, though, it why you built it. It was obviously a lot of effort; what feature was YouTube missing that made the effort worthwhile?

I really enjoy the creativity and the insight that goes behind applications such as this where you can't immediately tell "why?"- Might not sound like it makes any sense, but at first sight I really couldn't tell you "why" I have had this running in a tab since I saw this link.

It's beautiful. It grabs exactly what I want. It works, and it works quickly, with minimal effort. I wouldn't say that it fixes any one problem that I have had, rather it makes one of my life's conveniences a little better. That is cool, and I think this industry could make large impacts thinking the same way.

Just a black screen with a black cloud for me.. Am I supposed to click something?

Possibly like me you have plugins disabled - it looks like it doesn't start until you enable Flash.

Same problem here. When I read in the comments that it used YouTube, I expected it to support YouTube's HTML5 player.

Sorry ! :( You are not supposed to click something. Can you tell me your OS / Browser version ?

Same here.

I've got 'click-to-play' enabled - flash doesn't start running until I click on the flash object - and it looks like you've cleverly hidden it so there's no object for me to click on to enable it.

If I disable that the app loads fine.

Same here, and like fragmede I've got click-to-play enabled as well. I'm on Chrome stable, Win 7x64

Thanks for the report. I will inspect this.

Fantastic! A couple of thoughts: one is whether the lyrics can be shown and synchronized along with singing and with on/off feature, and the other is whether the video can be turned off for office users.

Thanks ! Good idea for the lyrics :) ! If I want to comply with the YouTube's API terms of use I can't turn off video. Sorry :(

Great job! Seen tons of similar services, but this is really polished. I already signed up, but was looking for a way to create my own playlists. I'd use this all the time if it had custom playlists

Thanks ! Many people ask me to add playlist support, so I will try to add it in a future update. :)

This is something similar to another project called SounDojo (http://soundojo.com/webapp/)

It's not working for me - I'm just getting a dark background with a cloud logo in the centre. Running Chrome v28 on Ubuntu.

Someone showed a similar service a few months back: youfm.org But great job on the front end development. The UI is slick.

A big issue for me: There is no obvious way to get the link for the youtube video that's currently playing.

You can click on the Youtube logo, bottom right of the player, goes for all embedded Youtube videos. :)

Not very helpful, as that stops the video playing and necessitates me fiddling around to copy the url of the new tab and close it and restart the video.

Just make the title of the video a link to the youtube page.

Any embedded video ever for Youtube, click that little logo in the corner.

This is absolutely awesome. Well done.

Great Stack!

Your UI is nice, clean, and awesome! I like your account sign up pop up and proposed keyboard shortcuts.

Thanks ! Glad you like it. :)

I love the app. I dislike its current name. Remembering that/typing it correctly will be hard.

Thanks ! I expect other opinions to change the name.

Pretty cool . looks like iTunes link is not being updated when I change songs.

Thanks. I will inspect for this !

CSS and Javascript don't seem to load, getting a 404 on those.

Same thing happened to me on Chrome. Works fine on Nightly.

Fixed. Thanks ! :)

Great! Please don't stop playing when I search for something.

As others have said it's a nice interface. Good job!

Curious. How long did it take you to build this?

Several weeks for the first version (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543955). Another month for the current release. :)

Demo account - Nickname: demo - Password: 123456

jeremylevy, I had a similar idea (a music service based on YouTube), but you executed it far better than I could have. Bravo!

Hey, thanks you ! :)

nice work! do you plan to add support for liking/disliking a song or adding it to a playlists? That would be helpful.

Really cool interface, awesome job.

Thanks ! :)

Really great interface, nice one.

Thanks ! Proud you liked it.

Loved it

Sadly, I seem to be unable to convince it to load entire albums, just individual songs. However, it does load unofficial videos, which is quite cool. I'm guessing that it runs a search without being logged in, and takes the first result which is shorter than 30min or so?

Thanks for the feedback ! Yes, you are right. I build blynde to specifically load track not full album. If I allow load entire albums, "artist panel", "your top" and so on became without interest, no ?

This was a nice touch. Caught me off guard at first but I understood immediately. Good work.

I honestly normally load up a bunch of full albums of progressive rock from the days of yesteryear and listen to two or three throughout the workday. It doesn't make sense to listen to just one song on those albums, and so I normally don't. I acknowledge that my music consumption habits are not normal, though. :3

I don't see what you mean... If you search for an album, album tracks was loaded in playlist and displayed in artist panel, no ?

I made the mistake of not opening a new tab and was unable to navigate away from your site using the back button. :(

Yes, currently I use hashbang instead of html5 history api. I will change this in future update. Thanks.

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