Lightweight HTML5 Grooveshark Player | Hacker News Reader

Lightweight HTML5 Grooveshark Player

html5.grooveshark.com

114 pointsvinnyglennon57 comments

Grooveshark is amazing. They have the best library out there hands down. Yes, they got it through piracy yadda yadda but they have more music than any of the legit services out there (I pay $9.99 for rdio per month..).

The thing is that I can find label music on Grooveshark (iTunes top 500 sort of stuff) but I can also easily find the most obscure stuff you can think of. So fan remixes, and regional music (Indian music, Pakistani music, Lebanese music, etc. etc.). The other services out there have a LONG way to go to make that happen.

Grooveshark has great breadth, but lacks in depth. There are lots of types of music, but I find that they rarely have the specific artists that I'm looking for. (I mainly listen to power metal.)

Also, there are a lot of tracks that finish prematurely, are just static, or simply don't play. I've tried flagging them as broken, but Grooveshark keeps adding them to my playlists. There are also tons of tagging issues (ie: there's one album under "Battle Beast" and another under "BATTLE BEAST" for the same band), making it difficult to find things sometimes.

I agree, Grooveshark is the best one out there, but it's far from perfect.

I had loads of fun sharing mistagged songs on Facebook, fishing for those "less in the known".

My favorite mistag is "Freebird" by "Led Zeppelin". Also, I'm of firm belief no one ever fixes that, as I've reported loads. And that's ok with me. :)

I'm curious which artists those are - Grooveshark seems to be fairly good compared to competing services in my experience.

YouTube is still the king of Internet music. I can find full length new releases of relatively unknown music on YouTube that I can't find anywhere else. The downsides of YouTube are quality control, and that as a playlist application it kind of sucks (compared to GrooveShark).

I love Grooveshark but disagree that it's any good for finding obscure music. For instance, Rare Essence is the most popular Go Go (a DC genre) band of all time excluding Chuck Brown and his band (the Soul Searchers), Brown having created Go Go. If you aren't from DC then this probably sounds like nonsense, but you really can't underestimate how big these bands are in the city, along with Junkyard Band, Backyard Band, and the Northeast Groovers.

For Chuck Brown, I see 21 songs. I have double albums of his with more songs than that. For Rare Essence, there are 17 songs, including a couple duplicates and a misattribution ("One Leg Up" is by Pure Elegance). BYB has 11 songs, NEG has 6, Junkyard has only one (!). These are very prolific bands that have produced tons of records sold in the DC area.

The thing is, nobody ever really "pirated" Go Go music, that is, put it on the internet. Just lots of bootleg cassettes and CDs.

I find Grooveshark to be limited to fairly mainstream and popular music, the kind that at one time or another could be found in record stores across the US/Europe or at least over a very large region within those places.

I'm the developer of the project and I just hijacked the top comment! :)

It's been a 2 years long ride. I used Backbone and Zepto on front end, jake for building and managing assets. App uses the same PHP backend as a desktop site.

Ask me anything!

How the hell is Grooveshark still alive? Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music.

Tenacity, that's how: http://mashable.com/2013/04/22/grooveshark-radio/

I love that company. But I just don't see a future where it keeps its doors open. Especially now with Google and Apple joining in.

You could argue the same about Youtube, in some sense.

They do pay royalties to some artists, and at least for a while a lot of upcoming artists were advertising their new albums there. I discovered a bunch of great groups through that.

Unrelated with revenue, but I liked how some artists (Avicii comes to mind) ask you what do you think about X song when you play it in Grooveshark, that's some valuable direct feedback. The radios are awesome too.

Can't hide the fact I've been using it for years, but I truly think Grooveshark is the best music streaming service by far. Spotify's catalog is nowhere as large, Pandora misses on so many features, Last.fm recommendations are good but what else do they do...

You just supported his point. The best feature of Grooveshark is that it has a big library... because it's acquired illegally. I just listened to Drake's entire album thats coming out next week. Sweet, but totally illegal.

Rdio has a better interface, Spotify better social/apps, Pandora better radio. Grooveshark will die because it's only option is to eventually go legal, and then it loses it's only advantage.

>Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music.

And I think it's only a good thing. 'Legal/Illegal' are just man-made barriers to access the spirit of freedom to rejoice/discover various cultures/tradition/communities.

I understand that there is a possible monetary loss involved as a side-effect, but I don't think it's much serious as the various Copyright organisations project it to us[1]. If that was how it was, the internet would be piracy free, already.

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales...

What do you do for a living? Whatever it is, in the spirit of freedom I hereby demand that you offer your services for free.

Doesn't sound like a good idea, does it?

Music, just like any other service, art or physical product, requires time and effort - it has value and is not a commodity. If you don't value it enough to justify spending more than the price tag of a spotify subscription (which doesn't help any artist anyway), then don't - it's fine - but don't expect artists to work for free.

That said, Grooveshark is a mor ethan shady business and should have been closed a long time ago in my opinion.

I don't know. I'm an artist, and while I enjoy getting paid to create and preform, taking money for reproductions that do not require further effort on my part always feels weird.

I don't feel I have the right to tell anyone not to reproduce my art at their own expanse. If I play you a song, it's your right to record it and play it to your friends - just like it's your right to whistle it. Just like it's your right to remember it.

To me, intellectual property feels like a diversion. Instead of having an audience that pays me for my work, I have a middleman that makes me work for free so that he can overcharge my audience while I wait for my percentage.

I don't need to restrict anyone's freedom to make a living. The middleman does. And if grooveshark hurts his income - he had it coming. He's been hurting both our incomes (artist and audience) for years.

You got your analogy wrong.

1) If I offer a service, it's not one time - I need to keep working till a specific deadline/check point is reached.

With music/movies, it's a one time investment - You compose music once and put it on sale. And it does the work for you. Just for comparison, if I stop providing my service/offer it for free, I may not make money at all.

2) I'm not asking 100% of the artist's money for free. It maybe only a certain (in)significant percentage because despite piracy, the artist still makes money from sales. In fact, piracy improves sales (see link in parent post).

Whereas, if I offer my services for free, I make no money at all and there is no free marketing for my business involved (that would make me profitable) as in the scenario above.

So, it's not fair that you expect I should offer 1) services for free and 2) 100% of it.

I totally get your point though, and like I said, I still believe that time and effort, one time or not, is pretty valuable.

Cheers.

They've done it tough, but they've signed licensing deals with Sony and EMI in the last 6 weeks.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4668442/grooveshark-settle...

I use Grooveshark daily. Aside from the excellent UI and service (couldn't tell you the last time it was down), the catalog is incredible.

One thing to note, though, is that they do pretty well with takedowns. For example, I attempted to upload a copyrighted song years ago and uploads were disabled on my account. They also work with publishers and artists to ensure fair compensation is made.

I've paid for the Pro account for a few years now and strongly believe they could do better than their competition if they made the service paid-only.

This must be a very recent development then - there have been countless stories of rather obscure and niche artists that found it impossible to have their work taken down by Grooveshark. Instead these reports often suggested that those (re-)uploads of unlicensed material seemed to happen automated.

They have agreements with the big labels. They just signed one with Sony.

http://bgr.com/2013/08/28/grooveshark-sony-music-settlement/

This is live for ages. I think they just started PR around this because it can now not die on iOS 7, running in background.

As a side note, try out Leap Motion playback controls on GS (in Settings > Subscription, wtf), they're super sweet. I just wave my hands around to control music, it's awesome!

Yeah, I've been using this for about a year!

Yeah. I don't use the HTML5 player much because it doesn't support broadcasts, which are the main feature I rely on, and it seems to be a bit unreliable on Android in general - it's still neat thoug.

they must've optimized it some more since I've last tried. it runs very snappily on the Nexus 4, as fast as a native app for the most part, and that hasn't been the case last time I tried it. well done.

Side note: my favorite radio show is uploaded to Grooveshark and the other day I needed to listen it offline, so I just used a proxy (fiddler) and save the stream from the proxy session console. There is an API where you can do the same, I think, because is just one request with the location of the MP3 audio. There are a lot of apps for downloading mp3 from Grooveshark but they usually came with a lot of crapware.

if do not mind Ruby. I am sure you can use https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark and wget.

The way I do it is much simple and it's not using the API. Just open the proxy sessions in Fiddler and save the response.

You can do the same with play.spotify.com, but you need premium account instead of API access.

With ID3 tagging it's a great way to keep your offline music organized even with devices which do not have Spotify on them.

Handy to run via cli also: https://npmjs.org/package/grooveshark-cli https://github.com/danopia/remora

remora seems to be outdated

Grooveshark is good 'more so' for playing the music you have already discovered. I personally like 8 Tracks model, Its one of the best platform to discover new music. It doesnt encourage piracy and at the same time lets us get some good free music. Its spot on solution.

It also takes care of piracy really well. Its a radio, so there are limitation on you going back and front, at the same time you can listen to the playlist as many times as you want.

User upload their own music: Which means no piracy: You have your paid content you are just broadcasting to larger audience. Like having your own radio station.

Odd. In Midori and Chromium, seems to work correctly. In Firefox, it appears crippled and I get 38 errors on the console -- SyntaxError, TypeError, ReferenceError -- including:

[09:42:19.907] SyntaxError: in strict mode code, functions may be declared only at top level or immediately within another function @ http://html5.grooveshark.com/build/app.min.js:1

Works fine in Firefox 27 for me.

Fine here, on Firefox Mobile 24.

Looks like its trying to run the site in strict JS mode. Do you have any extensions that might be forcing this?

The HTML5 player has been standard for at least a year now for GS. The two primary reasons I've avoided it are: - Lack of broadcasts. (Presumably available in their native app.) - Lack of wired.com-esque topnav position fixing in Chrome mobile. It's a minor thing, but having the entire page shift down every time you scroll can lead to incorrect menu selections when mindlessly selecting music.

I would use this all the time but there's one problem: the song doesn't advance to the next one on my iphone unless Safari is open. So, my phone has to be on with the screen on or the music ends when a song ends. (Grooveshark has had this player for a while... I haven't tried it in iOS 7).

We're currently working on a solution for this. The problem is that Safari stops running javascript and allowing us to stream audio after the phone has been off for some time.

Seconded. Love using Grooveshark to choose specific music I'm in the mood for (versus Pandora, for when I just want music to play non stop without having to think about choosing something), but Grooveshark only works for a few songs before it falls asleep and you have to tend to it.

Grooveshark has been my favorite online music player for last 3 years, but recently I have observed a lot of bugs on their site, which hinders smoooth experience and forces me to consider alternatives.

Used to love Grooveshark, but the music quality started to get a little too hit-or-miss for me. I find "normal" radio services like TuneIn, Pandora, and now iTunes Radio to be an overall better experience.

I am impressed that Grooveshark is still kicking, though, as I don't hear much about them outside of random articles on HN.

That's unfortunte that you've ran into bugs. Make sure to contact support@grooveshark.com whenever you encounter something weird and they'll make sure to report it and compensate you ;)

GrooveShark is great, but because of the user-uploaded content half the songs are incorrectly tagged and the albums are mostly incomplete.

If you access the site from Germany, they tell you that they have shut down in Germany because of too high operating costs.

that statement by itself is a little cryptic - the operating costs are caused by the GEMA agency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalis...

It's the same from Denmark. I guess most EU countries are cut off from Grooveshark these days.

strangely enough, in hungary GS works fine and spotify doesn't.

Works fine here in Portugal.

Surprisingly, it works fine here in Italy too.

Works great in Sweden.

I use https://hola.org/, works great and does not push all traffic trough proxy

I love grooveshark so much, I don't really have much to say other than that.

I've been using this for ever. I think I deserve hipster brownie points.

I can make a radio station based on my playlist anymore?

Where is the volume button?

I think the intention is that you change the volume on your phone.

Yes. I was suspecting this but since this works pretty well on the desktop as well (I actually prefer it over the normal interface) I think a volume button might be useful.

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