Show HN: An open source music player in the cloud based on Backbone and Node.js | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An open source music player in the cloud based on Backbone and Node.js

rdubigny.github.io

58 pointspoupotte19 comments

Love the idea of keeping the data at home, but 'in the cloud' at the same time. I hope to soon start a project of doing something similar for photo/video management.

A few recommendations for you that I also plan on for myself:

1. Keep the backend 'database' as simple (and portable) as possible. Files and folders is ideal, with metadata stored in the files (in this case probably as ID3,etc tags)

2. Have a simple API to the data so 'rich clients' could be developed that are capable of caching limited sets of data for offline usage.

3. Make the HTML interface somewhat skinnable so people with conflicting tastes to you don't get turned off just because of the style.

4. Focus on a great personal experience before adding lots of sharing features.

Good luck!

Thank you for cheerful feedback!

The app is developped for Cozycloud which is a personal platform as a service (= the app is independent from the platform). It has been written with an ODM (JugglingDB) so you can switch the data layer at your will. Also, this is a single page app meaning the server is only a REST API Backbone (and everything allowed to) can access.

For the "skinnable" part, we didn't have time to bring those features but it is something I would love to see!

On a side note, we, at Cozy, have developed a photo management app (https://github.com/mycozycloud/cozy-photos/, demo: https://demo.cozycloud.cc/#apps/photos/) if it can help you in any way! Or maybe you'll like it and contribute to it ;)

I just want to stop by and say I have looked at CozyCloud before, a few times, really appreciating something like OwnCloud with a code base in something other than PHP.

My only disappointment was, a full CozyCloud stack VPS, when I emailed one of you guys, required a significant amount of memory (maybe minimum 1024MB, perhaps IIRC 2048MB?) is expensive for VPS, so I am not sure I want to invest in it.

That being said, CC is very cool and I think the future of nerds running their own clouds, and with a hipster environment like Node.js to boot! :-) The CozyCloud guys do solid work, and I want to compliment you for a job well done so far.

Thank you 616c for your message! About the minimum hardware required, Cozy made some progress on the memory footprint (lighter framework and usage of javascript runtime instead of coffescript one). Now you can use it with only 512MB of RAM instead of 1024MB. You can make it run on a RaspberryPi (B model) too.

I would suggest adding a

transition: 0; (plus all prefixes of course)

#content #tracks-display table tbody tr.track:hover

At the moment the transition into the hover is making it feel laggy.

I'd also reduce the transition time to something like 0.1seconds, or preferably drop it entirely. It's distracting and fussy.

Apart from that, good job! Everything seems to work well on latest Chrome.

Thanks for the feedbacks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I take note.

rdubigny

A similar concept: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

Agree, this seems like a prototype of Subsonic. Note that I am not knocking this project. It is a great first effort and seems to fit in fit in with the rest of Cozy very well. Speaking of, Cozy looks very nice, and I will explore it later!

Speaking about Subsonic, it has its warts, even the much better Madsonic fork. However, there is no denying it's featureset, which includes

  * Album art support
  * Fast search
  * Video support, although this isn't great...
  * Podcast support
  * Jukebox mode to play through the server's speakers
  * mobile app with real-time transcoding for mobile networks.

Subsonic is the reason I still listen to my collection at all, since I largely listen in my car.

App seems promissing. Will try it later. The illustration IMHO is both unnecessary and cheap looking (clipart style).

ok for the illustration. I take note of your feedback. Thanks!

rdubigny

Thank your rdubigny for this awesome application for Cozy. Only the external contributions like yours can unleash the full potential of the platform.

Haha! You're welcome. Working alongside your guys is a real pleasure! Keep it up, Web 3.0 is coming!

Cool project! But could you swap the icon for queuing to a play one and the playlist icon with the queuing icon?

Thank you for the feedback, I'm glad you like it! I opened a github issue to solve this (https://github.com/rdubigny/cozy-music/issues/9)

Did you consider using the doctape api for hosting and converting the audio files in the background? ;-)

Hi,

Since the app can be self-hosted the whole point is to do it directly in the application itself (and keeping your data at home ;)). I don't know doctape but if the "media conversion" works well it could be a good addition though! Thanks for pointing this out.

The project is also based on CoffeeScript. Wish it was JS instead :|

why?

Probably heard it all before but spend about 10 minutes on http://coffeescript.org, read up on it, and you'll have it down.

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