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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

Really cool idea. Who hasn't thought of doing this before? Congrats on actually making it, and making it look beautiful. Already forked it, can't wait to start playing with it.

I don't see any mobile screenshots, how does it look on a phone screen? I can imagine that being a great use-case for this app.

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Congrats on the design, but it's sad to see that once again, the wheel has been reinvented: there once was playdar [0], the content resolver that clearly separated the data that was of interest to the user (artist, song, ...) and the actual sources. Its biggest problem was, I believe, that it wasn't an actual music player.

Its gentle folks decided to restart from scratch with a music player in mind, and keep the idea of having different resolvers to target different sources, such as local disk, youtube, spotify, radioshark, ... Really, if you know javascript, you can write a resolver targetting the platform of your choice. The end result is Tomahawk [1] and if you're interested in that you should have a look.

Maybe it didn't spread because it's not a webapp ?

[0] http://www.playdar.org/

[1] http://www.tomahawk-player.org/

>Maybe it didn't spread because it's not a webapp ?

I think this is it. I remember checking out Tomahawk a while ago, about the time Songbird announced it was discontinuing development. I ended up just going back to iTunes because it did all I needed (even if it is bloated). If I can install Tomahawk on a computer, I can probably install my music library onto it as well, so I don't need the resolving features it has.

I actually just tried installing Tomahawk because of your comment, and it does work very well, and looks pretty while doing it. It was able to find several obscure artists with perfect accuracy. (Though it did grab most of them from Soundcloud at 128kb/s, when a few of them are on Spotify with higher bitrates). But unless I can access it anywhere, with a moment's notice, I don't really have a purpose for it being installed on a machine.

I rarely even listen to music on my computer anymore. I use my phone for Spotify on the go and even at work. It's nice to not have another program running while I'm working. But a lot of artists I like aren't on Spotify, and my phone doesn't have enough storage to fit my entire library.

That's why this interests me so much. I would love to set up a server where I can open the URL on my phone, laptop, friend's laptop, etc, be able to play most of my music through web services, and the artists that aren't on those services would play from my server directly, or my DropBox, or whatever, and hopefully it can all be a seamless experience.

If you want a real surprise as to Tomahawk's design, grab a recent nightly. Looks fantastic now.

Also, an Android app for Tomahawk is in the works!

There is this basic Tomahawk webapp: http://toma.hk/ – it doesn’t seem like it’s very actively developed though.

Then there is also Youtify: http://youtify.com – open source as well https://github.com/youtify/youtify but stale for some time.

Thanks! I'm pretty sure though that I'm not the first one nor the last one to have ever thought of that :D

The design is fluid but not really responsive. What I've been playing with is remote control that worked great on mobile devices. You were able to control all of your active CloudTunes sessions from any connected browser. So you could for instance play music on your computer, and control it via your smartphone (just like the iOS Remote app from Apple can control iTunes, except this worked over the internet so you didn't need to be on the same network). It was a very crude prototype though so I didn't include it in the initial release.

Also I was just wondering if it has a mobile component, guess I hadn't thought of that....I could play music on my computer no problem, it's on my phone that is ideal :)

I don't think he's the first to think of it, but definitely one of the few who actually built it, I started once a while back, but never got very far...LOL

Just out of curiosity, why did you fork it immediately? Did you find issues you wanted to fix, code you wanted to change, something else?

I didn't see any mobile screenshots, or much code that seemed responsive, so I assumed it wasn't mobile friendly and wanted to try fixing that. And the comments below about it supporting Dropbox, but not music stored on the local server (and the tips from OP about how to implement it), is another goal I'd like to tackle. I don't know if I can implement these, but I'm certainly going to try, and I'll learn a lot in the process.

Also I've had this idea a million times before, but never committed to doing it, it's the kind of product I've always wanted. So seeing it on GitHub (and written in a language I'm good at) makes me really happy, and I'd love to tear into this thing.

Edit: Also it's very pretty, and I'm a sucker for anything with a pleasant UI like that.

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