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Comment by FooNull | Hacker News Reader

I'm sooooo glad I was paying a yearly fee for a VIP membership... and now I can't even get a copy of my playlists. All of those obscure songs I fell in love with are gone. I wonder if the information they turned over included my credit card billing data...

<sigh>

Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?

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You can probably recover your playlist. (Instructions for Chrome)

On the computer you used grooveshark on: visit the website, open developer tools, open "resources tab", click on local storage->grooveshark.com. Now find the key called 'libraryXXXXXX' where the X's are numbers. Right-click it, "edit value" and copy/paste that data here: https://json-csv.com.

Source of instructions: http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/34goss/meta_groovesha...

I just made an account on this site so I could tell you this, but you just saved the last four years of my music collection. I can't tell you how incredibly thankful I am right now.

I just made an account also only to tell yuo that I am incredibly grateful for your help, my music is really important to me and you just saved my several-year collection. THANK YOU!!!

Late, but if your library gets truncated because it is huge like mine, you can instead get it by opening the console and typing JSON.stringify(localStorage); while on grooveshark.com

I hope playlist data wasn't part of the settlement, and that we will be able to recover it.

It would be detrimental to the artists to have some of their fans not be able to find them again, right? Perhaps record companies care less about the artists which are forgettable in the first place.

My best guess is that the playlist data (and any other relevant user data) is probably the reason the legal action even happened. What's honesty more valuable to whichever company is primarily responsible for the suit: the profits said company stands to gain now that Grooveshark is out of the way, or the behavioral user data of 10 years of internet music streaming on a front-runner service? My bet is on the later.

> Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?

Popcorn Time [1] meets Spotify?

[1] https://popcorntime.io/

Sort of already exists, for usenet at least https://github.com/rembo10/headphones

There used to be HipHop [0], a simple app that scraped mp3 sites and streamed music from them. Although it was fully functional (and still appears to work on my side), there is no music discovery, only search - which is a limiting factor for this app. Previous discussion on hn [1].

[0] https://github.com/hiphopapp/hiphop [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850613

I tried building an primitive version of that idea a few years ago, called Downstream [1] that scoured MP3 spider sites for URLs, then fed them into AxWMPLib (MS's drop-in media player).

It had a few ideas that were before their time, like a playlist DJ, and what a 17 year old me thought passed for a 'stylish UI' [2]

[1] https://github.com/MattRyder/Downstream

[2] http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/328000/328491/downs...

You can already run your own streaming service with Subsonic today. What are you waiting for?

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp ?

This seems like an interesting project. I've never heard about it before, though I do wish it was an open-source one...

Subsonic is GPL.

I've been running it for a few years now. I especially like using it with iSub on iOS, though that isn't under active development anymore (it's GPL now, too).

The official android app seems closed source though.

Both Subsonic and the unofficial DSub can be found on F-Droid.

Subsonic + iSub is absolutely wonderful, been a huge fan of that combo for years.

I moved personally to Ampache http://ampache.org which I found lighter and smoother than Subsonic, and it is working with Subsonic clients.

I switched from Grooveshark VIP to Spotify Premium years ago, however I came back every once in a while to listen to remixes that were not available elsewhere from time to time.

I'm sad that there's not even access to the playlists anymore.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered (In Grooveshark) an album of "Ninja Gaiden 2: The Dark Sword of Chaos" remix, which was actually really good.

The only place were this album was available was in Grooveshark. Now I'll never be able to listen to it again. That's quite sad.

Also, services like Rdio (I am a subscriber), spotify and the like don't have all the music I listen to (or is not available in my country). For example this album: http://www.rdio.com/artist/Stratovarius/album/Visions/?apSou... I cannot listen... even though I am a paying member, and the funniest thing is that I have the CD at my mom's house, were I bought it about 13 years ago.

Grooveshark (like AllOfMP3 on its time) was years light from the paying services...

Did any of the remixes come from here? http://ocremix.org/game/135/ninja-gaiden-ii-the-dark-sword-o...

I wrote about my self-hosted alternative https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming

Not really open source, but plex works pretty well for hosting and making your private collection accessible. Works awesome with chromescasts as well.

You could do some anonymous block-chain ledger type-service, really doubt that it would win over simply bit-torrent though, and ultimately I'm kind of biased since I really would prefer that real creators get to exercise their rights.

What is this blind obsession with "THIS NEEDS A BLOCKCHAIN!!!!!!!"? There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in a system of storing playlists which needs decentralized canonical ordering. A blockchain is literally one of the most inefficient ways of storing data imaginable, and serves no purpose here other than a buzz word.

Some people have never heard of a DHT, and think that "blockchain" is a workable primitive instead of a high-level tool. It's like immediately jumping to "let's create a table for that in Postgres" instead of first considering whether the problem could be solved with a dictionary.

Also, if people are looking for something to use as a primitive, I'd much rather they look at Freenet. :)

> There's nothing, absolutely nothing

No, there is something. You could use the blockchain as a decentralized torrent tracker.

Why on earth does that need canonical ordering.

It's not about the canonical ordering. It's about storing the pointers to files in a way that cannot be taken down by authorities. The playlists themselves could be stored anywhere, including but not necessarily in the blockchain.

http://www.soundtrack.io/ is well under way from the Coding Soundtrack community that came together when TurnTable.fm was alive.

You can connect an existing iTunes library to Plex and stream it anywhere.

You can also have Plex organize your music, but I've only ever used the iTunes part

If you don't have an external backup, don't complain about losing data.

Services like Grooveshark are no exception.

Yes. Obviously. I should have been downloading the tracks I was listening too and wring my own scripts to parse and save my playlist data with the full expectation that the service I had been paying for would be terminated without warning...

Guess I'll know for next time.

There were add-ons to seamless download songs as you played them, as we as playlists

Honestly, yes. Even if you were paying money for it, Grooveshark was blatantly, flagrantly illegal.

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