Show HN: YouFM - A new way to listen to music on Youtube

http://www.youfm.org/

by ashraful • 14 years ago

121 81 14 years ago

NathanKP• 14 years ago

Very cool! Is there a way to make the video larger if you want to actually view the video instead of just using the site as a music player?

Perhaps make the area below the video player clickable so that it makes the video appear in a larger area above the song list.

I am very impressed. Great work Ashraful!

ashraful15• 14 years ago

Thanks a lot.

I finally decided to try my hand at coding and this is the result of about 2 weeks of learning. I decided to skip the tutorials and books and jumped straight into coding. The code's mess but it works and that's great.

I still have a lot to learn, but I do plan on adding three features:

1. Have new searches not interrupt the current song. 2. Make the video resizable. 3. Add playlists. I actually asked a fellow HN-ers to help out with this because I don't think I'll be able to handle databases yet.

Glad you liked it.

samirahmed• 14 years ago

I would also recommend hiding the auto-suggest right hand side bar until everything is loaded and then sliding it into view when ready. I suggest this for 2 reasons,

1. I initially clicked the song and the first thing I noticed, before I the music played was the "this might take 90 seconds dialog" and I was ready to kill the tab thinking.

2. Just the fact that it says this might take a long time, is a 'downer', its better to make that view visible when it is ready so that user doesn't have to ever know of the fact that you have a process that takes 90 seconds.

habosa2• 14 years ago

This is the first thing you ever coded? That's fantastic, it's a great product.

rane• 14 years ago

Like the idea of having a Spotify-like UI for the vast amount of music on Youtube.

Not so much like the fact that it's pretty much Spotify's interface copied to the smallest detail.

bbrian• 14 years ago

I've never seen Spotify and thought it was just like iTunes, but with the controls at the bottom.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Pretty much that, and darker shades of grey.

p4bl06• 14 years ago

About Spotify, a friend of mine using it sent me a link to their website yesterday, and by visiting this link I was logged into her account, could see her personal informations and even change her password. I tweeted[1,2] about it as soon as I realized it. It's really a shame such a big website is so low on security…

I guess it might be a link from their desktop app to their website that she followed, but at least they could redirect to a clean url after having authenticated the user, it's okay that she sent that link to me (it was just to show me the prices of Spotify's monthly subscriptions), but what if she shared it publicly on Twitter or Facebook?

[1] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/236967984319590400

[2] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/236969256187731968

zapt02• 14 years ago

You are right, this looks like he just stole the assets.

wubbfindel• 14 years ago

Yup, that's the first thing I noticed.

Having a spotify/itunes-esq UI for youtube is a great idea, but this is just ripping off Spotify a bit too closely IMHO.

However, I seem to remember that a German competitor for Spotify has done almost the exact same UI copy - so maybe Spotify aren't that bothered by it. It's not as if their UI is that ground breaking (as someone else comments, it much like iTunes), it's the backend tech that makes Spotify so good.

holyjaw• 14 years ago

Solid execution. Looks beautiful, easy to use. Works. Thumbs up.

cjstewart882• 14 years ago

Neat, I made http://www.tubalr.com about 2 years ago and have been working on it every since. It made its way onto Mashable, Techcrunch, and several other blogs this past Dec/Jan.

Something to keep in mind, eventually YouTube will start blocking certain videos from being played on your site. This took a while and mainly started happening when traffic picked up. Theres no good way to pickout blocked videos, heres a function I use to weed through some of the blocked videos: https://github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr/blob/master/app/assets...

Also, all of Tubalr's codes in github if you're interested: http://www.github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr

Good Luck!

ashraful15• 14 years ago

Has it really been two years? Tubalr was actually the inspiration for this. I really loved it, particularly the old UI (the new ones great too).

Thanks for the link to the js to avoid blocked youtube vids. It'll definitely be a lot of help.

cjstewart882• 14 years ago

Yup, Sept 12, 2010 will be the 2 year mark o_O

No prob, shoot me an email cjstewart88@gmail.com if you need anything.

p4bl06• 14 years ago

This is a service I would really like. There's also youtify[1], but neither work for me (with youtify Soundcloud works but not YouTube). The music simply never starts.

That's too bad because such a "music mode" is something I would love to see on YouTube. It's not that I constantly listen to music on YouTube, that would be a waste of bandwidth, but I use YouTube almost exclusively as a music/artist discovery platform, then I download the musics I like once and for all. But I would still appreciate a lot to be able to actually have a working playlist/queue feature on YouTube, and also to be able to desactivate the video display (and download) to only keep the sound.

[1] http://www.youtify.com/

EDIT: I guess the best service of this type I've seen yet is http://roll.io/ (which works for me on top of that). I was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665090

ashraful15• 14 years ago

Hiding the video and letting users download the music or the video is against Youtube's TOS.

p4bl06• 14 years ago

It's too bad that hiding the video is against YouTube's TOS. Most of the time the video is a single static image anyway.

About your second point, I didn't ask for "letting users download the music or the video", when I said that I download the music it can be from many sources, most of the time .zip or .rar files that the artists put on mediafire or some services like this.

jensnockert2• 14 years ago

If Youtube doesn't work in Youtify, you probably have some sort of flash blocker installed. If you don't, a bug report would be appreciated. (https://github.com/youtify/youtify)

p4bl06• 14 years ago

I don't have any flashblocker installed. I thought it was because of HTTPS Everywhere but I disabled it temporarily and got the same result. Anyway I won't add an exception rule to HTTPS Everywhere for YouTube. So I have no clue at all what the cause could be, I don't think a "it doesn't work for me" bug report would be of any help.

Jonovono• 14 years ago

I made http://www.tunesicles.com . It allows you to easily search youtube (you can search for an album and instantly add all the songs to a playlist). Not sure if this is something like what you would like!

izad• 14 years ago

Cool, my last two web apps (http://beepmunk.com and http://choruzz.com) are somewhat similar to this.

I love the UI but search results can be improved IMO. Maybe you could utilize Last.fm API for search?

ashraful15• 14 years ago

I use Last.FM to find similar songs. It appears in the right sidebar when you play any song.

I didn't use Last.FM for the main search, because I couldn't get the album name directly from the keyword search (the JSON has the title and artist only). Getting the album name would require querying the API for each search result which again I tried but takes about 30 sec for the results to appear.

I am considering using Spotify's API though since iTunes gives strange results sometimes.

weego• 14 years ago

Confusing UX. I assumed that "top 100 hits" button would give me the top 100 hits for my search term, rather than the search button only being implicit. The placeholder text is a bad position for instruction (as a rule, not just in this case) because it's gone when you are in need of the signpost of what to do.

nosecreek• 14 years ago

You may want to set cursor:pointer in your css. At first I didn't think I could click on a track to play it because it just showed the default cursor or, worse, a text-selector cursor.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Nicely done, but I would love a separate column for the bitrage/quality of the music. Most of the music on YouTube is subpar bitrate, and music should usually be heard in decent quality. :)

K2h• 14 years ago

couldn't get song to play from ipad2. everything else seemed to work, the search is surprisingly good, and I like the UI.

dysoco• 14 years ago

The UX is really good a nice to the eyes, some suggestions:

I searched for "The Who" and almost 90% of the songs weren't by The Who, but instead song titles with "who". "Bob Dylan" worked fine.

Please, add support for lyrics, that would be simply awesome, and something Grooveshark is lacking.

Some songs just don't play, not sure why.

The search box is like "broken", I can't select with the mouse.

But it's great!

ashraful15• 14 years ago

The search results are sometimes quite weird. For example I can search for "The Who" now and get all the songs for the artists. I'll change the iTunes API I use now to Spotify's (or Last.FM's) soon.

Sometimes if you click on a song before the javascript for the music player loads it doesn't work. I'll do my best to fix it soon.

aysar• 14 years ago

Decent xcution, but rather slow :/

elteto• 14 years ago

I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Youtube has pretty much all the music that I listen to but it's playlist handling is borderline unusable. Sometimes I wonder if this is something they do on purpose so users can not convert Youtube into a personal jukebox. Overall, great project and kudos to the developer!

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

The search delays get annoying. Have you thought about caching search results on the server? It seems that would be especially useful if everyone is listening to the same playlist (as is the case now.)

Gigablah• 14 years ago

Just a heads up, "view new releases" is misspelt as "view new realeases".

muratmutlu• 14 years ago

This is genius

jfc2• 14 years ago

Brilliant. I listen to music on YouTube alot; this is something I've been looking for. Easy to use, very clean look.

As soon as you implement the playlist feature, I plan to use it.

One question: What sort of limits do you have on the searching? I have a song I listen to on YouTube and when I type in the song or artist, it doesn't come up.

ashraful15• 14 years ago

I'm searching iTunes, and then searching youtube with the query "<song title> - <artists name>" and then playing the first result.

Sometimes iTunes does not have a song, or the query doesn't return the correct video.

I'm trying to figure out a way to solve these cases, but haven't come up with a decent solution yet.

jfc2• 14 years ago

Ah, makes sense. The song isn't in iTunes; I recently requested that Apple add it to their database.

Thanks for the clarification. This site is awesome.

arkitaip• 14 years ago

The blatant theft of Spotify's look and feel makes me not want to use this service.

Screenshot of Spotify http://i.imgur.com/Um0HM.png

rationalbeats• 14 years ago

Never used Spotify before, but the screen shot you just posted looks just like iTunes to me.

jzukoff• 14 years ago

Spotify and iTunes may have similar UI but this site and Spotify are identical. One can assume Spotify was inspired by the design of iTunes, since well, lets be honest, its how everybody now pictures their music players. This site on the other hand had done nothing new at all, its blatant theft of Spotify's interface.

ashraful15• 14 years ago

This was sort of a project for me to learn to code, so I borrowed a UI that was suitable. I didn't want to spend much time coming up with a new UI.

I'll redesign the entire UI before launching the update version though.

Apologies to anyone who got offended at the Spotify ripoff.

ww520• 14 years ago

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

Killswitch• 14 years ago

Thanks for showing me this. The blatant theft of iTune's look and feel makes me never want to use Spotify.

arrowgunz• 14 years ago

I like the Spotify like interface. Good job. Looks neat.

craft• 14 years ago

I'm not going to discuss technical stuff - I REALLY like top hits functionality. Well Done!

nightpool2• 14 years ago

Really cool. It would be really useful though if I could sort the results, for example, by album/track number. Seems like a REALLY useful service nonetheless. Congrats.

EDIT: Also, sometimes people combine multiple songs into one youtube video, for example http://youtu.be/J0FawK4G_AY They seem to show up in your player as only the first song. This is a lot more complicated then my first suggestion, but some sort of detection of that (and maybe the possibly more common case of full album videos) would help save some confusion when users play one song and get another one for free. (BONUS!)

EDIT2: Also, allowing only one video for any given song has issues, for example, when the first result is a live video or otherwise bad quality. Maybe just a right click menu that lets you select "See alternate videos"?

ashraful15• 14 years ago

Will do the multiple videos thing in the next version.

nightpool2• 14 years ago

Cool! Any thoughts on sorting (and possibly adding a bit more metadata to sort with)?

fredsted• 14 years ago

Neat idea!

I also made something similar that allows you to easily make playlists from YouTube videos: http://instadj.com

ashraful15• 14 years ago

Thats really cool!

Is the code available somewhere? I'd love to take a look at how the search and the playlist thing works.

hhimanshu• 14 years ago

How have you implemented the queue and manipulation on lists like previous, next, shuffle? would love to know about it

strictfp• 14 years ago

Nice app. But I suspect that this will draw more attention to the possibility of using YouTube as a music service and therefore increase the risk of these videos taken off YouTube.

ashraful15• 14 years ago

Nowadays almost all the music videos on Youtube are legal. Most of them are from VEVO's official channel. So the risk of them getting taken off youtube is quite low.

jebblue• 14 years ago

Slick idea (providing it's legal), very nice interface not too dark, good balance, far better than what my 1992 html mind could dream up.

I tried some Bon Jovi tunes, every one I tried worked but Blaze of Glory, No. 34 on your list, odd.

Nice idea and site!

itmag• 14 years ago

I want technical details on how it works behind the scenes, plz :)

ashraful15• 14 years ago

It takes your search term and queries the iTunes API. Using the search results, the Youtube API is queried for the search term "<song name> - <artist name>". The first video result is taken (it may or may not be the correct video but usually is).

The video is played using Youtube's Chromeless Player.

Similar results are displayed using Last.FM's API.

joering2• 14 years ago

very cool and clean design. the only thing you need to change is that horrible scroller that you left untouched.

this will be perfect for you and will perfectly match the design: http://jamesflorentino.github.com/nanoScrollerJS/

edit: next to "time" column pls put the "# of views" -- this will help me discover whats popular in my search.

esalman• 14 years ago

Nice to see a decent app designed by a fellow Bangladeshi on HN.

cwp• 14 years ago

Love the idea! I mainly use YouTube to find interesting music, and this would (will?) make that easier.

The interface seems sketchy though. Sometimes clicking on a song in the results list doesn't do anything. Other times there's a little flash, but it doesn't switch to playing that song. Sometimes it selects the song and the video appears to load, but it doesn't actually start playing. In general, the UI is frustrating because it looks clean and polished, but a gesture has the desired effect only about 75% of the time.

Another issue I found is that sometimes I get what seems to be the wrong video—it's not the song listed, and appears to be completely unrelated. Several times I got a video of somebody narrating a Dickens novel, and once an Asian game show of some kind. It could be wrong metadata on the YouTube side, but it happened often enough that I doubt it.

If you sort out these issues, this could be awesome.

ashraful15• 14 years ago

The video not playing properly is an issue with the Youtube Chromeless player I used. I probably messed up the javascript somehow. I'll have it fixed when I implement the new UI.

The wrong video issue is simply the result of the first video result from youtube being wrongly tagged. I can't really do anything about it.

dpacmittal• 14 years ago

For the wrong video, maybe you can see the likes to dislike ratio? That would filter out lot of bad music too but I guess that's not what you want.

Another way is to use some API to look for the song title and duration, and match it with the duration of youtube video with +-10 seconds.

maxbernstein• 14 years ago

Nice, Ash! Coming with playlist functionality soon.

zephjc• 14 years ago

Needs a favicon ;) Very cool!

sbi• 14 years ago

This reminds me of songza from several years ago.

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

I'm impressed! Works better than i expected. Excellent, thank you for sharing.

sachitgupta• 14 years ago

If you use the iPhone, YouTunes lets you do the same thing and create playlists for your favorite songs: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtunes-live/id519596476?mt=...

startupkitchen• 14 years ago

A friend did something a little similar with this site - www.ransomnotemusic.com

navs• 14 years ago

Beautiful! I just wish there was a way to disable the video player on the bottom left, but seeing as how you're using youtube I don't see that being a possibility. Here's what I immediately love about this: no registration.

csmeder• 14 years ago

How about full screen video for party mode?

kenkam• 14 years ago

Nice work ashraful. The interface looks great and is easy to use. Just one small suggestion for improvement: could you make the mouse cursor to be a pointer when hovering over the rows of videos?

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

I type in cyrillic text: [барто готов] press enter and land on a blank, broken page.

knowaveragejoe• 14 years ago

Awesome idea, would be perfect if I could change the quality settings though.

bradcarter• 14 years ago

Earlier this year I had developed my own app to listen to music through YouTube because I was finding myself using YouTube to just listen to songs I wanted to hear: http://www.deskamp.com

With all these new YouTube music apps coming out recently you'd think 2012 is the year when YouTube reigns supreme for music listening.

drucken• 14 years ago

This is cool.

Would be nice to know how popular a particular tune was, i.e. at minimum Youtube Views and preferably also Likes/Dislikes as columns so you could order by them.

This is useful for many reasons, e.g. someone recommended a band and you do not know the easiest way to get into it.

Show HN: YouFM - A new way to listen to music on Youtube

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