Show HN: Instant Music plays songs on Chrome

by howon92 • 12 years ago

12 13 12 years ago

calbear812• 12 years ago

Nice, can you describe how this compares to Streamus?

howon926• 12 years ago

Yes I'd love to! Streamus was way ahead of this and it was a great inspiration for Instant Music. One key difference is that users of Instant Music can play songs off BillBoard and iTunes charts and choose their favorite genres. Like Streamus, users can search for the songs they want and create their own playlists with them. However, users cannot "save" because there are no user accounts. So the nicest thing about Instant Music is that when you don't know what you want to listen to, you can just turn this on and start playing music.

calbear812• 12 years ago

Cool, that makes sense. The process of creating playlists can be a bit daunting. I had two ideas I wanted to shoot you:

Community Playlists - In our office we have a JamBox that one person broadcasts to. We all want to take turns picking the next song, would love to have a turntable.fm style option to invite other users to join a group and collectively manage the playlist.

Lists based on songs on blogs - Would love to just follow some of my favorite blogs recommendations like the ability to load the playlist from Pretty Much Amazing. You could do this by looking for all links that point to SoundCloud, YouTube, etc.

MeoMix420• 12 years ago

Hey hey,

Creator of Streamus here. :) Nice app! Feel free to look through Streamus' codebase for ideas if you'd like, https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension Just give attribution where appropriate.

I like your idea of using Billboard and iTunes charts. While not integrated into the actual UI, Streamus does integrate with Beatport's charts and I have BBC1's charts on my radar. I suppose others could be added as well, but not something I'm looking to do in the short term.

There's actually some semblance of user accounts with Streamus -- they're just not required. I do generate unique IDs for every installation and that can sync across PCs using chrome.storage.sync, but there isn't a lot of protection against malicious activity on that at this point. That is pretty much my #1 priority after I finish ironing out the last of some client-side bugs. I will be adding support for various openID logins and making users who aren't signed-in "second class citizens" while disabling the ability to delete records -- just providing them with the ability to mark them deleted so they don't show up client-side. That way someone can't go on a rampage nuking unauthenticated user data.

Anyway, keep up the good work. Happy to help you with any snares you encounter in building your extension. There's more than a couple 'gotchas' :)

Cheers

timl88• 12 years ago

I like it. I have a couple of ideas:

-Add album art

-Ability to search for a song

Greta job so far!

howon926• 12 years ago

You can search for any song and make your own playlist. From the charts option, choose "favorites" and then you will see the search bar. You can also pick songs from the Billboard or iTunes charts to be on that same list :)

keywonc• 12 years ago

I found the search function sorta hard to discover. Can you make it more prominent? I think it's great that you can build your own playlist. BTW is the custom playlist saved next time I open Chrome?

jonathanmarvens• 12 years ago

Awesome job! I use Rdio almost exclusively for all of my music needs, but this is great nevertheless.

howon926• 12 years ago

Wow! Thank you for a great feedback. Please tell me if there is anything you feel inconvenient.

Show HN: Instant Music plays songs on Chrome

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