15 ms·

Nuclear – Popcorn Time for music

223 points by devcriollo 8y ago

ikeboy 8y ago
Isn't that just YouTube or Spotify? Free music is freely given out legally these days, don't see the need for this.
- thieving_magpie 8y ago
  I wouldn't use this for my own moral reasons but we have different definitions of free. In this case you use "free" to mean: providing personal data and being subjected to a targeted marketing campaign in exchange for music.
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    So I'm curious why you draw a moral line here? - Do you find it immoral to watch music videos on YouTube? - Do you find it immoral to watch music videos on YouTube with ads blocked? - Do you find just putting that in a separate player to be the immoral part?
    - thieving_magpie 8y ago
      I haven't really thought through my moral position in detail and I probably wouldn't answer this even if I did. I'm just a random person on the internet.
  - e40 8y ago
    I agree on the YT front, but I don't remember seeing Spotify ads.
    - thieving_magpie 8y ago
      From Spotify: https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s6 https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s6 "To provide you with features, information, advertising, or other content which is based on your specific location." You might also be interested in the massive amount of data they store about users that was discovered after GDPR passed. Here's the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681289
      - Karunamon 8y ago
        That has to be in the license for the free service. There are no ads, period, when paid. Also, location information is used to avoid account sharing, which I think would clear GDPR.
        thieving_magpie 8y ago
        Forgive my lack of clarity, I was only talking about the non-paid service.
  - snazz 8y ago
    Using youtube-dl circumvents both the personal data and the marketing. Just convert to audio with ffmpeg, and then you can listen on your own devices with a normal music player.
    - Retr0spectrum 8y ago
      You can use youtube-dl to download just the audio stream directly, no need to remux with ffmpeg.
      - criddell 8y ago
        Are you happy with the audio quality with streams ripped from YouTube? I'm guessing it's been compressed more than once and that can't be good.
        snazz 8y ago
        Using the flag shown at https://askubuntu.com/questions/423508/can-i-directly-download-audio-using-youtube-dl https://askubuntu.com/questions/423508/can-i-directly-downlo..., you can see all of the different stream qualities available (both audio and video). Some videos (particularly official music videos) have pretty good audio, while amateur videos, remixes, and parodies usually don’t sound as good.
        jasonjayr 8y ago
        It's just as good as taping music off the radio...
        Retr0spectrum 8y ago
        Assuming the file uploaded to youtube was high enough quality, what you get from youtube-dl has only been compressed once.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  This tool is quite literally a YouTube and SoundCloud ripper as far as I can tell.
  - charlesism 8y ago
    That doesn't feel much like "PopcornTime for music" to me. Soulseek probably fits that description better.
japanoise 8y ago
>On an unrelated note, highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs. How incredibly arrogant. It can't be that people have legitimate grievances with elecron, like not wanting to use a program based on an incredibly bloated and poorly designed platform, oh no, they just "lack real world experience" and are "more interested in identity" (whatever that means). High-and-mighty types like this are exactly why working in IT or contributing to FLOSS is so draining at times.
- sschueller 8y ago
  I agree, turns me off. What a blinded way to move through life.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  The author doesn't claim you can't have grievances, but to simply stand by and claim you'll never ever use electron isn't airing a balanced grievance as much as it's a polarized opinion. There's a time and place for all technologies.
  - loeg 8y ago
    Characterizing all grievances against Electron as a religious dispute not based in fact is a sweeping, broad characterization of a group of people, and substantially inaccurate. That's what people object to about the README statement. > What if I am religiously opposed to using Electron for any and all purposes? > Then you are not the target audience of this program. See mps-youtube (link above) for a similar program that will not taint your machine with a library you happen to dislike. > On an unrelated note, highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs. The phrasing of the question is unnecessarily offensive, but whatever. The Q and A stands alone just fine. They really didn't need that second paragraph jab at Electron-dislikers to make their opinion of such people clear.
- 8y ago
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Ah, an Electron app... :) Something tells me it doesn't support gapless playback. (I might be wrong tho)
seanhandley 8y ago
Not sure making the UI look so much like Spotify was a wise move.
- mhh__ 8y ago
  Looks worse, but just as slow!
Deganta 8y ago
Popcorn time was popular because it was way better than any of the legal alternatives. You just had to open it, type the name of the movie/series and you probably could start watching. You could also do this in the legal alternatives, but the chance of actually finding what you were looking for was pretty small. Here I don't really see how this is better than Spotify/iTunes/Amazon Music.
- shanehoban 8y ago
  I believe it might be sought after is because it is a free alternative (although not sure if it contains ads or not, I don't see any mention of it anywhere - and I haven't used it).
- skykooler 8y ago
  Spotify recently removed six songs in my "offline" playlist from its library, so I can no longer play them. If this actually saves music files, that's a big plus.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Indeed. I'd love an app that allowed me to download songs (from torrent etc.) - the desired version, quality, ID3 tags and so on without issues. That would be a big improvement on most music services (streaming and buying). However, this looks to mainly be a low-quality Spotify alternative, so...
    - nonbirithm 8y ago
      You may be interested in soulseek[0]. I use it to search for more obscure music and the results include the bitrate/format. There's also a watchlist function in case you can't find something so you can keep searching in the background. Afterwards I use beets[1] to autotag everything with musicbrains and move it to my library folder, and it usually works. The downside is it isn't a streaming service so you have to find some way to listen remotely. I use Plex[2] for this and haven't had any issues. Also since it's P2P there's a general expectation that you also share things with other people, so you'd have to be prepared for that. [0] https://www.slsknet.org/news/ https://www.slsknet.org/news/ [1] https://github.com/beetbox/beets https://github.com/beetbox/beets [2] https://www.plex.tv/ https://www.plex.tv/
woodlander87 8y ago
Best part is the text in the LEGAL document: # Legal information My lawyer tells me I am allowed to smack anyone saying this program is illegal with a flyswatter.
- chrismeller 8y ago
  So he’s allowed to smack flyswatter-owning people who say it’s illegal? Awesome, I don’t own a flyswatter! Isn’t English grand?
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    No, they have to say that it's illegal by using their flyswatter. However, that makes you safe anyway :P
joeblau 8y ago
There was a time (Napster -> Bearsahre/Limewire/Kazaa) when I would have been excited about something like this. As I've become more financially stable, and have more hardware for music to integrate into I look at a project like this and think: How can I share music links with my friends easily? How do I get these songs on my watch? How do I get these songs on my phone? How do I play these from my home speakers? How easy is going to be for my partner to do all of the same things? The user experience bar for a music service has gone up since the days of Napster. If you primarily use one computer and that's your audio experience, this probably works well. I've found that I'm increasingly playing podcasts and music in different locations and going back to a centralized playing source is not an experience I want.
- vvillena 8y ago
  Ten years ago evey respectable device had DLNA support, an agnostic way to browse and play all kinds of media content available on the local network. Sharing a song with a friend could be easily done by sending the whole song (duplicates were not an issue since well-formed MP3s usually included Musicbrainz UUIDs that the media players compared), or by simply linking to Youtube or Grooveshark. DLNA is slowly going the way of RSS. It's too open of a standard for the current times. Google is already mounting an Embrace-Extend-Extinguish attack on it via the Chromecast protocol. I'm scared Bluetooth audio will be the next to be forgotten. Meanwhile, cloud music services are current trend, and it's not crazy to think they will follow the Nextflix-HBO-Disney steps and start creating walled gardens full of exclusive content. So, which options do we have now? Users can surrender power and gain convenience by going with, say, Spotify. The app's slick, the multiple device support is awesome, and the social features, while nowhere near Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, are enough. Keep in mind Last.fm is more than 15 years old. 15 years without progress on the music social media front. Also, disappearing songs are a huge problem. A company that pulls a song from their catalog without notifying the user is borderline evil. I feel connected to music. It's almost like the company is deleting a memory from your brain, hoping you won't notice its absence. Another option is to keep living in the 00s and maintain a home music library. You ensure no songs will disappear from your library without notice, which is good. The bad thing is you are more isolated. There's no easy way to access your library in other devices, there's no easy way to integrate a personal library with a cloud service, and there's no easy way to share your experiences with friends in the same way you can do it with Spotify. What do I do then? I decided to go the Spotify way, while keeping a small "memories" library which contains the more obscure songs, plus the ones I want to keep with me forever. I'm wary, though. The day Spotify decides to become more profitable, it will be over. Half the features will be gone, and we'll have to start all over again in a worse position than before, because our hardware will be less open than it is now.
porkloin 8y ago
It seems like calling this "Popcorn Time" for music isn't necessarily a great comparison. PT allowed streaming playback of torrented movies and was very clearly piracy and illegal. Meanwhile, this seems like an aggregator for existing free sources of music (Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud). That said, it looks like a cool hobby project and a great alternative for folks who want/need a multi-source music client. Google Play Music was my go-to service for a long time since I could not only get streaming access but also upload my own local files to their servers for playback anywhere. Most of that local music came from Bandcamp.
- Lio 8y ago
  The screenshots make me nervous. All of the bands shown certainly sell/pay stream their music online. Now I haven't checked if those bands are sharing free promotional material on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, etc. but something feels a bit iffy about this. I'd be a lot happier if the artists featured were clearly releasing music under Creative Commons or something like that. Right now this makes me think that if I use it the music streamed would be against the artists' wishes.
  - qnsi 8y ago
    calling this Popcorn Time for music suggests that this is very against artists' whishes
    - Lio 8y ago
      I was trying to be generous to the developer and was hopping the intention was to support peer to peer music streaming rather than just ripping people off. Just like with software, FOSS is better for everyone than just pirating commercial software.
- floatboth 8y ago
  Is ripping videos from YouTube (even not for permanent storage, just to show in a different interface) legal?
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
I mean Spotify is built on CEF, so who gives a shit if this is on Electron or not. It's not like there's a huge difference. Adding a piece of text to the README just to alienate people isn't wise; it just makes the author look like a tool, ripe for criticism.
Yuval_Halevi 8y ago
Don't call it popcorn time for music. It looks good enough to stand by itself.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
manigandham 8y ago
Reminds me of AudioGalaxy back in the day, nothing else came close to finding anything. Eventually it shutdown and Grooveshark was ok for a bit but that heyday in the early 2000s of music “streaming” was really something.
dmix 8y ago
This looks great conceptually but the UX on my first run through was awful. The prominent "Best new music" part had an Earl Sweatshirt album review, so I wanted to listen to it, but you can't click the album title... only the artist name. Then I had to sift through 30+ album covers (no titles... not ordered by release date) to find the one that looked like the one I saw on the previous page (it had a slightly different cover). You'd think a "new" album would be at the top. Then I double clicked the first song twice, then realize there is a popup that has a "Play Now" button on a SINGLE click (unlike Spotify or Google Music). I clicked that and it only added it to my "queue", I thought it was downloading for a couple min, but nope I had to click "Play" at the bottom to actually start it. I went to another album, clicked "Play Now" on a song and it froze with the logo pulsing fullscreen, and I had to restart the app. This is basic stuff.
- laaph 8y ago
  I'm getting the same results. I've puzzled with it for 20 minutes and have yet to get sound out of it.
z3t4 8y ago
It's amazing that some guy in a garage can do a better job then 500 guy's in a fancy office ...
- mhh__ 8y ago
  It's worse in just about every way than the 500 guys alternative, to be honest. It's really slow, and try searching for a specific song, or recovering from a crash, or working out what failed etc.
tambourine_man 8y ago
Title suggestion: nuclear - Popcorn Time for music It's nice to know the project's name
xj9 8y ago
> Popcorn Time for Music but where is the torrent client?
Malp 8y ago
Didn't we already get a "Popcorn Time for music" (which didn't use legal sources) with http://aurous.me/ http://aurous.me/ ?
superlopuh 8y ago
People who build on Electron should understand the technical tradeoffs they are making. On the one hand, they get a cross platform app, on the other, they have an extra Issue in their bug tracker to move to another platform, with occasional reminders thereof. On an unrelated note, highly polarising comments about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs.
- ourcat 8y ago
  I was recently tasked to build a cross platform win/linux/macos application. After looking around a few options, I plumped for Electron. (Also since I can write JS etc. pretty confidently) Glad I did. The project was done way faster than I could have imagined. And everyone else was amazed and pleased as punch with the result. Job done. :)
  - chooseaname 8y ago
    Great job optimizing for developer productivity!
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > on the other, they have an extra Issue in their bug tracker to move to another platform I presume that in this case such bug reports would be closed immediately.
kjullien 8y ago
I love this, it's so simple (at least the idea is) yet nobody has done this. (as far as I know). I use Popcorn Time almost daily and spent 60 700 minutes in 2018 listening to Spotify, so it's safe to say I need my music, yet to me 120 Euros a year is 120 spent elsewhere or saved. I already have a VPN subscription for Popcorn Time so this is really wonderful. There was at one point an app that did something similar (I can't recall the name), except it used YouTube instead of torrents which made it pretty useless for me as I find 128kbps playback rate to be quite terrible. "It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it." (even if it is of dubious legality) edit: nvm all that, got fooled by the title. This does not work with torrents but with free music streaming services, which will clearly be inferior to most premium services like Spotify, guess I'm starting another new side-project...
aquova 8y ago
I have what is probably a very naive question, as I am not well versed at all in Electron or web frameworks. I understand the complaints towards Electron, but I also see the appeal of developing utilizing a cross-platform browser. Is there a reason why developers can't simply have their application run in a local server? (Jupyter Notebook is an example that comes to mind.) This way, the user can use their browser of choice and doesn't have to have several installations of Chromium, while the developer can still utilize the web. I imagine it's more complex than this, but it's something I've been wondering.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  Some reasons off the top of my head: 1) Local servers are a no-go for multiuser environments unless you want to log-on every time you run your "native" app, as most (all?) browsers don't support http over domain sockets and there is no authentication for local sockets. 2) Managing the health of the service properly in a cross-platform manner is complicated. With electron if the app crashes, it just crashes. With a local server the browser tab just stops working. Sure technical users can figure it out, but if you are targeting a gui over a console, presumably you are trying to capture some fraction of non-technical users.
  - jpeeler 8y ago
    Ignoring the multiuser issue, could not some javascript be injected that displays "crash" instructions (or even just closes the tab) in the event the server becomes unresponsive? I'm not a web dev, but this sounds feasible.
  - loeg 8y ago
    The intersection of <people who use Electron apps> and <simultaneous multi-user systems> is likely small enough to ignore.
- snazz 8y ago
  This sounds like a great idea. It might be more confusing to people who don’t use computers as much, because interacting with your local computer over the web might feel strange, but there’s also the requirement to have a true native component acting as the server. Electron allows for zero truly native code to be written by the developer, which can help deal with inconsistencies between operating systems and configurations.
anonymous5133 8y ago
Is this another program which publicly exposes your IP address...and thus makes you vulnerable to copyright strikes from your ISP or potential legal action?
laaph 8y ago
Once upon a time I used a program called iRate. It had an online database of freely available music, and would download music, and you could rate the music, and its algorithms would attempt to figure out what music you liked and provide you with more of it. While the algorithms sucked, it was really nice to listen to random music, with a menu item that said "download more music", and get more music you had never heard of. More recently, I used Songbird (which went through a few name changes). It was a web browser that tried to include iTunes functionality. It really sucked - imagine trying to take a normal web browser and make it twice or thrice or more slower - but the idea was nice, you could go to music blogs, and click the play button and listen to all the songs they linked to, and click the download button if you wanted to keep the file. I am trying to get Nuclear to work, just to see what it's about, but I literally can't get any audio out of the program. That makes it slightly useless. I would love a program that collated legally available music and provide a music player interface (preferably VLC or WinAmp style and speediness). There is so much music out there that you would never have to listen to the same song twice. Digging through SoundCloud and BandCamp and Archive.org would provide endless music. Archive.org alone, if you wanted to avoid legal issues (even though lots of music is available free streaming at the other two websites I mentioned). Perhaps I'll have to write this program myself. I already have too many projects as it is, though.

223 points by devcriollo 8y ago

ikeboy 8y ago

Isn't that just YouTube or Spotify? Free music is freely given out legally these days, don't see the need for this.

thieving_magpie 8y ago
I wouldn't use this for my own moral reasons but we have different definitions of free. In this case you use "free" to mean: providing personal data and being subjected to a targeted marketing campaign in exchange for music.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  So I'm curious why you draw a moral line here? - Do you find it immoral to watch music videos on YouTube? - Do you find it immoral to watch music videos on YouTube with ads blocked? - Do you find just putting that in a separate player to be the immoral part?
  - thieving_magpie 8y ago
    I haven't really thought through my moral position in detail and I probably wouldn't answer this even if I did. I'm just a random person on the internet.
- e40 8y ago
  I agree on the YT front, but I don't remember seeing Spotify ads.
  - thieving_magpie 8y ago
    From Spotify: https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s6 https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s6 "To provide you with features, information, advertising, or other content which is based on your specific location." You might also be interested in the massive amount of data they store about users that was discovered after GDPR passed. Here's the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681289
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      That has to be in the license for the free service. There are no ads, period, when paid. Also, location information is used to avoid account sharing, which I think would clear GDPR.
      - thieving_magpie 8y ago
        Forgive my lack of clarity, I was only talking about the non-paid service.
- snazz 8y ago
  Using youtube-dl circumvents both the personal data and the marketing. Just convert to audio with ffmpeg, and then you can listen on your own devices with a normal music player.
  - Retr0spectrum 8y ago
    You can use youtube-dl to download just the audio stream directly, no need to remux with ffmpeg.
    - criddell 8y ago
      Are you happy with the audio quality with streams ripped from YouTube? I'm guessing it's been compressed more than once and that can't be good.
      - snazz 8y ago
        Using the flag shown at https://askubuntu.com/questions/423508/can-i-directly-download-audio-using-youtube-dl https://askubuntu.com/questions/423508/can-i-directly-downlo..., you can see all of the different stream qualities available (both audio and video). Some videos (particularly official music videos) have pretty good audio, while amateur videos, remixes, and parodies usually don’t sound as good.
      - jasonjayr 8y ago
        It's just as good as taping music off the radio...
      - Retr0spectrum 8y ago
        Assuming the file uploaded to youtube was high enough quality, what you get from youtube-dl has only been compressed once.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
shittyadmin 8y ago
This tool is quite literally a YouTube and SoundCloud ripper as far as I can tell.
- charlesism 8y ago
  That doesn't feel much like "PopcornTime for music" to me. Soulseek probably fits that description better.

japanoise 8y ago

>On an unrelated note, highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs. How incredibly arrogant. It can't be that people have legitimate grievances with elecron, like not wanting to use a program based on an incredibly bloated and poorly designed platform, oh no, they just "lack real world experience" and are "more interested in identity" (whatever that means). High-and-mighty types like this are exactly why working in IT or contributing to FLOSS is so draining at times.

sschueller 8y ago
I agree, turns me off. What a blinded way to move through life.
vorpalhex 8y ago
The author doesn't claim you can't have grievances, but to simply stand by and claim you'll never ever use electron isn't airing a balanced grievance as much as it's a polarized opinion. There's a time and place for all technologies.
- loeg 8y ago
  Characterizing all grievances against Electron as a religious dispute not based in fact is a sweeping, broad characterization of a group of people, and substantially inaccurate. That's what people object to about the README statement. > What if I am religiously opposed to using Electron for any and all purposes? > Then you are not the target audience of this program. See mps-youtube (link above) for a similar program that will not taint your machine with a library you happen to dislike. > On an unrelated note, highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs. The phrasing of the question is unnecessarily offensive, but whatever. The Q and A stands alone just fine. They really didn't need that second paragraph jab at Electron-dislikers to make their opinion of such people clear.
8y ago

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

Ah, an Electron app... :) Something tells me it doesn't support gapless playback. (I might be wrong tho)

seanhandley 8y ago

Not sure making the UI look so much like Spotify was a wise move.

mhh__ 8y ago
Looks worse, but just as slow!

Deganta 8y ago

Popcorn time was popular because it was way better than any of the legal alternatives. You just had to open it, type the name of the movie/series and you probably could start watching. You could also do this in the legal alternatives, but the chance of actually finding what you were looking for was pretty small. Here I don't really see how this is better than Spotify/iTunes/Amazon Music.

shanehoban 8y ago
I believe it might be sought after is because it is a free alternative (although not sure if it contains ads or not, I don't see any mention of it anywhere - and I haven't used it).
skykooler 8y ago
Spotify recently removed six songs in my "offline" playlist from its library, so I can no longer play them. If this actually saves music files, that's a big plus.
- tomp 8y ago
  Indeed. I'd love an app that allowed me to download songs (from torrent etc.) - the desired version, quality, ID3 tags and so on without issues. That would be a big improvement on most music services (streaming and buying). However, this looks to mainly be a low-quality Spotify alternative, so...
  - nonbirithm 8y ago
    You may be interested in soulseek[0]. I use it to search for more obscure music and the results include the bitrate/format. There's also a watchlist function in case you can't find something so you can keep searching in the background. Afterwards I use beets[1] to autotag everything with musicbrains and move it to my library folder, and it usually works. The downside is it isn't a streaming service so you have to find some way to listen remotely. I use Plex[2] for this and haven't had any issues. Also since it's P2P there's a general expectation that you also share things with other people, so you'd have to be prepared for that. [0] https://www.slsknet.org/news/ https://www.slsknet.org/news/ [1] https://github.com/beetbox/beets https://github.com/beetbox/beets [2] https://www.plex.tv/ https://www.plex.tv/

woodlander87 8y ago

Best part is the text in the LEGAL document: # Legal information My lawyer tells me I am allowed to smack anyone saying this program is illegal with a flyswatter.

chrismeller 8y ago
So he’s allowed to smack flyswatter-owning people who say it’s illegal? Awesome, I don’t own a flyswatter! Isn’t English grand?
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  No, they have to say that it's illegal by using their flyswatter. However, that makes you safe anyway :P

joeblau 8y ago

There was a time (Napster -> Bearsahre/Limewire/Kazaa) when I would have been excited about something like this. As I've become more financially stable, and have more hardware for music to integrate into I look at a project like this and think: How can I share music links with my friends easily? How do I get these songs on my watch? How do I get these songs on my phone? How do I play these from my home speakers? How easy is going to be for my partner to do all of the same things? The user experience bar for a music service has gone up since the days of Napster. If you primarily use one computer and that's your audio experience, this probably works well. I've found that I'm increasingly playing podcasts and music in different locations and going back to a centralized playing source is not an experience I want.

vvillena 8y ago
Ten years ago evey respectable device had DLNA support, an agnostic way to browse and play all kinds of media content available on the local network. Sharing a song with a friend could be easily done by sending the whole song (duplicates were not an issue since well-formed MP3s usually included Musicbrainz UUIDs that the media players compared), or by simply linking to Youtube or Grooveshark. DLNA is slowly going the way of RSS. It's too open of a standard for the current times. Google is already mounting an Embrace-Extend-Extinguish attack on it via the Chromecast protocol. I'm scared Bluetooth audio will be the next to be forgotten. Meanwhile, cloud music services are current trend, and it's not crazy to think they will follow the Nextflix-HBO-Disney steps and start creating walled gardens full of exclusive content. So, which options do we have now? Users can surrender power and gain convenience by going with, say, Spotify. The app's slick, the multiple device support is awesome, and the social features, while nowhere near Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, are enough. Keep in mind Last.fm is more than 15 years old. 15 years without progress on the music social media front. Also, disappearing songs are a huge problem. A company that pulls a song from their catalog without notifying the user is borderline evil. I feel connected to music. It's almost like the company is deleting a memory from your brain, hoping you won't notice its absence. Another option is to keep living in the 00s and maintain a home music library. You ensure no songs will disappear from your library without notice, which is good. The bad thing is you are more isolated. There's no easy way to access your library in other devices, there's no easy way to integrate a personal library with a cloud service, and there's no easy way to share your experiences with friends in the same way you can do it with Spotify. What do I do then? I decided to go the Spotify way, while keeping a small "memories" library which contains the more obscure songs, plus the ones I want to keep with me forever. I'm wary, though. The day Spotify decides to become more profitable, it will be over. Half the features will be gone, and we'll have to start all over again in a worse position than before, because our hardware will be less open than it is now.

porkloin 8y ago

It seems like calling this "Popcorn Time" for music isn't necessarily a great comparison. PT allowed streaming playback of torrented movies and was very clearly piracy and illegal. Meanwhile, this seems like an aggregator for existing free sources of music (Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud). That said, it looks like a cool hobby project and a great alternative for folks who want/need a multi-source music client. Google Play Music was my go-to service for a long time since I could not only get streaming access but also upload my own local files to their servers for playback anywhere. Most of that local music came from Bandcamp.

Lio 8y ago
The screenshots make me nervous. All of the bands shown certainly sell/pay stream their music online. Now I haven't checked if those bands are sharing free promotional material on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, etc. but something feels a bit iffy about this. I'd be a lot happier if the artists featured were clearly releasing music under Creative Commons or something like that. Right now this makes me think that if I use it the music streamed would be against the artists' wishes.
- qnsi 8y ago
  calling this Popcorn Time for music suggests that this is very against artists' whishes
  - Lio 8y ago
    I was trying to be generous to the developer and was hopping the intention was to support peer to peer music streaming rather than just ripping people off. Just like with software, FOSS is better for everyone than just pirating commercial software.
floatboth 8y ago
Is ripping videos from YouTube (even not for permanent storage, just to show in a different interface) legal?

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

I mean Spotify is built on CEF, so who gives a shit if this is on Electron or not. It's not like there's a huge difference. Adding a piece of text to the README just to alienate people isn't wise; it just makes the author look like a tool, ripe for criticism.

Yuval_Halevi 8y ago

Don't call it popcorn time for music. It looks good enough to stand by itself.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

manigandham 8y ago

Reminds me of AudioGalaxy back in the day, nothing else came close to finding anything. Eventually it shutdown and Grooveshark was ok for a bit but that heyday in the early 2000s of music “streaming” was really something.

dmix 8y ago

This looks great conceptually but the UX on my first run through was awful. The prominent "Best new music" part had an Earl Sweatshirt album review, so I wanted to listen to it, but you can't click the album title... only the artist name. Then I had to sift through 30+ album covers (no titles... not ordered by release date) to find the one that looked like the one I saw on the previous page (it had a slightly different cover). You'd think a "new" album would be at the top. Then I double clicked the first song twice, then realize there is a popup that has a "Play Now" button on a SINGLE click (unlike Spotify or Google Music). I clicked that and it only added it to my "queue", I thought it was downloading for a couple min, but nope I had to click "Play" at the bottom to actually start it. I went to another album, clicked "Play Now" on a song and it froze with the logo pulsing fullscreen, and I had to restart the app. This is basic stuff.

laaph 8y ago
I'm getting the same results. I've puzzled with it for 20 minutes and have yet to get sound out of it.

z3t4 8y ago

It's amazing that some guy in a garage can do a better job then 500 guy's in a fancy office ...

mhh__ 8y ago
It's worse in just about every way than the 500 guys alternative, to be honest. It's really slow, and try searching for a specific song, or recovering from a crash, or working out what failed etc.

tambourine_man 8y ago

Title suggestion: nuclear - Popcorn Time for music It's nice to know the project's name

xj9 8y ago

> Popcorn Time for Music but where is the torrent client?

Malp 8y ago

Didn't we already get a "Popcorn Time for music" (which didn't use legal sources) with http://aurous.me/ http://aurous.me/ ?

superlopuh 8y ago

People who build on Electron should understand the technical tradeoffs they are making. On the one hand, they get a cross platform app, on the other, they have an extra Issue in their bug tracker to move to another platform, with occasional reminders thereof. On an unrelated note, highly polarising comments about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs.

ourcat 8y ago
I was recently tasked to build a cross platform win/linux/macos application. After looking around a few options, I plumped for Electron. (Also since I can write JS etc. pretty confidently) Glad I did. The project was done way faster than I could have imagined. And everyone else was amazed and pleased as punch with the result. Job done. :)
- chooseaname 8y ago
  Great job optimizing for developer productivity!
crooked-v 8y ago
> on the other, they have an extra Issue in their bug tracker to move to another platform I presume that in this case such bug reports would be closed immediately.

kjullien 8y ago

I love this, it's so simple (at least the idea is) yet nobody has done this. (as far as I know). I use Popcorn Time almost daily and spent 60 700 minutes in 2018 listening to Spotify, so it's safe to say I need my music, yet to me 120 Euros a year is 120 spent elsewhere or saved. I already have a VPN subscription for Popcorn Time so this is really wonderful. There was at one point an app that did something similar (I can't recall the name), except it used YouTube instead of torrents which made it pretty useless for me as I find 128kbps playback rate to be quite terrible. "It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it." (even if it is of dubious legality) edit: nvm all that, got fooled by the title. This does not work with torrents but with free music streaming services, which will clearly be inferior to most premium services like Spotify, guess I'm starting another new side-project...

aquova 8y ago

I have what is probably a very naive question, as I am not well versed at all in Electron or web frameworks. I understand the complaints towards Electron, but I also see the appeal of developing utilizing a cross-platform browser. Is there a reason why developers can't simply have their application run in a local server? (Jupyter Notebook is an example that comes to mind.) This way, the user can use their browser of choice and doesn't have to have several installations of Chromium, while the developer can still utilize the web. I imagine it's more complex than this, but it's something I've been wondering.

aidenn0 8y ago
Some reasons off the top of my head: 1) Local servers are a no-go for multiuser environments unless you want to log-on every time you run your "native" app, as most (all?) browsers don't support http over domain sockets and there is no authentication for local sockets. 2) Managing the health of the service properly in a cross-platform manner is complicated. With electron if the app crashes, it just crashes. With a local server the browser tab just stops working. Sure technical users can figure it out, but if you are targeting a gui over a console, presumably you are trying to capture some fraction of non-technical users.
- jpeeler 8y ago
  Ignoring the multiuser issue, could not some javascript be injected that displays "crash" instructions (or even just closes the tab) in the event the server becomes unresponsive? I'm not a web dev, but this sounds feasible.
- loeg 8y ago
  The intersection of <people who use Electron apps> and <simultaneous multi-user systems> is likely small enough to ignore.
snazz 8y ago
This sounds like a great idea. It might be more confusing to people who don’t use computers as much, because interacting with your local computer over the web might feel strange, but there’s also the requirement to have a true native component acting as the server. Electron allows for zero truly native code to be written by the developer, which can help deal with inconsistencies between operating systems and configurations.

anonymous5133 8y ago

Is this another program which publicly exposes your IP address...and thus makes you vulnerable to copyright strikes from your ISP or potential legal action?

laaph 8y ago

Once upon a time I used a program called iRate. It had an online database of freely available music, and would download music, and you could rate the music, and its algorithms would attempt to figure out what music you liked and provide you with more of it. While the algorithms sucked, it was really nice to listen to random music, with a menu item that said "download more music", and get more music you had never heard of. More recently, I used Songbird (which went through a few name changes). It was a web browser that tried to include iTunes functionality. It really sucked - imagine trying to take a normal web browser and make it twice or thrice or more slower - but the idea was nice, you could go to music blogs, and click the play button and listen to all the songs they linked to, and click the download button if you wanted to keep the file. I am trying to get Nuclear to work, just to see what it's about, but I literally can't get any audio out of the program. That makes it slightly useless. I would love a program that collated legally available music and provide a music player interface (preferably VLC or WinAmp style and speediness). There is so much music out there that you would never have to listen to the same song twice. Digging through SoundCloud and BandCamp and Archive.org would provide endless music. Archive.org alone, if you wanted to avoid legal issues (even though lots of music is available free streaming at the other two websites I mentioned). Perhaps I'll have to write this program myself. I already have too many projects as it is, though.