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Show HN: roll.io eats txt files and shits youtube videos. Useful?
- kri5 15y agoGreat idea and very promising application. I've exported my favourite tracks via foobar2000 and last.fm statistics via softplaylist plugin (it creates XPSF playlist) et voila! my videoplaylist was created en instant.
- hbz 15y agoI think it's useful and very well made. Nice job!
- firatdemirel 15y agoit works & sounds great. but i'd like to close video part completely. also a browser extension could be nice for it.
- schizophrenia 15y agovery clear and good idea, congrats guys
- rmc 15y agoI was a bit confused at first. You should have more details on how it works
- mgkimsal 15y agoi misunderstood it at first. i thought you meant it would parse out a text file looking for meaning/relevancy and give you videos based on the text. It's nice what you've done, just wasn't my first reaction to the Show HN text.
- hafifuyku 15y agoSorry for the confusing title. roll.io takes txt files, searches every line in youtube and plays the results one after the other. This is the result of a tiny hackathon. We wanted to listen to the old playlists of Woxy.com
- tmachinecharmer 15y agoCan you have man/help page? Because a lot many guys were confused at first. Nice job.
- mgkimsal 15y agoit became apparent after I saw the sample "upload text" but perhaps having a default text box with sample lines in it would remove the confusion.
- AretNCarlsen 15y agoThat is a good idea! Like Google advertising, where the ads are selected based on the textual context -- words in your search string or email or website -- but instead of ads as the output, short video clips. For long text blocks, run the videos alongside a scrolling reader such that the video and text stay synchronized. The word "respect" prompts an Aretha Franklin clip, maybe. Appeal to the [people who think they are] multitaskers! You'll have nerd users searching for which Shakespearean passages lead to the most amusing clip playlist! If the video bandwidth is all Youtube's, and the UI is Javascript, your ongoing cost is mostly the server time to run the text against your corpus and spit out a playlist. I love when startup ideas spring from a misinterpretation of how someone else summarizes their product.
- p4bl0 15y agoYouTube's playlist management is a PITA, so this is really a great idea. And it's done following the KISS principle, kudos!
- instakill 15y agoVoted up if only for the title.
- kraymer 15y agoI fed it with my lastfm charts, good job. Empty lines are currently displayed and link to a random video. A quick improvement would be to just skip these empty lines.
- noob007 15y agovery nice idea! would be nice if we could type out playlist in textboxes and then open them via roll.io so that those boxes are easy to emded in forums when someone wants to list out a few viddys without going to youtube to expressedly look & link for them.
- hafifuyku 15y agowonderful idea
- c4urself 15y agomuch better than youtube, clear and to the point, simple. great job!
- tnajdek 15y agoI love how simple yet functional it is. If I can suggest just a few minor things: 1. We have the 'hide video' options, can we please have 'hide list' option which makes video bigger? 2. Can we have the 'always select best quality' switch? With these features roll.io would make it to my favorite music players list.
- bochi 15y agoReally nice idea. I have created something similar but I try to create a playlist for those who have last.fm accounts: http://lastvj.appspot.com http://lastvj.appspot.com
- sfgfdhgfdshdhhd 15y agoGreat idea, but definitely needs a better explanation as I misunderstood it at first. Obviously the next step is allowing users to save their playlists.
- PaulJoslin 15y agoI really like this, I had a similar idea a few years ago with 'YouLink' - essentially solving the playlist problem of YouTube - but I didn't think of making such a simple and clean execution. Mine was more Youtube meets iTunes style - pre Spotify days. Plus back then, bandwidth was not so great / YouTube often buffered causing breaks in the music. So I abandoned the project. However Roll.io is a great solution, often I have the situation where I have a track listing for something that I can find individual songs for on youtube, but need to quickly make a playlist out of it, but don't due to the horrible youtube playlist interface. This is especially true when it comes to 'Remixed' music where the songs have particular unique names. e.g. http://roll.io/#4fvjsj!0 http://roll.io/#4fvjsj!0 Thanks for making it. The only request I would have would be to automatically remove or recognise track listing numbers at the start of the tracks. E.g. if I copy a track listing I often have: 1. SongA 2. SongB 3. SongC 4. SongD - It is a slight pain to manually remove the 1., 2., 3., 4. from the front and may cause incorrect matching on the songs if I leave them on.
- bekirdag 15y agoafter collecting some data, we will prepare some regexp for the common mistakes.
- marcocampos 15y agoThis is great. Congrats! For me the killer feature is Grooveshark support :)
- jannes 15y agoVery useful. I always wished for something like this. I was a little disappointed to see that it didn't work on the iPad, though. The page just tells me (in grey text on a black background btw) that the flash player is needed, although embedded YouTube videos usually work without the need for flash on this thing.
- bekirdag 15y agoI know, it's a pitty but probably roll.io could never be suitable for ios.
- noob007 15y agojust thought of something else. It would be quite cool if we could direct roll.io to play files via url parameter. Say we want to play 3 songs. We could type something like this in a forum: http://roll.io/song1title-song2title-song3title http://roll.io/song1title-song2title-song3title With '-' as delimiter or some other char/word
- bekirdag 15y agoit does something similar. Here are some examples: http://roll.io/queen http://roll.io/queen (plays 1 song from queen) http://roll.io/queen http://roll.io/queen play:all (plays 25 songs from queen) http://roll.io/queen http://roll.io/queen play:2 (plays 2 songs from queen) http://roll.io/http://bt.ly/Ercv6 http://roll.io/http://bt.ly/Ercv6 (the url of your txt file)
- BonoboBoner 15y agoAwesome idea. Drap and drop upload oft txt files would be nice.
- mrcharles 15y agoThis is a great idea, and amazing for previewing new albums! However, sometimes when it fails to search and substitutes, it would be nice to be able to hand edit the playlist.
- karolist 15y agoThanks for sharing, this looks useful, though not sure the shit mantra is necessary.
- encoderer 15y agoI second this. It's crass and unnecessary and just makes me look at it.. i dunno... differently. And because of that -- and only that -- I would never see myself sharing this with people or using it to send video playlists to people aside from some anonymous web forum.
- jh3 15y agoThat's a pretty shitty reason not to share this with people.
- encoderer 15y agoAnd the bad pun award goes to jh3! Seriously, though, I'm not one to be easily offended -- and I think fake umbrage in our society has been taken to a ridiculous level (especially in politics). But the reason I like good design is because when something is well designed it gives me a sense of calm and peace. Having "I eat text and shit out whatever" is just very bad design to me. And it's offensive enough that why would I risk offending somebody? Why do I care enough about the site to take on that risk?
- hafifuyku 15y agoI understand. It also seems to be misleading according to some comments. I will think it through. Thank you.
- camiller 15y agoI'm not one to be easily offended either, but I am also less likely to share this with my 12 year old daughter who really likes to explore youtube. Of course all she plays is that bieber kid, some kid named cody and lady gaga.
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- csertoglu 15y agofirehose of a firehose. i like it. one day, there will be some semantic sense made out of this.
- ssdsa 15y agoI wonder why everyone seems to get what this does from reading the description. When I read "eat and shit", I assume that the "food" is "transformed" into ... youtube videos. So I thought this would generate new videos and upload them to youtube automatically, maybe showing the txt files as a huge StarWars scroller, or something.
- p4bl0 15y agoThis is also exactly what I thougth (with the starwars scroller and all!), but the website is pretty self explainatory once you visited it and cliqued "enter txt" link.
- hafifuyku 15y agoSorry. that's me trying to sound cool in 80 characters (minus "Show HN:")
- joebo 15y agoPersonally, I could go for less 'cool' on HN and more clarity and accuracy instead. 'Show HN: roll.io plays youtube videos searching list of text. Useful?' That aside, neat app. It's a clever tagline though.
- p4bl0 15y agoFor this particular link I'm not sure I would have clicked it with the text you suggest. And I'm glad I did click it. But I agree that in the general case, titles on HN should be accurate rather than catchy.
- random42 15y agoNo need to. We prefer quality over wordiness.
- adolph 15y agoYeah, I had uploaded the first 10 chapters of Moby Dick, all along thinking "what is this annoying video playing," before realizing it doesn't do a StarWars scroller.
- jaysonelliot 15y agoOnce you get what it does, it becomes addictive. I hope this idea stays as focused and bloat-free as it is right now, I just love it.
- edshadi 15y agoLOVE it...I would completely use it and I got it from the first look!
- atacrawl 15y agoDefinitely gets an upvote from me. Probably the neatest music site idea I've seen since the now-defunct Muxtape.
- johnrob 15y agoMobile version please!!! (for my flash enabled android phone) For some reason the page is very slow to interact with and type on while using my Motorola Atrix (supposedly a fast device). Ideally, the home page would have just a textarea and no video playing by default.
- rsbrown 15y agoHuh. That was one of the quickest "how fuckin' stupid" => "how fuckin' brilliant" turnarounds my brain has experienced. Nice work.
- yellowbkpk 15y agoWhen I clicked on a "Death Cab For Cutie" video in the list I was shown a 50-minute academic video about search engine quality. Slightly ironic.
- omouse 15y ago...that's the correct result seeing as Death Cab For Cutie is an indie/hipster band ;p
- seanp2k 15y ago.... they (are|have) signed with Warner and Atlantic. Doesn't get much more mainstream than that. REF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_cab_for_cutie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_cab_for_cutie Regarding the _USEFULNESS_ of this: low. Regarding the entertainment factor: pretty high. I could use a m3u-> txt parser to dump a huge load of youtube videos and make a "music video playlist" -- kind of cool.
- kdeberk 15y agoFinally! A good replacement for radioblogclub. I was so unhappy when they took that down since it was my main source for discovering good artists.
- pyUser 15y agosimple and great idea! vote up it is.
- tobylane 15y agoIt's most useful if a) Always (settable option?) HD videos, b) uses less cpu time/battery/memory than playing the video (when hiding the video) c) youtube playlists. Mostly b. Even on an imac youtube can take 10% of cpu I'd rather be used for something else, like a lagging game.
- vld 15y agoRight, interesting. Some problems tho: removed as requested
- johnconroy 15y agoYou bastard. There goes my afternoon.
- sokolski 15y agoNice. Doesn't youtube api have limits on number of requests?
- zem 15y agonot what i was expecting (i thought it'd be some sort of programmatic generation of presentations that were then converted to video) but a very neat idea indeed.
- johnrob 15y agoExcellent. I hope this doesn't go the way of atdhe.net. They built the equivalent of this, but for live sports video instead of music.
- zem 15y agofeature request: allow me to append to a playlist without resetting
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoJust upload your text file again.
- zem 15y agothat isn't seamless - it stops the currently playing song
- minikomi 15y agoWow.. Did something similar for mp3s and markdown while back... http://texttape.heroku.com http://texttape.heroku.com
- kolinko 15y agoWow, brilliant. I'd love to read about the technology behind. It works well even on names I typed in in Polish.
- rsbrown 15y agoFeature request: show the current playlist entry in the page title. I have your site running in a background tab and I want to quickly glance up and see the song name without switching tabs.
- follower 15y agoA different approach for YouTube playlists I was introduced to recently: http://www.youtify.com/ http://www.youtify.com/ More useful for building playlists on the fly rather than having a prepared list of songs as roll.io does.
- miguelpais 15y agoWOW! I had exactly this idea at a Hackaton festival called Codebits in Portugal in November last year and presented it[1] to the audience but didn't receive that much excitement from them about my implementation done in 12 hours using JS and Rails3. Now I see I should have stick to it. Deep inside me I knew if the service would be useful to me, it would be to some other folks, but I was a bit disappointed and didn't correct the bugs that the project had. Here is the website if you guys want to check: [1] http://youtubemyplaylist.heroku.com/ http://youtubemyplaylist.heroku.com/ It is buggy, sometimes doesn't change to the next video and it lacks the controls and the display of the playlist as this site does and it is a lot slower. It also lacks the upload of a text file. But I had other ideas in mind, the mode implemented was supposed to be the "feeling lucky" mode, where you just typed each video one per line and hoped it would match to the video you wanted, but you'd also have a way to create playlist more carefully by passing the exact urls of the videos you wanted, like this site does. How do you overcome this feeling when you know you should have sticked to your guts? Anyway, good work guys! This is exactly what I wanted.
- jaysonelliot 15y agoNever feel like "they got there first" - when someone does a similar idea to your own, consider it validation that you had a good idea! If it's something you really love, and feel your implementation works in a way you prefer to the other(s), just keep building it. There's room for more than one version of everything. What if the iPhone was the only smartphone, or Ivory was the only soap? If it's not too near and dear to your heart, and you like what the other guy has done, just go ahead and use their version and have fun with it, and move on to your next project idea, with the confidence of knowing that your ideas are good, and you should keep believing in them and making more.
- patrickk 15y agoHow about iterating on your idea? Here's an idea of mine for free (I came up with this as I was reading your comment, so feel free to critique it): Instead of uploading a text file, a user can type in an artist and song title on their smartphone. This gets added to a playlist that's displaying on a large monitor/TV/projector screen. This could pick songs from YouTube/iTunes/Winamp etc. Uses: - Nightclubs. People can offer track selections for the DJ. These are displayed on the wall. Or maybe there is no DJ at all. Users can vote on their track choice that are coming up next on the screen, as well as offering their own track pick - like HN voting/article submissions. (This would be the geekiest nightclub of all time.) - House parties. As above.
- superasn 15y agoI had a similar idea for a winamp/itunes plugin a while back. Basically it turns your mp3 playlist a plays the music video of it from YouTube. You can find more about it here: http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp3-playlist-into-a-video-playlist/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp3...
- noodle 15y agoi'd like to see a list of most common songs. which is probably not simple to do per se, based on how this probably works, but i think it'd be neat to see, at least
- bekirdag 15y agoexcatly :) this does not works this way, sorry.
- jannes 15y agoDo you think this would also work with Grooveshark? The problem with YouTube is that most music videos are geo-blocked outside the US, or at least for my country they are. (So are Pandora, Spotify, etc.) Furthermore I believe that Grooveshark's song library is bigger anyway, so it would be an improvement for everyone. Grooveshark offers widgets, so in theory it could work. http://widgets.grooveshark.com/make http://widgets.grooveshark.com/make
- bekirdag 15y agousing other services would be a future request. we will consider this.
- jvoorhis 15y agoQuick, someone write a bookmarklet that posts tracklists from discogs
- matthewcieplak 15y agoInteresting. Seems like a less flashy version of instant.fm: http://instant.fm/p/90 http://instant.fm/p/90
- swaraj 15y agoHoly shit, this is amazing. I'm really into electronic music, and when I am listening to new music online (youtube, music blogs, etc.) I don't always take the time to download songs right then. Instead, I simply record the artist and title in a txt file. I uploaded my electro.txt file to roll.io and out came a perfect playlist for all the music (~500 songs) I liked, but haven't downloaded. This is awesome
- cjstewart88 15y agoI had a feature similar to this on www.tubalr.com, you could type in several bands and given a playlist.
- peterwwillis 15y agoI have been using this all afternoon. Thank you.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- spydertennis 15y agoYou should let people save playlists to a custom url. roll.io/bestplaylistever
- resdirector 15y agoRequest: Ability to enter in wikipedia track listing URL, e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin_Bob_Dylan#Track_listing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin_Bob_Dylan#Track...
- bekirdag 15y agoCan you give me at least two different examples of this type of listing please? If it's generic, we can prepare a connector for this.
- resdirector 15y agoAFAIK, most track listings use this template: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Track_listing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Track_listing. (Although you should check this!) Actually, what would be very cool is a chrome plugin that allows you to play the songs listed on any wiki album page, with a click of a button. That would be incredibly cool.
- bekirdag 15y agoOk it's done. Thank you very much for your help.
- ses 15y agoI wasn't sure about this when I read your tag line here but I have to say that is pretty nifty. I think its the sheer simplicity that makes it a pleasure to use, typing a bunch of song titles seems to actually be quite a natural way to get a playlist together.
- krig 15y agoA similar idea to the linked text file (not to roll.io itself) is http://www.tuneset.com/ http://www.tuneset.com/ (disclosure: made by a friend of mine). roll.io is awesome though. Just making and sharing lists of talks broken up in several videos, things like this.. I wanted this exact thing just yesterday without knowing it.
- retube 15y agoApart from (annoyingly and without warning) playing the best matching track to your query/text line, how is this different from youtube search?
- hafifuyku 15y agothe difference is here: not one line but thousands of lines.
- pclark 15y agoThis is a great idea and your elevator pitch on hacker news is brilliant, except you should have said "text" rather than txt. I assumed you meant you took a .txt file of text and extracted any and all videos from it. "Show HN: roll.io eats text and shits relevant youtube videos. Useful?" The proposition is so obvious you should just spell it out on your home page, like, have a text box with some pre-populated text and a big arrow that says "becomes" and then a playlist of youtube videos.
- chetan51 15y agoSuggestion: Have the option to switch the embedded YouTube player to an embedded Grooveshark widget for higher-quality audio.
- mayk 15y agoit's very useful. good luck...
- ChrisArchitect 15y agoused this last night on a whim to paste in the contents of a tracklist from a radio show. Great way to flip through some of the tracks the djs played without having the actual show recording on hand. Handy for those into electronic/dance stuff where there's lots of livesets and tracklists floating around. I'd say it was 80% accurate in picking up the right track from youtube. Amazing how much stuff is on youtube of course.