9 ms·

Google has killed Discord's best music bot

114 points by ajdude 5y ago

stnmtn 5y ago
This is a bummer, but when I heard the news last night it inspired me to add this functionality to the bot I've made for the server I'm in with friends. For anyone looking for a fun, quick project to do I recommend checkout out discord bots, discord.py is a great library that allows for some pretty cool stuff! The most fun I've had is hooking it up to OpenAI so that typing "!ai some prompt" here will get the bot to respond back with OpenAI's response
- mnvxdynbx 5y ago
  Why is your reaction "let's build another bot Discord can shut down whenever they want" and encouraging others to have this same experience when you could run your own server, maybe Rocket Chat or Mattermost or Matrix, and write a bot against software that is at least open source? Discord is just Slack for gamers. Its popularity, and misuse of the term "server," for a cloud product, just kills me
rektide 5y ago
theres a core idea gere of sharedistening beung nothing more than a feed of links that is not gonna die. the copyright & control world is rearing up very heavily here, with twitch, in so many places so many ways. unhosting the stream, simply providing metadata about what you are listening to, is a liberty these large powers that be will have a much harder time wrenching back from humanity.
- riffic 5y ago
  > simply providing metadata about what you are listening to scrobbling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm#Scrobbling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm#Scrobbling edit: I had to go just a bit further into this rabbit hole. Apparently the term "scrobble" is still a registered trademark of Last.fm, a company owned by ViacomCBS. There's the open source ListenBrainz project, which uses "listen" instead: https://listenbrainz.org/faq/ https://listenbrainz.org/faq/
  - rektide 5y ago
    yup! i very much lean towards: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-listen https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-listen
hombre_fatal 5y ago
> Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room, Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos, joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users It's not surprising that this was shut down like most "freeload until we get caught" hobby crafts. But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of any existing music services? For example, if you were able to give Groovy your Youtube Music API key at a subscription level premium enough for your Discord server, but that doesn't exist on Youtube. I can imagine there isn't much upside for the big players in these hard spaces to support "glue app" value like Groovy, but how can you build Groovy without building your own music service?
- blibble 5y ago
  I'm always surprised the source code doesn't accidentally leak out when this sort of C&D occurs
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    > a big "fuck you" to google Ehh, I'll be the devil's advocate, google makes money via tracking and ads. Both were avoided by using the bot. big brother is just protecting their business model.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      I'd take a bet that the email chain that began the process to send Groovy the C&D started with one of the companies who license music to YouTube.
  - notamy 5y ago
    The code used for scraping YouTube and streaming audio to Discord has always been open source: - https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer - https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink
  - ddoolin 5y ago
    Discord.js (the primary Node.js interface to the Discord API) is chock full of exactly this code -- as examples even. Using ytdl to stream into voice channels.
echelon 5y ago
I was prepared to be angry at Google, but this probably stems from at-volume use of licensed material outside of the ToS. It probably impacts their deals with the music industry, etc. and requires intervention. (Not that this couldn't also be a salvo fired against an upstart competitor, but I doubt that's the primary reason.) Seems like Discord could estimate the value of Groovy to its users, and if non-negligible, could come up with their own license deal. Perhaps with Spotify or another company. The people to be angry at are the recording industry.
- Macha 5y ago
  Discord does in fact have a Spotify integration, but it has limitations - you need to link your spotify account, if anyone is a free user everyone else gets silence while they have ads, and you can't use it at the same time as voice chat (the last one is largely why bots like the topic of this post are still popular). https://support.spotify.com/us/article/discord-and-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/discord-and-spotify/
rolph 5y ago
i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to snarf audio tracks. it seems YT-dl has had its fight on the hill with google and won out for the time being, its possible a discord bot using YT-dl might wake a sleeping bear
- stnmtn 5y ago
  This is exactly what I made last night so I hope not!
- rchaud 5y ago
  That would be awful. Youtube-dl feels like Slsk to me. As long as its under-the-radar enough, the big dogs will let it live. That it's a CLI tool is enough to deter most users. If somebody creates a GUI app for it however, I imagine it would be snuffed out quickly.
  - thomastjeffery 5y ago
    youtube-dl already has a gui app.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      I wasn't aware of that. I know about NewPipe which is almost certainly using the API. But not a desktop app.
      - mod50ack 5y ago
        NewPipe isn't using YouTube-DL. There's a GUI for desktop platforms, and DVD on Android. They know about it plenty. It's still not going anywhere until and unless they add DRM to YouTube. Which I could see happening in a few years.
- notamy 5y ago
  > i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to snarf audio tracks. youtube-dl + ffmpeg was the "traditional" way of doing it, but it didn't scale very well. These days, the majority of bots use lavaplayer[0] based solutions like lavalink[1] to stream audio. There's also YouTube IP bans to be concerned about. Most bots get around it by rotating through blocks of IPv6 addresses. [0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer [1] https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink
prepend 5y ago
I liked groovy bot and it replaced what people would do manually by just streaming their machine watching YouTube. It seems stupid that Google didn’t work something out as the main problem was that it didn’t play ads. So just play ads. I dislike the trend of shutting down APIs as groovy should be able to use any user’s license to YouTube to play music into a channel (or Spotify or Apple Music or whatever). This is the equivalent of playing a record over the phones to my friends and should cost me any extra money. I’ve never used groovy in a channel with more than 5 people anyway.
- me_me_me 5y ago
  Don't forget that google wants you to watch the videos and ads. Most preferably logged into your account. They want to learn what you watch and listen to. Bot usage anonymises your preferences and skips ads.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    So then Googs should embrace the bots and attach the bot to a user so that anything the bot does is associated with the user. win-win
  - prepend 5y ago
    Google could provide an api that shows ads or plays ads. They could also even register the users to know who was listening. They don’t want APIs and only want listeners through their apps. Kind of lame they aren’t building technical solutions for actual user problems (like I’d like to listen to YouTube in my channel), they would be able to charge advertisers more if there are 5 people listening to an ad vs just one.
- camtarn 5y ago
  > This is the equivalent of playing a record over the phones to my friends Yeah, that's against copyright law too. It's just that if you were doing that yourself, it would be on too small a scale for the record industry to fight against.
  - 5y ago
enlyth 5y ago
It comes as no surprise to me, they were monetizing streaming music from YouTube to millions of people, once you get to that scale you can't pretend it's just a hobby project, it's a business that's freeloading on YT content. If you want a music bot that won't succumb to the same fate, you are better off self hosting something on a small VPS.
rchaud 5y ago
Well, yeah...anything that depends on a third party API will last only as long as the API owner is OK with it. 10 years ago, back when Windows Phone was a thing, Google wouldn't make an official WP app for Youtube. So somebody created MetroTube, a native YT client. Incredible app, with a completely seamless experience. Then Google changed its API rules and it was dead in under a year.
- danuker 5y ago
  There is NewPipe for Android if anyone is interested (just not on Play Store of course). https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/
- notamy 5y ago
  > anything that depends on a third party API will last only as long as the API owner is OK with it. Discord bots generally use a library like lavaplayer[0] to scrape YouTube for music streaming purposes; no API access per se. It was always at best a grey area, especially since many large bots rotate through IPv6 blocks to avoid YouTube's IP bans. [0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer
ddoolin 5y ago
There are hundreds if not thousands of these bots, some are already close to Groovy's size. My initial reaction is that...this won't have much of an effect? I wonder if a "bot factory" would be more effective, so then you're in the same boat as torrent trackers (we just make the gun, we don't use it).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Discord should just use AI generated music trained on those unlimited 8 hour tracks. Then the music could be generated by the user’s cpu with low bandwidth utilization.
hobo_mark 5y ago
Thought experiment: let's say I'm in a Zoom call (or Jitsi or whatever) with some strangers, and in turn each of us plays some music in the call (could be from Spotify, could be from the local music library, whatever can be piped into an audio sink), assume the room is open for anyone to join, would this (which is basically plug.dj over webrtc) be illegal? If so why?
- foepys 5y ago
  In some jurisdictions is even illegal to sing a song to yourself in public. Copyright around music and film is insane and absolutely detached from reality. Having a copyright for 70 years after the last involved person's death? Because shoveling money into a grave is useful? Why isn't it like patents, 25 years and done?
  - nightcracker 5y ago
    Mickey Mouse.
spaceisballer 5y ago
Any good options for something similar? It’s been pretty great for a few friends hanging out grinding some game and chatting. Or queuing up music of a random theme we think of.
dennisblue 5y ago
What if we invented some kind of protocol for sharing media?

114 points by ajdude 5y ago

This is a bummer, but when I heard the news last night it inspired me to add this functionality to the bot I've made for the server I'm in with friends. For anyone looking for a fun, quick project to do I recommend checkout out discord bots, discord.py is a great library that allows for some pretty cool stuff! The most fun I've had is hooking it up to OpenAI so that typing "!ai some prompt" here will get the bot to respond back with OpenAI's response

mnvxdynbx 5y ago
Why is your reaction "let's build another bot Discord can shut down whenever they want" and encouraging others to have this same experience when you could run your own server, maybe Rocket Chat or Mattermost or Matrix, and write a bot against software that is at least open source? Discord is just Slack for gamers. Its popularity, and misuse of the term "server," for a cloud product, just kills me

rektide 5y ago

theres a core idea gere of sharedistening beung nothing more than a feed of links that is not gonna die. the copyright & control world is rearing up very heavily here, with twitch, in so many places so many ways. unhosting the stream, simply providing metadata about what you are listening to, is a liberty these large powers that be will have a much harder time wrenching back from humanity.

riffic 5y ago
> simply providing metadata about what you are listening to scrobbling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm#Scrobbling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm#Scrobbling edit: I had to go just a bit further into this rabbit hole. Apparently the term "scrobble" is still a registered trademark of Last.fm, a company owned by ViacomCBS. There's the open source ListenBrainz project, which uses "listen" instead: https://listenbrainz.org/faq/ https://listenbrainz.org/faq/
- rektide 5y ago
  yup! i very much lean towards: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-listen https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-listen

hombre_fatal 5y ago

> Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room, Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos, joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users It's not surprising that this was shut down like most "freeload until we get caught" hobby crafts. But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of any existing music services? For example, if you were able to give Groovy your Youtube Music API key at a subscription level premium enough for your Discord server, but that doesn't exist on Youtube. I can imagine there isn't much upside for the big players in these hard spaces to support "glue app" value like Groovy, but how can you build Groovy without building your own music service?

blibble 5y ago
I'm always surprised the source code doesn't accidentally leak out when this sort of C&D occurs
- me_me_me 5y ago
  > a big "fuck you" to google Ehh, I'll be the devil's advocate, google makes money via tracking and ads. Both were avoided by using the bot. big brother is just protecting their business model.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    I'd take a bet that the email chain that began the process to send Groovy the C&D started with one of the companies who license music to YouTube.
- notamy 5y ago
  The code used for scraping YouTube and streaming audio to Discord has always been open source: - https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer - https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink
- ddoolin 5y ago
  Discord.js (the primary Node.js interface to the Discord API) is chock full of exactly this code -- as examples even. Using ytdl to stream into voice channels.

echelon 5y ago

I was prepared to be angry at Google, but this probably stems from at-volume use of licensed material outside of the ToS. It probably impacts their deals with the music industry, etc. and requires intervention. (Not that this couldn't also be a salvo fired against an upstart competitor, but I doubt that's the primary reason.) Seems like Discord could estimate the value of Groovy to its users, and if non-negligible, could come up with their own license deal. Perhaps with Spotify or another company. The people to be angry at are the recording industry.

Macha 5y ago
Discord does in fact have a Spotify integration, but it has limitations - you need to link your spotify account, if anyone is a free user everyone else gets silence while they have ads, and you can't use it at the same time as voice chat (the last one is largely why bots like the topic of this post are still popular). https://support.spotify.com/us/article/discord-and-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/discord-and-spotify/

rolph 5y ago

i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to snarf audio tracks. it seems YT-dl has had its fight on the hill with google and won out for the time being, its possible a discord bot using YT-dl might wake a sleeping bear

stnmtn 5y ago
This is exactly what I made last night so I hope not!
rchaud 5y ago
That would be awful. Youtube-dl feels like Slsk to me. As long as its under-the-radar enough, the big dogs will let it live. That it's a CLI tool is enough to deter most users. If somebody creates a GUI app for it however, I imagine it would be snuffed out quickly.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  youtube-dl already has a gui app.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I wasn't aware of that. I know about NewPipe which is almost certainly using the API. But not a desktop app.
    - mod50ack 5y ago
      NewPipe isn't using YouTube-DL. There's a GUI for desktop platforms, and DVD on Android. They know about it plenty. It's still not going anywhere until and unless they add DRM to YouTube. Which I could see happening in a few years.
notamy 5y ago
> i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to snarf audio tracks. youtube-dl + ffmpeg was the "traditional" way of doing it, but it didn't scale very well. These days, the majority of bots use lavaplayer[0] based solutions like lavalink[1] to stream audio. There's also YouTube IP bans to be concerned about. Most bots get around it by rotating through blocks of IPv6 addresses. [0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer [1] https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink

prepend 5y ago

I liked groovy bot and it replaced what people would do manually by just streaming their machine watching YouTube. It seems stupid that Google didn’t work something out as the main problem was that it didn’t play ads. So just play ads. I dislike the trend of shutting down APIs as groovy should be able to use any user’s license to YouTube to play music into a channel (or Spotify or Apple Music or whatever). This is the equivalent of playing a record over the phones to my friends and should cost me any extra money. I’ve never used groovy in a channel with more than 5 people anyway.

me_me_me 5y ago
Don't forget that google wants you to watch the videos and ads. Most preferably logged into your account. They want to learn what you watch and listen to. Bot usage anonymises your preferences and skips ads.
- dylan604 5y ago
  So then Googs should embrace the bots and attach the bot to a user so that anything the bot does is associated with the user. win-win
- prepend 5y ago
  Google could provide an api that shows ads or plays ads. They could also even register the users to know who was listening. They don’t want APIs and only want listeners through their apps. Kind of lame they aren’t building technical solutions for actual user problems (like I’d like to listen to YouTube in my channel), they would be able to charge advertisers more if there are 5 people listening to an ad vs just one.
camtarn 5y ago
> This is the equivalent of playing a record over the phones to my friends Yeah, that's against copyright law too. It's just that if you were doing that yourself, it would be on too small a scale for the record industry to fight against.
- 5y ago

enlyth 5y ago

It comes as no surprise to me, they were monetizing streaming music from YouTube to millions of people, once you get to that scale you can't pretend it's just a hobby project, it's a business that's freeloading on YT content. If you want a music bot that won't succumb to the same fate, you are better off self hosting something on a small VPS.

rchaud 5y ago

Well, yeah...anything that depends on a third party API will last only as long as the API owner is OK with it. 10 years ago, back when Windows Phone was a thing, Google wouldn't make an official WP app for Youtube. So somebody created MetroTube, a native YT client. Incredible app, with a completely seamless experience. Then Google changed its API rules and it was dead in under a year.

danuker 5y ago
There is NewPipe for Android if anyone is interested (just not on Play Store of course). https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/
notamy 5y ago
> anything that depends on a third party API will last only as long as the API owner is OK with it. Discord bots generally use a library like lavaplayer[0] to scrape YouTube for music streaming purposes; no API access per se. It was always at best a grey area, especially since many large bots rotate through IPv6 blocks to avoid YouTube's IP bans. [0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer

ddoolin 5y ago

There are hundreds if not thousands of these bots, some are already close to Groovy's size. My initial reaction is that...this won't have much of an effect? I wonder if a "bot factory" would be more effective, so then you're in the same boat as torrent trackers (we just make the gun, we don't use it).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Discord should just use AI generated music trained on those unlimited 8 hour tracks. Then the music could be generated by the user’s cpu with low bandwidth utilization.

hobo_mark 5y ago

Thought experiment: let's say I'm in a Zoom call (or Jitsi or whatever) with some strangers, and in turn each of us plays some music in the call (could be from Spotify, could be from the local music library, whatever can be piped into an audio sink), assume the room is open for anyone to join, would this (which is basically plug.dj over webrtc) be illegal? If so why?

foepys 5y ago
In some jurisdictions is even illegal to sing a song to yourself in public. Copyright around music and film is insane and absolutely detached from reality. Having a copyright for 70 years after the last involved person's death? Because shoveling money into a grave is useful? Why isn't it like patents, 25 years and done?
- nightcracker 5y ago
  Mickey Mouse.

spaceisballer 5y ago

Any good options for something similar? It’s been pretty great for a few friends hanging out grinding some game and chatting. Or queuing up music of a random theme we think of.

dennisblue 5y ago

What if we invented some kind of protocol for sharing media?