6 ms·

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

132 points by ashraful 14y ago

ashraful 14y ago
A little background: http://ashraful.me/?p=7 http://ashraful.me/?p=7
- j-s-f 14y ago
  * Link to OP's Blog and Launch Post (This should be higher up)
- Daiz 14y ago
  >YouFM is a simple music streaming site that searches Spotify for the data and then plays the music video from Youtube. No wonder it couldn't find anything for most of the artists I tried, then, despite a whole lot of their stuff being on YouTube... And for the one it did, the song matching seemed incredibly spotty (try searching for Huoratron and playing the song A699F, for example). Some other feedback: You should probably add some tooltips (I assume the circling arrow on the far right of the bottom bar is for "repeat" but it'd be nice to have a tooltip confirm the assumption), and for some reason the volume slider seems pretty unresponsive - you need to hit it in a rather exact spot to set the volume automatically to a specific level.
  - ashraful 14y ago
    Actually in the next update, I'll add direct results from youtube for searches that doesn't return anything from Spotify. I just have to figure out how to get the song metadata in a meaningful way for those.
    - rwar 14y ago
      Have you taken a look at http://www.discogs.com/developers/ http://www.discogs.com/developers/ ?
      - suoloordi 14y ago
        also last.fm: http://www.last.fm/api http://www.last.fm/api and musicbrainz: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2/Search http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Versi...
math0ne 14y ago
Looks cool, I can't play anything in FF right now though it just says an error has occurred.
waxy 14y ago
It's nice, but how is this different than from any other yt player out there?
- ashraful 14y ago
  The interface is better for listening to music (I hope). Also, the search is run on Spotify so you only get music results.
  - lucaspiller 14y ago
    Good idea using Spotify to get metadata. I did something similar a few years ago, mine was a bit different in that instead of searching for a specific artist you get different channels you can watch, similar to MTV. One of the issues I had then was that you don't just get the official videos in results for popular songs [0], how do you solve that? [0] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PJ+%26+Duncan+Lets+Get+Ready+To+Rhumble http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PJ+%26+Duncan+Le...
    - ashraful 14y ago
      I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns. For more obscure artists/songs or for those with generic names, YouFM might play the wrong video if Youtube returns the wrong result. I'm not sure if there's any way to fix it except crowd-sourced curation.
      - jdonahue 14y ago
        > I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns. I had thought of a similar idea to what this website does (using song metadata from a cleaned source like Spotify and then play the song through YouTube). The way I'd imagined doing the song to YouTube mapping was through crowdsourcing - you could rank the YouTube results for each song based on number of listens and votes on your website. By default you would play the top ranked video for a song, but allow users to see alternate video links (probably hidden behind menus) and play those instead if they want (or if they have accounts, you could allow users to individually mark a video as being their preference for a particular song, etc.), probably also incorporating these plays into your ranking. You could also use crowdsourcing for further metadata about the video - e.g., some music videos have long intros/outros that you wouldn't necessarily want to hear when you're just listening to music, so you could allow people to submit and vote on start/end times for the 'song' part of the music video. Anyway, I really like the interface! It's much cleaner than any other attempt at this I've seen. Edit: I missed your mention of crowdsourcing at the end of your post, whoops - sounds like you've probably already thought of most/all the ideas in this post :)
darkchasma 14y ago
I feel this will be shutdown before the end of the week.
- ashraful 14y ago
  No reason for it to be shutdown. All music videos are from Youtube (provided legally by the original artists, their labels or Vevo) and I followed Youtube's requirement of not hiding the video player when playing songs (which a lot of similar sites do, and is against Youtube's TOS)
  - yoshyosh 14y ago
    Is this the smallest allowable size you can make the videos legally?
    - ashraful 14y ago
      200px by 200px is the smallest allowed.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    Google plans to introduce a music subscription service soon, and it might be tied to Youtube. If they are doing anything similar to this, they will probably find a way to shut it down. I hope they don't though.
  - darkchasma 14y ago
    Lets hope so, best wishes to you.
- iza 14y ago
  There are dozens of similar sites that have been around for quite a while.
  - kreutz 14y ago
    Buzzkill
Jonovono 14y ago
Cool. I made something similar awhile back and been meaning to update it. It allows you to search by artists and then see all of their albums and you can easily add an entire album to a playlist. Click "Album/Artist" search. Or youtube search to search like you normally would on Youtube. http://tunesicles.com http://tunesicles.com
jaredsohn 14y ago
YouFM v1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404007
- khet 14y ago
  Missed it the first time, I am almost glad it was reposted.
  - ashraful 14y ago
    More info: http://ashraful.me/?p=7 http://ashraful.me/?p=7
chuhnk 14y ago
It doesn't like Beethoven apparently and says "oops something went wrong", same goes for Moonlight Sonata.
- ashraful 14y ago
  That error comes up randomly (internal server error). Not sure why it happens or how to prevent it. I ran a search for "Moonlight Sonata" and got results just fine: http://www.youfm.org/#/search/Moonlight http://www.youfm.org/#/search/Moonlight Sonata
udfalkso 14y ago
Well done! I think I'll use this. A few suggestions: - You should add custom page titles for each album, search result, etc. It's hard to figure out what's what in the Back menu in my browser because they're all the same. - Would be nice to have a way to drag multiple songs, or an entire album into a playlist. - When dragging, droppable zones (playlists) should highlight, and when hovering over them the highlight should get even stronger so I know it's ready to be dropped. - History doesn't seem to work.
- ashraful 14y ago
  Good suggestions, I'll definitely make these improvements. I also need to make some improvements to the UI (didn't get a chance to test it properly outside chrome on osx, seems to have a lot of annoyances on other browsers and platforms) Ctrl click or Cmd click should let you select multiple songs that you can then drag onto playlists.
  - udfalkso 14y ago
    Cool, thanks. I guess I tried to use shift. Might also be nice to let me drag an album name and include all the songs if I do so.
BaconJuice 14y ago
Are you planning on making a mobile friendly version?
- ashraful 14y ago
  It should work on mobile devices, although a few tweaks in the CSS is needed to make the UI adapt properly. I'll make those in the coming weeks. If I find people using the site regularly, I'll create a mobile app for it.
  - BaconJuice 14y ago
    I'm sure with this been on front page HN it will gain some traction =P Also although the site loads find on an iPad..it seems to be very off. Just FYI.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- ashraful 14y ago
  Thanks. I'm a designer by trade(madebyargon.com) so good user experience is a very important factor for me. I'm glad you think YouFM is relatively bug-free but I think there's still a lot of UI inconsistencies and bugs in YouFM. But I'll be working on it and hopefully improving it. I also hope to improve the overall speed of the site. But for now, I appreciate all the feedback.
acchow 14y ago
I don't know what's going on anymore. I can't get it to NOT play 2 songs simultaneously.
glitch273 14y ago
Beautiful site :) Really well done on the UI/UX side.
quasque 14y ago
Very nicely done. Feature suggestion: importing playlists from other services, e.g. Spotify.
zavulon 14y ago
Doesn't work if you type something with a space in it. For example, typing "Municipal Waste" gives you an error page, and the URL looks like this: http://www.youfm.org/#/search/municipal http://www.youfm.org/#/search/municipal waste
- ashraful 14y ago
  It does work actually. Although when you share the link the space messes up the hyperlink, I should probably turn spaces into "+"s. If you're getting an error that says "Oops something went wrong", thats something that pops up now and again (Can't figure out why). Refresh the page and it should work.
  - epa 14y ago
    Hello, Got the "oops somethign went wrong" error on my first search. Searched for "Hoodie Allen", and did not work. When I added underscores in the link, it worked. Searched again from the home page with the same term and it worked..
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Good stuff. I'm giving it a try. I like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to give things a good number of listens before I part with my money. I like the idea of sourcing from YouTube as it takes all the guess work out of what is legal and what isn't (as least from a listener point of view) so I can focus on listening. So thanks for building this. The Playlist seems a bit dodgy. There is no indicator that the item was added. After I added something (and didn't get confirmation) I went to the playlist to see if it added... but it said it was empty. So I went back and added it again. Again, no indicator and still showed as empty. So I went back and added a different song. And now the playlist has 2 items (the first one I tried to add twice and the second one). So I removed one item... and now the playlist says it is empty again. I added another song and now it says two again. So it seems there is something wrong with the count to determine if a playlist is empty or not. And without the indicator that something was added, I was quite confused. I think it would be cool if you could incorporate some way to link to somewhere to buy songs/albums. Not sure how others feel about that. But if I was going to buy something, I'd gladly click through an affiliate link to support the site.
- ashraful 14y ago
  Yea, there are some quirks with the UI particularly the BackboneJS bits. I'll be fixing them soon. I'm holding off on the monetization stuff (buy songs) until I can work out all the bugs.
ntaylor 14y ago
You have a competitor, in case you hadn't already noticed: http://www.tubalr.com http://www.tubalr.com.
- ashraful 14y ago
  Yes. Youfm was actually (partly) inspired by Tubalr back when it was first launched (almost 3 years ago I think).
  - cjstewart88 14y ago
    Glad to have inspired you :). Tubalr was launched Sept 12, 2010. Just curious, how are you able to embed vevo videos?
egze 14y ago
Nice UI. Please fix the issue when a song is blocked by copyright holders. In Germany it happens a lot and then a player just keeps retrying to play a song.
Kiro 14y ago
How do you solve authentication considering it's run against a backend on a different domain?
- ashraful 14y ago
  Its not on a different domain. Everything's on youfm.org which is hosted on heroku.
angryasian 14y ago
in all honesty its similar to grooveshark. There are so many of these types of sites and my issue is just that I don't want to keep searching and creating playlists.
OGinparadise 14y ago
I am trying to use it but the "working" image is still spinning. Anyway, what happens when /if Youtube shuts you down? Google is getting into streaming music and has Play so they might consider you a competitor. I am hoping that you have a plan B and didn't spend all your time and savings in this.
- kreutz 14y ago
  Buzzkill
streetwiseherc 14y ago
It looks very sharp and works very well for me. Enjoying some nice tunes while I work: http://www.youfm.org/#/search/zabiela http://www.youfm.org/#/search/zabiela
stuaxo 14y ago
Looks alright, a bit off putting the picture of Bonno at the start, but heh ho.
kaleistyleguide 14y ago
I started working for a company late last year involved with providing an online radio experience. We tackle the same problem of providing a seamless music listening experiencing. http://www.earbits.com http://www.earbits.com
mrboombastic 14y ago
I started working for a company late last year involved with providing an online radio experience. We tackle the same problem of providing a seamless music listening experience. http://www.earbits.com http://www.earbits.com
dools 14y ago
"Oops something went wrong!" If anyone is seeing then same error and wants to make some quick youtube playlists while waiting for youfm.org to overcome the "HN spike" you could check out my little thing at http://www.cueyoutube.com/ http://www.cueyoutube.com/ :)
photon_off 14y ago
Make a turntable.fm for YouTube videos.
- kall 14y ago
  That already exists. It's called http://plug.dj http://plug.dj
gnaz 14y ago
Its a nice project but I was wondering if there's any larger objective to this than just creating this for the sake of it
minikomi 14y ago
Here's a similar rough thing I made but it uses last fm data : http://fmix.heroku.com http://fmix.heroku.com
hanzenlim 14y ago
how did you manage to remove the ads? and how long did it take to implements ? BTW impressive project!!
pthulin2 14y ago
Looks nice! Looks a lot like Youtify though, which is open source and welcoming contributors. http://www.youtify.com/ http://www.youtify.com/
- itsuart 14y ago
  Awesome site, thanks!
kall 14y ago
There's a german music radio station by that name. If you get popular with this you should check what kind of trademarks they have.
jole 14y ago
I really like the idea :) Interface looks great.
ubojan 14y ago
Simple and responsive UI, I like this site. Please add favicon for easier bookmark navigation.
jepper 14y ago
Nice site, one of the nicest looking youtube streaming sites. Good clean UI. You need a favicon though, was hard tot find it amongst all my tabs.
OliverLassen 14y ago
I have made something similar, but not as finish.. :Dhttp://songbird.apphb.com http://songbird.apphb.com

132 points by ashraful 14y ago

ashraful 14y ago

A little background: http://ashraful.me/?p=7 http://ashraful.me/?p=7

j-s-f 14y ago
* Link to OP's Blog and Launch Post (This should be higher up)
Daiz 14y ago
>YouFM is a simple music streaming site that searches Spotify for the data and then plays the music video from Youtube. No wonder it couldn't find anything for most of the artists I tried, then, despite a whole lot of their stuff being on YouTube... And for the one it did, the song matching seemed incredibly spotty (try searching for Huoratron and playing the song A699F, for example). Some other feedback: You should probably add some tooltips (I assume the circling arrow on the far right of the bottom bar is for "repeat" but it'd be nice to have a tooltip confirm the assumption), and for some reason the volume slider seems pretty unresponsive - you need to hit it in a rather exact spot to set the volume automatically to a specific level.
- ashraful 14y ago
  Actually in the next update, I'll add direct results from youtube for searches that doesn't return anything from Spotify. I just have to figure out how to get the song metadata in a meaningful way for those.
  - rwar 14y ago
    Have you taken a look at http://www.discogs.com/developers/ http://www.discogs.com/developers/ ?
    - suoloordi 14y ago
      also last.fm: http://www.last.fm/api http://www.last.fm/api and musicbrainz: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2/Search http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Versi...

math0ne 14y ago

Looks cool, I can't play anything in FF right now though it just says an error has occurred.

waxy 14y ago

It's nice, but how is this different than from any other yt player out there?

ashraful 14y ago
The interface is better for listening to music (I hope). Also, the search is run on Spotify so you only get music results.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  Good idea using Spotify to get metadata. I did something similar a few years ago, mine was a bit different in that instead of searching for a specific artist you get different channels you can watch, similar to MTV. One of the issues I had then was that you don't just get the official videos in results for popular songs [0], how do you solve that? [0] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PJ+%26+Duncan+Lets+Get+Ready+To+Rhumble http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PJ+%26+Duncan+Le...
  - ashraful 14y ago
    I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns. For more obscure artists/songs or for those with generic names, YouFM might play the wrong video if Youtube returns the wrong result. I'm not sure if there's any way to fix it except crowd-sourced curation.
    - jdonahue 14y ago
      > I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns. I had thought of a similar idea to what this website does (using song metadata from a cleaned source like Spotify and then play the song through YouTube). The way I'd imagined doing the song to YouTube mapping was through crowdsourcing - you could rank the YouTube results for each song based on number of listens and votes on your website. By default you would play the top ranked video for a song, but allow users to see alternate video links (probably hidden behind menus) and play those instead if they want (or if they have accounts, you could allow users to individually mark a video as being their preference for a particular song, etc.), probably also incorporating these plays into your ranking. You could also use crowdsourcing for further metadata about the video - e.g., some music videos have long intros/outros that you wouldn't necessarily want to hear when you're just listening to music, so you could allow people to submit and vote on start/end times for the 'song' part of the music video. Anyway, I really like the interface! It's much cleaner than any other attempt at this I've seen. Edit: I missed your mention of crowdsourcing at the end of your post, whoops - sounds like you've probably already thought of most/all the ideas in this post :)

darkchasma 14y ago

I feel this will be shutdown before the end of the week.

ashraful 14y ago
No reason for it to be shutdown. All music videos are from Youtube (provided legally by the original artists, their labels or Vevo) and I followed Youtube's requirement of not hiding the video player when playing songs (which a lot of similar sites do, and is against Youtube's TOS)
- yoshyosh 14y ago
  Is this the smallest allowable size you can make the videos legally?
  - ashraful 14y ago
    200px by 200px is the smallest allowed.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Google plans to introduce a music subscription service soon, and it might be tied to Youtube. If they are doing anything similar to this, they will probably find a way to shut it down. I hope they don't though.
- darkchasma 14y ago
  Lets hope so, best wishes to you.
iza 14y ago
There are dozens of similar sites that have been around for quite a while.
- kreutz 14y ago
  Buzzkill

Jonovono 14y ago

Cool. I made something similar awhile back and been meaning to update it. It allows you to search by artists and then see all of their albums and you can easily add an entire album to a playlist. Click "Album/Artist" search. Or youtube search to search like you normally would on Youtube. http://tunesicles.com http://tunesicles.com

jaredsohn 14y ago

YouFM v1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404007

khet 14y ago
Missed it the first time, I am almost glad it was reposted.
- ashraful 14y ago
  More info: http://ashraful.me/?p=7 http://ashraful.me/?p=7

chuhnk 14y ago

It doesn't like Beethoven apparently and says "oops something went wrong", same goes for Moonlight Sonata.

ashraful 14y ago
That error comes up randomly (internal server error). Not sure why it happens or how to prevent it. I ran a search for "Moonlight Sonata" and got results just fine: http://www.youfm.org/#/search/Moonlight http://www.youfm.org/#/search/Moonlight Sonata

udfalkso 14y ago

Well done! I think I'll use this. A few suggestions: - You should add custom page titles for each album, search result, etc. It's hard to figure out what's what in the Back menu in my browser because they're all the same. - Would be nice to have a way to drag multiple songs, or an entire album into a playlist. - When dragging, droppable zones (playlists) should highlight, and when hovering over them the highlight should get even stronger so I know it's ready to be dropped. - History doesn't seem to work.

ashraful 14y ago
Good suggestions, I'll definitely make these improvements. I also need to make some improvements to the UI (didn't get a chance to test it properly outside chrome on osx, seems to have a lot of annoyances on other browsers and platforms) Ctrl click or Cmd click should let you select multiple songs that you can then drag onto playlists.
- udfalkso 14y ago
  Cool, thanks. I guess I tried to use shift. Might also be nice to let me drag an album name and include all the songs if I do so.

BaconJuice 14y ago

Are you planning on making a mobile friendly version?

ashraful 14y ago
It should work on mobile devices, although a few tweaks in the CSS is needed to make the UI adapt properly. I'll make those in the coming weeks. If I find people using the site regularly, I'll create a mobile app for it.
- BaconJuice 14y ago
  I'm sure with this been on front page HN it will gain some traction =P Also although the site loads find on an iPad..it seems to be very off. Just FYI.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ashraful 14y ago
Thanks. I'm a designer by trade(madebyargon.com) so good user experience is a very important factor for me. I'm glad you think YouFM is relatively bug-free but I think there's still a lot of UI inconsistencies and bugs in YouFM. But I'll be working on it and hopefully improving it. I also hope to improve the overall speed of the site. But for now, I appreciate all the feedback.

acchow 14y ago

I don't know what's going on anymore. I can't get it to NOT play 2 songs simultaneously.

glitch273 14y ago

Beautiful site :) Really well done on the UI/UX side.

quasque 14y ago

Very nicely done. Feature suggestion: importing playlists from other services, e.g. Spotify.

zavulon 14y ago

Doesn't work if you type something with a space in it. For example, typing "Municipal Waste" gives you an error page, and the URL looks like this: http://www.youfm.org/#/search/municipal http://www.youfm.org/#/search/municipal waste

ashraful 14y ago
It does work actually. Although when you share the link the space messes up the hyperlink, I should probably turn spaces into "+"s. If you're getting an error that says "Oops something went wrong", thats something that pops up now and again (Can't figure out why). Refresh the page and it should work.
- epa 14y ago
  Hello, Got the "oops somethign went wrong" error on my first search. Searched for "Hoodie Allen", and did not work. When I added underscores in the link, it worked. Searched again from the home page with the same term and it worked..

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

Good stuff. I'm giving it a try. I like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to give things a good number of listens before I part with my money. I like the idea of sourcing from YouTube as it takes all the guess work out of what is legal and what isn't (as least from a listener point of view) so I can focus on listening. So thanks for building this. The Playlist seems a bit dodgy. There is no indicator that the item was added. After I added something (and didn't get confirmation) I went to the playlist to see if it added... but it said it was empty. So I went back and added it again. Again, no indicator and still showed as empty. So I went back and added a different song. And now the playlist has 2 items (the first one I tried to add twice and the second one). So I removed one item... and now the playlist says it is empty again. I added another song and now it says two again. So it seems there is something wrong with the count to determine if a playlist is empty or not. And without the indicator that something was added, I was quite confused. I think it would be cool if you could incorporate some way to link to somewhere to buy songs/albums. Not sure how others feel about that. But if I was going to buy something, I'd gladly click through an affiliate link to support the site.

ashraful 14y ago
Yea, there are some quirks with the UI particularly the BackboneJS bits. I'll be fixing them soon. I'm holding off on the monetization stuff (buy songs) until I can work out all the bugs.

ntaylor 14y ago

You have a competitor, in case you hadn't already noticed: http://www.tubalr.com http://www.tubalr.com.

ashraful 14y ago
Yes. Youfm was actually (partly) inspired by Tubalr back when it was first launched (almost 3 years ago I think).
- cjstewart88 14y ago
  Glad to have inspired you :). Tubalr was launched Sept 12, 2010. Just curious, how are you able to embed vevo videos?

egze 14y ago

Nice UI. Please fix the issue when a song is blocked by copyright holders. In Germany it happens a lot and then a player just keeps retrying to play a song.

Kiro 14y ago

How do you solve authentication considering it's run against a backend on a different domain?

ashraful 14y ago
Its not on a different domain. Everything's on youfm.org which is hosted on heroku.

angryasian 14y ago

in all honesty its similar to grooveshark. There are so many of these types of sites and my issue is just that I don't want to keep searching and creating playlists.

OGinparadise 14y ago

I am trying to use it but the "working" image is still spinning. Anyway, what happens when /if Youtube shuts you down? Google is getting into streaming music and has Play so they might consider you a competitor. I am hoping that you have a plan B and didn't spend all your time and savings in this.

kreutz 14y ago
Buzzkill

streetwiseherc 14y ago

It looks very sharp and works very well for me. Enjoying some nice tunes while I work: http://www.youfm.org/#/search/zabiela http://www.youfm.org/#/search/zabiela

stuaxo 14y ago

Looks alright, a bit off putting the picture of Bonno at the start, but heh ho.

kaleistyleguide 14y ago

I started working for a company late last year involved with providing an online radio experience. We tackle the same problem of providing a seamless music listening experiencing. http://www.earbits.com http://www.earbits.com

mrboombastic 14y ago

I started working for a company late last year involved with providing an online radio experience. We tackle the same problem of providing a seamless music listening experience. http://www.earbits.com http://www.earbits.com

dools 14y ago

"Oops something went wrong!" If anyone is seeing then same error and wants to make some quick youtube playlists while waiting for youfm.org to overcome the "HN spike" you could check out my little thing at http://www.cueyoutube.com/ http://www.cueyoutube.com/ :)

photon_off 14y ago

Make a turntable.fm for YouTube videos.

kall 14y ago
That already exists. It's called http://plug.dj http://plug.dj

gnaz 14y ago

Its a nice project but I was wondering if there's any larger objective to this than just creating this for the sake of it

minikomi 14y ago

Here's a similar rough thing I made but it uses last fm data : http://fmix.heroku.com http://fmix.heroku.com

hanzenlim 14y ago

how did you manage to remove the ads? and how long did it take to implements ? BTW impressive project!!

pthulin2 14y ago

Looks nice! Looks a lot like Youtify though, which is open source and welcoming contributors. http://www.youtify.com/ http://www.youtify.com/

itsuart 14y ago
Awesome site, thanks!

kall 14y ago

There's a german music radio station by that name. If you get popular with this you should check what kind of trademarks they have.

jole 14y ago

I really like the idea :) Interface looks great.

ubojan 14y ago

Simple and responsive UI, I like this site. Please add favicon for easier bookmark navigation.

jepper 14y ago

Nice site, one of the nicest looking youtube streaming sites. Good clean UI. You need a favicon though, was hard tot find it amongst all my tabs.

OliverLassen 14y ago

I have made something similar, but not as finish.. :Dhttp://songbird.apphb.com http://songbird.apphb.com