9 ms·

Lightweight HTML5 Grooveshark Player

114 points by vinnyglennon 13y ago

bdz 13y ago
How the hell is Grooveshark still alive? Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music.
- wyclif 13y ago
  Tenacity, that's how: http://mashable.com/2013/04/22/grooveshark-radio/ http://mashable.com/2013/04/22/grooveshark-radio/
  - yashodhan 13y ago
    I love that company. But I just don't see a future where it keeps its doors open. Especially now with Google and Apple joining in.
- eLobato 13y ago
  You could argue the same about Youtube, in some sense. They do pay royalties to some artists, and at least for a while a lot of upcoming artists were advertising their new albums there. I discovered a bunch of great groups through that. Unrelated with revenue, but I liked how some artists (Avicii comes to mind) ask you what do you think about X song when you play it in Grooveshark, that's some valuable direct feedback. The radios are awesome too. Can't hide the fact I've been using it for years, but I truly think Grooveshark is the best music streaming service by far. Spotify's catalog is nowhere as large, Pandora misses on so many features, Last.fm recommendations are good but what else do they do...
  - nwienert 13y ago
    You just supported his point. The best feature of Grooveshark is that it has a big library... because it's acquired illegally. I just listened to Drake's entire album thats coming out next week. Sweet, but totally illegal. Rdio has a better interface, Spotify better social/apps, Pandora better radio. Grooveshark will die because it's only option is to eventually go legal, and then it loses it's only advantage.
- neya 13y ago
  >Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music. And I think it's only a good thing. 'Legal/Illegal' are just man-made barriers to access the spirit of freedom to rejoice/discover various cultures/tradition/communities. I understand that there is a possible monetary loss involved as a side-effect, but I don't think it's much serious as the various Copyright organisations project it to us[1]. If that was how it was, the internet would be piracy free, already. [1] http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales-study-finds-120517/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales...
  - thirdsun 13y ago
    What do you do for a living? Whatever it is, in the spirit of freedom I hereby demand that you offer your services for free. Doesn't sound like a good idea, does it? Music, just like any other service, art or physical product, requires time and effort - it has value and is not a commodity. If you don't value it enough to justify spending more than the price tag of a spotify subscription (which doesn't help any artist anyway), then don't - it's fine - but don't expect artists to work for free. That said, Grooveshark is a mor ethan shady business and should have been closed a long time ago in my opinion.
    - qwertyboy 13y ago
      I don't know. I'm an artist, and while I enjoy getting paid to create and preform, taking money for reproductions that do not require further effort on my part always feels weird. I don't feel I have the right to tell anyone not to reproduce my art at their own expanse. If I play you a song, it's your right to record it and play it to your friends - just like it's your right to whistle it. Just like it's your right to remember it. To me, intellectual property feels like a diversion. Instead of having an audience that pays me for my work, I have a middleman that makes me work for free so that he can overcharge my audience while I wait for my percentage. I don't need to restrict anyone's freedom to make a living. The middleman does. And if grooveshark hurts his income - he had it coming. He's been hurting both our incomes (artist and audience) for years.
    - neya 13y ago
- glennos 13y ago
  They've done it tough, but they've signed licensing deals with Sony and EMI in the last 6 weeks. http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4668442/grooveshark-settles-with-sony-atv-music-publishing-as-it-struggles-towards-legitimacy http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4668442/grooveshark-settle...
- rglover 13y ago
  I use Grooveshark daily. Aside from the excellent UI and service (couldn't tell you the last time it was down), the catalog is incredible. One thing to note, though, is that they do pretty well with takedowns. For example, I attempted to upload a copyrighted song years ago and uploads were disabled on my account. They also work with publishers and artists to ensure fair compensation is made. I've paid for the Pro account for a few years now and strongly believe they could do better than their competition if they made the service paid-only.
  - thirdsun 13y ago
    This must be a very recent development then - there have been countless stories of rather obscure and niche artists that found it impossible to have their work taken down by Grooveshark. Instead these reports often suggested that those (re-)uploads of unlicensed material seemed to happen automated.
- wedraweverting 13y ago
  They have agreements with the big labels. They just signed one with Sony. http://bgr.com/2013/08/28/grooveshark-sony-music-settlement/ http://bgr.com/2013/08/28/grooveshark-sony-music-settlement/
wslh 13y ago
Side note: my favorite radio show is uploaded to Grooveshark and the other day I needed to listen it offline, so I just used a proxy (fiddler) and save the stream from the proxy session console. There is an API where you can do the same, I think, because is just one request with the location of the MP3 audio. There are a lot of apps for downloading mp3 from Grooveshark but they usually came with a lot of crapware.
- bliker 13y ago
  if do not mind Ruby. I am sure you can use https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark and wget.
  - wslh 13y ago
    The way I do it is much simple and it's not using the API. Just open the proxy sessions in Fiddler and save the response.
- Jhsto 13y ago
  You can do the same with play.spotify.com, but you need premium account instead of API access. With ID3 tagging it's a great way to keep your offline music organized even with devices which do not have Spotify on them.
ashray 13y ago
Grooveshark is amazing. They have the best library out there hands down. Yes, they got it through piracy yadda yadda but they have more music than any of the legit services out there (I pay $9.99 for rdio per month..). The thing is that I can find label music on Grooveshark (iTunes top 500 sort of stuff) but I can also easily find the most obscure stuff you can think of. So fan remixes, and regional music (Indian music, Pakistani music, Lebanese music, etc. etc.). The other services out there have a LONG way to go to make that happen.
- rcfox 13y ago
  Grooveshark has great breadth, but lacks in depth. There are lots of types of music, but I find that they rarely have the specific artists that I'm looking for. (I mainly listen to power metal.) Also, there are a lot of tracks that finish prematurely, are just static, or simply don't play. I've tried flagging them as broken, but Grooveshark keeps adding them to my playlists. There are also tons of tagging issues (ie: there's one album under "Battle Beast" and another under "BATTLE BEAST" for the same band), making it difficult to find things sometimes. I agree, Grooveshark is the best one out there, but it's far from perfect.
  - dsirijus 13y ago
    I had loads of fun sharing mistagged songs on Facebook, fishing for those "less in the known". My favorite mistag is "Freebird" by "Led Zeppelin". Also, I'm of firm belief no one ever fixes that, as I've reported loads. And that's ok with me. :)
  - makomk 13y ago
    I'm curious which artists those are - Grooveshark seems to be fairly good compared to competing services in my experience.
- Miyamoto 13y ago
  YouTube is still the king of Internet music. I can find full length new releases of relatively unknown music on YouTube that I can't find anywhere else. The downsides of YouTube are quality control, and that as a playlist application it kind of sucks (compared to GrooveShark).
code_duck 13y ago
I would use this all the time but there's one problem: the song doesn't advance to the next one on my iphone unless Safari is open. So, my phone has to be on with the screen on or the music ends when a song ends. (Grooveshark has had this player for a while... I haven't tried it in iOS 7).
- fastest963 13y ago
  We're currently working on a solution for this. The problem is that Safari stops running javascript and allowing us to stream audio after the phone has been off for some time.
- timjahn 13y ago
  Seconded. Love using Grooveshark to choose specific music I'm in the mood for (versus Pandora, for when I just want music to play non stop without having to think about choosing something), but Grooveshark only works for a few songs before it falls asleep and you have to tend to it.
dsirijus 13y ago
This is live for ages. I think they just started PR around this because it can now not die on iOS 7, running in background. As a side note, try out Leap Motion playback controls on GS (in Settings > Subscription, wtf), they're super sweet. I just wave my hands around to control music, it's awesome!
- nnnnni 13y ago
  Yeah, I've been using this for about a year!
- makomk 13y ago
  Yeah. I don't use the HTML5 player much because it doesn't support broadcasts, which are the main feature I rely on, and it seems to be a bit unreliable on Android in general - it's still neat thoug.
- imissmyjuno 13y ago
  they must've optimized it some more since I've last tried. it runs very snappily on the Nexus 4, as fast as a native app for the most part, and that hasn't been the case last time I tried it. well done.
auggierose 13y ago
If you access the site from Germany, they tell you that they have shut down in Germany because of too high operating costs.
- VMG 13y ago
  that statement by itself is a little cryptic - the operating costs are caused by the GEMA agency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalische_Auff%C3%BChrungs-_und_mechanische_Vervielf%C3%A4ltigungsrechte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalis...
- kreddor 13y ago
  It's the same from Denmark. I guess most EU countries are cut off from Grooveshark these days.
  - riffraff 13y ago
    strangely enough, in hungary GS works fine and spotify doesn't.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Works fine here in Portugal.
  - MartinodF 13y ago
    Surprisingly, it works fine here in Italy too.
  - dagw 13y ago
    Works great in Sweden.
- bliker 13y ago
  I use https://hola.org/ https://hola.org/, works great and does not push all traffic trough proxy
um304 13y ago
Grooveshark has been my favorite online music player for last 3 years, but recently I have observed a lot of bugs on their site, which hinders smoooth experience and forces me to consider alternatives.
- chucknelson 13y ago
  Used to love Grooveshark, but the music quality started to get a little too hit-or-miss for me. I find "normal" radio services like TuneIn, Pandora, and now iTunes Radio to be an overall better experience. I am impressed that Grooveshark is still kicking, though, as I don't hear much about them outside of random articles on HN.
- fastest963 13y ago
  That's unfortunte that you've ran into bugs. Make sure to contact support@grooveshark.com whenever you encounter something weird and they'll make sure to report it and compensate you ;)
vinnyglennon 13y ago
Handy to run via cli also: https://npmjs.org/package/grooveshark-cli https://npmjs.org/package/grooveshark-cli https://github.com/danopia/remora https://github.com/danopia/remora
- bliker 13y ago
  remora seems to be outdated
vially 13y ago
Where is the volume button?
- fastest963 13y ago
  I think the intention is that you change the volume on your phone.
  - vially 13y ago
    Yes. I was suspecting this but since this works pretty well on the desktop as well (I actually prefer it over the normal interface) I think a volume button might be useful.
Mozai 13y ago
Odd. In Midori and Chromium, seems to work correctly. In Firefox, it appears crippled and I get 38 errors on the console -- SyntaxError, TypeError, ReferenceError -- including: [09:42:19.907] SyntaxError: in strict mode code, functions may be declared only at top level or immediately within another function @ http://html5.grooveshark.com/build/app.min.js:1 http://html5.grooveshark.com/build/app.min.js:1
- azakai 13y ago
  Works fine in Firefox 27 for me.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Fine here, on Firefox Mobile 24.
- fastest963 13y ago
  Looks like its trying to run the site in strict JS mode. Do you have any extensions that might be forcing this?
torbit 13y ago
I can make a radio station based on my playlist anymore?
alexvr 13y ago
I've been using this for ever. I think I deserve hipster brownie points.
notregistering 13y ago
The HTML5 player has been standard for at least a year now for GS. The two primary reasons I've avoided it are: - Lack of broadcasts. (Presumably available in their native app.) - Lack of wired.com-esque topnav position fixing in Chrome mobile. It's a minor thing, but having the entire page shift down every time you scroll can lead to incorrect menu selections when mindlessly selecting music.
benbristow 13y ago
GrooveShark is great, but because of the user-uploaded content half the songs are incorrectly tagged and the albums are mostly incomplete.
hardwaresofton 13y ago
I love grooveshark so much, I don't really have much to say other than that.
aakashbarot 13y ago
Grooveshark is good 'more so' for playing the music you have already discovered. I personally like 8 Tracks model, Its one of the best platform to discover new music. It doesnt encourage piracy and at the same time lets us get some good free music. Its spot on solution. It also takes care of piracy really well. Its a radio, so there are limitation on you going back and front, at the same time you can listen to the playlist as many times as you want. User upload their own music: Which means no piracy: You have your paid content you are just broadcasting to larger audience. Like having your own radio station.

114 points by vinnyglennon 13y ago

bdz 13y ago

How the hell is Grooveshark still alive? Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music.

wyclif 13y ago
Tenacity, that's how: http://mashable.com/2013/04/22/grooveshark-radio/ http://mashable.com/2013/04/22/grooveshark-radio/
- yashodhan 13y ago
  I love that company. But I just don't see a future where it keeps its doors open. Especially now with Google and Apple joining in.
eLobato 13y ago
You could argue the same about Youtube, in some sense. They do pay royalties to some artists, and at least for a while a lot of upcoming artists were advertising their new albums there. I discovered a bunch of great groups through that. Unrelated with revenue, but I liked how some artists (Avicii comes to mind) ask you what do you think about X song when you play it in Grooveshark, that's some valuable direct feedback. The radios are awesome too. Can't hide the fact I've been using it for years, but I truly think Grooveshark is the best music streaming service by far. Spotify's catalog is nowhere as large, Pandora misses on so many features, Last.fm recommendations are good but what else do they do...
- nwienert 13y ago
  You just supported his point. The best feature of Grooveshark is that it has a big library... because it's acquired illegally. I just listened to Drake's entire album thats coming out next week. Sweet, but totally illegal. Rdio has a better interface, Spotify better social/apps, Pandora better radio. Grooveshark will die because it's only option is to eventually go legal, and then it loses it's only advantage.
neya 13y ago
>Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music. And I think it's only a good thing. 'Legal/Illegal' are just man-made barriers to access the spirit of freedom to rejoice/discover various cultures/tradition/communities. I understand that there is a possible monetary loss involved as a side-effect, but I don't think it's much serious as the various Copyright organisations project it to us[1]. If that was how it was, the internet would be piracy free, already. [1] http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales-study-finds-120517/ http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales...
- thirdsun 13y ago
  What do you do for a living? Whatever it is, in the spirit of freedom I hereby demand that you offer your services for free. Doesn't sound like a good idea, does it? Music, just like any other service, art or physical product, requires time and effort - it has value and is not a commodity. If you don't value it enough to justify spending more than the price tag of a spotify subscription (which doesn't help any artist anyway), then don't - it's fine - but don't expect artists to work for free. That said, Grooveshark is a mor ethan shady business and should have been closed a long time ago in my opinion.
  - qwertyboy 13y ago
    I don't know. I'm an artist, and while I enjoy getting paid to create and preform, taking money for reproductions that do not require further effort on my part always feels weird. I don't feel I have the right to tell anyone not to reproduce my art at their own expanse. If I play you a song, it's your right to record it and play it to your friends - just like it's your right to whistle it. Just like it's your right to remember it. To me, intellectual property feels like a diversion. Instead of having an audience that pays me for my work, I have a middleman that makes me work for free so that he can overcharge my audience while I wait for my percentage. I don't need to restrict anyone's freedom to make a living. The middleman does. And if grooveshark hurts his income - he had it coming. He's been hurting both our incomes (artist and audience) for years.
  - neya 13y ago
glennos 13y ago
They've done it tough, but they've signed licensing deals with Sony and EMI in the last 6 weeks. http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4668442/grooveshark-settles-with-sony-atv-music-publishing-as-it-struggles-towards-legitimacy http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4668442/grooveshark-settle...
rglover 13y ago
I use Grooveshark daily. Aside from the excellent UI and service (couldn't tell you the last time it was down), the catalog is incredible. One thing to note, though, is that they do pretty well with takedowns. For example, I attempted to upload a copyrighted song years ago and uploads were disabled on my account. They also work with publishers and artists to ensure fair compensation is made. I've paid for the Pro account for a few years now and strongly believe they could do better than their competition if they made the service paid-only.
- thirdsun 13y ago
  This must be a very recent development then - there have been countless stories of rather obscure and niche artists that found it impossible to have their work taken down by Grooveshark. Instead these reports often suggested that those (re-)uploads of unlicensed material seemed to happen automated.
wedraweverting 13y ago
They have agreements with the big labels. They just signed one with Sony. http://bgr.com/2013/08/28/grooveshark-sony-music-settlement/ http://bgr.com/2013/08/28/grooveshark-sony-music-settlement/

wslh 13y ago

Side note: my favorite radio show is uploaded to Grooveshark and the other day I needed to listen it offline, so I just used a proxy (fiddler) and save the stream from the proxy session console. There is an API where you can do the same, I think, because is just one request with the location of the MP3 audio. There are a lot of apps for downloading mp3 from Grooveshark but they usually came with a lot of crapware.

bliker 13y ago
if do not mind Ruby. I am sure you can use https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark and wget.
- wslh 13y ago
  The way I do it is much simple and it's not using the API. Just open the proxy sessions in Fiddler and save the response.
Jhsto 13y ago
You can do the same with play.spotify.com, but you need premium account instead of API access. With ID3 tagging it's a great way to keep your offline music organized even with devices which do not have Spotify on them.

ashray 13y ago

Grooveshark is amazing. They have the best library out there hands down. Yes, they got it through piracy yadda yadda but they have more music than any of the legit services out there (I pay $9.99 for rdio per month..). The thing is that I can find label music on Grooveshark (iTunes top 500 sort of stuff) but I can also easily find the most obscure stuff you can think of. So fan remixes, and regional music (Indian music, Pakistani music, Lebanese music, etc. etc.). The other services out there have a LONG way to go to make that happen.

rcfox 13y ago
Grooveshark has great breadth, but lacks in depth. There are lots of types of music, but I find that they rarely have the specific artists that I'm looking for. (I mainly listen to power metal.) Also, there are a lot of tracks that finish prematurely, are just static, or simply don't play. I've tried flagging them as broken, but Grooveshark keeps adding them to my playlists. There are also tons of tagging issues (ie: there's one album under "Battle Beast" and another under "BATTLE BEAST" for the same band), making it difficult to find things sometimes. I agree, Grooveshark is the best one out there, but it's far from perfect.
- dsirijus 13y ago
  I had loads of fun sharing mistagged songs on Facebook, fishing for those "less in the known". My favorite mistag is "Freebird" by "Led Zeppelin". Also, I'm of firm belief no one ever fixes that, as I've reported loads. And that's ok with me. :)
- makomk 13y ago
  I'm curious which artists those are - Grooveshark seems to be fairly good compared to competing services in my experience.
Miyamoto 13y ago
YouTube is still the king of Internet music. I can find full length new releases of relatively unknown music on YouTube that I can't find anywhere else. The downsides of YouTube are quality control, and that as a playlist application it kind of sucks (compared to GrooveShark).

code_duck 13y ago

I would use this all the time but there's one problem: the song doesn't advance to the next one on my iphone unless Safari is open. So, my phone has to be on with the screen on or the music ends when a song ends. (Grooveshark has had this player for a while... I haven't tried it in iOS 7).

fastest963 13y ago
We're currently working on a solution for this. The problem is that Safari stops running javascript and allowing us to stream audio after the phone has been off for some time.
timjahn 13y ago
Seconded. Love using Grooveshark to choose specific music I'm in the mood for (versus Pandora, for when I just want music to play non stop without having to think about choosing something), but Grooveshark only works for a few songs before it falls asleep and you have to tend to it.

dsirijus 13y ago

This is live for ages. I think they just started PR around this because it can now not die on iOS 7, running in background. As a side note, try out Leap Motion playback controls on GS (in Settings > Subscription, wtf), they're super sweet. I just wave my hands around to control music, it's awesome!

nnnnni 13y ago
Yeah, I've been using this for about a year!
makomk 13y ago
Yeah. I don't use the HTML5 player much because it doesn't support broadcasts, which are the main feature I rely on, and it seems to be a bit unreliable on Android in general - it's still neat thoug.
imissmyjuno 13y ago
they must've optimized it some more since I've last tried. it runs very snappily on the Nexus 4, as fast as a native app for the most part, and that hasn't been the case last time I tried it. well done.

auggierose 13y ago

If you access the site from Germany, they tell you that they have shut down in Germany because of too high operating costs.

VMG 13y ago
that statement by itself is a little cryptic - the operating costs are caused by the GEMA agency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalische_Auff%C3%BChrungs-_und_mechanische_Vervielf%C3%A4ltigungsrechte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalis...
kreddor 13y ago
It's the same from Denmark. I guess most EU countries are cut off from Grooveshark these days.
- riffraff 13y ago
  strangely enough, in hungary GS works fine and spotify doesn't.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Works fine here in Portugal.
- MartinodF 13y ago
  Surprisingly, it works fine here in Italy too.
- dagw 13y ago
  Works great in Sweden.
bliker 13y ago
I use https://hola.org/ https://hola.org/, works great and does not push all traffic trough proxy

um304 13y ago

Grooveshark has been my favorite online music player for last 3 years, but recently I have observed a lot of bugs on their site, which hinders smoooth experience and forces me to consider alternatives.

chucknelson 13y ago
Used to love Grooveshark, but the music quality started to get a little too hit-or-miss for me. I find "normal" radio services like TuneIn, Pandora, and now iTunes Radio to be an overall better experience. I am impressed that Grooveshark is still kicking, though, as I don't hear much about them outside of random articles on HN.
fastest963 13y ago
That's unfortunte that you've ran into bugs. Make sure to contact support@grooveshark.com whenever you encounter something weird and they'll make sure to report it and compensate you ;)

vinnyglennon 13y ago

Handy to run via cli also: https://npmjs.org/package/grooveshark-cli https://npmjs.org/package/grooveshark-cli https://github.com/danopia/remora https://github.com/danopia/remora

bliker 13y ago
remora seems to be outdated

vially 13y ago

Where is the volume button?

fastest963 13y ago
I think the intention is that you change the volume on your phone.
- vially 13y ago
  Yes. I was suspecting this but since this works pretty well on the desktop as well (I actually prefer it over the normal interface) I think a volume button might be useful.

Mozai 13y ago

Odd. In Midori and Chromium, seems to work correctly. In Firefox, it appears crippled and I get 38 errors on the console -- SyntaxError, TypeError, ReferenceError -- including: [09:42:19.907] SyntaxError: in strict mode code, functions may be declared only at top level or immediately within another function @ http://html5.grooveshark.com/build/app.min.js:1 http://html5.grooveshark.com/build/app.min.js:1

azakai 13y ago
Works fine in Firefox 27 for me.
icebraining 13y ago
Fine here, on Firefox Mobile 24.
fastest963 13y ago
Looks like its trying to run the site in strict JS mode. Do you have any extensions that might be forcing this?

torbit 13y ago

I can make a radio station based on my playlist anymore?

alexvr 13y ago

I've been using this for ever. I think I deserve hipster brownie points.

notregistering 13y ago

The HTML5 player has been standard for at least a year now for GS. The two primary reasons I've avoided it are: - Lack of broadcasts. (Presumably available in their native app.) - Lack of wired.com-esque topnav position fixing in Chrome mobile. It's a minor thing, but having the entire page shift down every time you scroll can lead to incorrect menu selections when mindlessly selecting music.

benbristow 13y ago

GrooveShark is great, but because of the user-uploaded content half the songs are incorrectly tagged and the albums are mostly incomplete.

hardwaresofton 13y ago

I love grooveshark so much, I don't really have much to say other than that.

aakashbarot 13y ago

Grooveshark is good 'more so' for playing the music you have already discovered. I personally like 8 Tracks model, Its one of the best platform to discover new music. It doesnt encourage piracy and at the same time lets us get some good free music. Its spot on solution. It also takes care of piracy really well. Its a radio, so there are limitation on you going back and front, at the same time you can listen to the playlist as many times as you want. User upload their own music: Which means no piracy: You have your paid content you are just broadcasting to larger audience. Like having your own radio station.