

Show HN: CloudPlay - A music player for YouTube, SoundCloud, and more - ammmir
http://cloudplay.fm/

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ammmir
This is an app I've been working on for the past couple of months (see [1] for
some background). A lot of us listen to music while coding or designing and I
wanted to build something that makes it as pain-free as possible. I'd love to
know what you guys think!

[1] [http://amirmalik.net/2012/08/09/cloudplay-a-music-player-
for...](http://amirmalik.net/2012/08/09/cloudplay-a-music-player-for-youtube-
etc)

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jancborchardt
Oh nice, this looks slick. Do you know of the functionally similar
<http://youtify.com>?

It’s an open source web app, see <http://github.com/youtify/youtify>

~~~
ammmir
Thanks! I can't believe I never noticed Youtify before, it's amazing. I think
we'll see a lot of similar functionality to go across different services.

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rabidsnail
Very cool.

Feature suggestions:

* Add last.fm scrobbling

* Add Grooveshark as a source

* Group tracks into albums (you can get the metadata from musicbrainz and last.fm)

* Use last.fm similar tracks (<http://www.last.fm/api/show/track.getSimilar>) to automatically queue up the next track

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ammmir
Last.fm scrobbling has been the #1 request to my surprise! Track grouping is
one of the next features, just need to think more about the browse process.
The Echo Nest also has a great API for finding similar tracks that I was
planning on using, but I'll look at Last.fm, too... thanks!

~~~
rabidsnail
I would write integrations for both, use last.fm (since it's free) in
production, and if last.fm decides to start charging you you're in a good
negotiating position. Single-sourcing api's in general is extremely dangerous.

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jordanlev
Cool idea! I recently built out a fun side project to scrape local music
listings and display youtube videos for each artist (so if you want to go out
to live music but don't know any of the bands playing you can quickly listen
to music samples): <http://stl.showspinner.com>

A big problem though is when there are no youtube videos for artists. Your app
makes me realize that tapping into the SoundCloud API might be a good
addition, though. Any caveats I should be aware of?

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vikramhaer
Are you planning on keeping this mac-only? Any reason for not making it
browser-based? looks great, would love to try it

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ammmir
It's definitely coming to mobile (probably iOS first) if there's enough
interest. There are already a few browser-based players that search multiple
services, and I wanted something that doesn't require me to hunt down which
browser tab is playing music :)

CloudPlay is basically Spotlight for Music. (Spotlight is the Mac indexing
service/always-running-app that lets you quickly find and open files on your
system.)

EDIT: To answer your actual question... it's Mac only for now, since I'm an
army of one, but other platforms may come depending on demand.

~~~
simba-hiiipower
yeah, i totally understand the need to focus on one platform at a time if
you’re not going for a web app, but a Windows version (guess i’m in the
minority here; ironic) would also be much appreciated. it looks really cool;
would love to try it out someday.

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jc4p
This is freaking awesome.

Is there any way to make it so the play/stop/previous/next shortcuts you have
right now work off the respective keys on the keyboard? I'm really used to
hitting the pause button on my computer so and if I do that right now Spotify
start playing random music while I'm trying to pause this app.

~~~
ammmir
Thanks :)

Are you using a custom keyboard? Right now I've only mapped the Apple media
keys (using the Option-Shift prefix since iTunes takes over the non-prefixed
ones and Mac App Store apps can't trap them, giving Spotify/Rdio the upper
hand).

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brady747
I'm not on a mac but good luck, I've been waiting for someone to do something
like this or similar for a while. For those people looking at alternatives I
recently found and am enjoying - tomahawk-player.org

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cjstewart88
Looks nice, I made this(<http://www.tubalr.com>) about two years ago and have
been working on it every since with pretty much the same vision and hopes.

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ramanujam
It would be great if it let me import my playlists from Youtube. Also, option
to close the video pane when the song is playing would be nice. Congrats on
the launch. Very nice implementation.

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ammmir
Thanks! Import of favorites and likes across different services is coming
soon! The window itself closes if you click away from it to another app :)

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aw3c2
It would be ace if you could add jamendo.com and archive.org as sources for
free music. Also maybe <http://be.electrobel.org/>

~~~
ammmir
Fantastic suggestions! A lot of these sites don't have APIs, so I'll probably
need to put together a little scraper.

~~~
aw3c2
Jamendo has an API, they just made a terrible redesign a while ago and seem
not to link it anymore. See <http://developer.jamendo.com/en/>

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ajcronk
Most of my music is in iCloud, so it shows up in CloudPlay, but it doesn't
actually play. Any way that CloudPlay can fetch songs in iCloud?

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ammmir
hmm.. are you using iTunes Match? I believe iTunes uses a private API to
stream music, so unfortunately there's not much I can do until I find another
way. In the meantime, I should probably hide non-local iTunes tracks.

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alexkiwi
Thankfully a native player for <http://console.fm>, congrats on releasing
Amir!!!!

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xam
I think this would be even better if it were integrated with podcasts as well.

~~~
ammmir
Currently it uses whatever is in your iTunes library, so you can play any
downloaded podcasts, but you're right, a podcast directory/download feature
would be great!

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jmathai
Congrats Amir! Missed you at the recent nReduce meetings :)

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evertonfuller
Fantastic tool for copyright holders too.

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codenerdz
Shoutcast pretty please :)

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gdilla
bandcamp as a source would be great too. lots of great music there.

