
Show HN: roll.io eats txt files and shits youtube videos. Useful? - hafifuyku
http://roll.io
======
ssdsa
I 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.

~~~
hafifuyku
Sorry. that's me trying to sound cool in 80 characters (minus "Show HN:")

~~~
joebo
Personally, 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
For 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.

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miguelpais
WOW! 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/>

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.

~~~
patrickk
How 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.

~~~
miguelpais
Once I thought of something like that too, but in the environment of a park
with speakers and wifi (yeah, far fetched, I know). People could go to a
website available on the wireless network with their smartphones and pick a
track to play (from a library such as Spotify). Then everybody on the park
would be able to up or down the track using their smartphones. If the track
had enough up votes, that person would be able to pick another track to play.

It would be the interactive/social/sound park. :P

But since I don't know that many parks with speakers, on clubs it would
probably work better. They could do it as an experiment on a tent of some
festival like they did with the concept of the silent disco
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_disco>).

------
yellowbkpk
When 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
...that's the correct result seeing as Death Cab For Cutie is an indie/hipster
band ;p

~~~
seanp2k
.... 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>

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.

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mgkimsal
i 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
Sorry 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

~~~
mgkimsal
it 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.

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jaysonelliot
Once 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.

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p4bl0
YouTube's playlist management is a PITA, so this is really a great idea. And
it's done following the KISS principle, kudos!

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karolist
Thanks for sharing, this looks useful, though not sure the shit mantra is
necessary.

~~~
encoderer
I 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
That's a pretty shitty reason not to share this with people.

~~~
encoderer
And 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?

~~~
camiller
I'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.

------
jannes
Do 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>

~~~
bekirdag
using other services would be a future request. we will consider this.

------
atacrawl
Definitely gets an upvote from me. Probably the neatest music site idea I've
seen since the now-defunct Muxtape.

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superasn
I 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...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-
mp3-playlist-into-a-video-playlist/)

------
rmc
I was a bit confused at first. You should have more details on how it works

------
PaulJoslin
I 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>

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
after collecting some data, we will prepare some regexp for the common
mistakes.

------
johnrob
Mobile 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.

------
follower
A different approach for YouTube playlists I was introduced to recently:
<http://www.youtify.com/>

More useful for building playlists on the fly rather than having a prepared
list of songs as roll.io does.

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rsbrown
Feature 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.

------
vld
Right, interesting. Some problems tho: _removed as requested_

~~~
bekirdag
wow. you got me there :) can you please remove the image?

~~~
vld
Done, I hope you know what and where to fix :)

~~~
bekirdag
i guess i fixed it. can you please check again?

~~~
vld
MemTotal: 1025760 kB MemFree: 349528 kB

What do you think? =)

~~~
vld
Please check email.

------
pclark
This 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.

------
swaraj
Holy 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

------
retube
Apart from (annoyingly and without warning) playing the best matching track to
your query/text line, how is this different from youtube search?

~~~
hafifuyku
the difference is here: not one line but thousands of lines.

------
hbz
I think it's useful and very well made. Nice job!

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krig
A similar idea to the linked text file (not to roll.io itself) is
<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.

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rsbrown
Huh. That was one of the quickest "how fuckin' stupid" => "how fuckin'
brilliant" turnarounds my brain has experienced.

Nice work.

------
jannes
Very 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
I know, it's a pitty but probably roll.io could never be suitable for ios.

------
tnajdek
I 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.

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tobylane
It'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.

------
ses
I 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.

------
kri5
Great 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.

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marcocampos
This is great. Congrats! For me the killer feature is Grooveshark support :)

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resdirector
Request:

Ability to enter in wikipedia track listing URL, e.g.:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin_Bob_Dylan#Track...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin_Bob_Dylan#Track_listing)

~~~
bekirdag
Can 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
AFAIK, most track listings use this template:
<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
Ok it's done. Thank you very much for your help.

------
bochi
Really 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>

------
mrcharles
This 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.

------
sokolski
Nice. Doesn't youtube api have limits on number of requests?

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ChrisArchitect
used 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.

------
kraymer
I 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.

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minikomi
Wow.. Did something similar for mp3s and markdown while back...
<http://texttape.heroku.com>

------
kdeberk
Finally! A good replacement for radioblogclub. I was so unhappy when they took
that down since it was my main source for discovering good artists.

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johnrob
Excellent. 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.

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chetan51
Suggestion: Have the option to switch the embedded YouTube player to an
embedded Grooveshark widget for higher-quality audio.

------
cjstewart88
I had a feature similar to this on www.tubalr.com, you could type in several
bands and given a playlist.

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kolinko
Wow, brilliant.

I'd love to read about the technology behind. It works well even on names I
typed in in Polish.

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spydertennis
You should let people save playlists to a custom url. roll.io/bestplaylistever

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jvoorhis
Quick, someone write a bookmarklet that posts tracklists from discogs

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BonoboBoner
Awesome idea. Drap and drop upload oft txt files would be nice.

------
noodle
i'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
excatly :) this does not works this way, sorry.

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zem
not 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.

------
peterwwillis
I have been using this all afternoon. Thank you.

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firatdemirel
it works & sounds great. but i'd like to close video part completely. also a
browser extension could be nice for it.

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zem
feature request: allow me to append to a playlist without resetting

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Just upload your text file again.

~~~
zem
that isn't seamless - it stops the currently playing song

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edshadi
LOVE it...I would completely use it and I got it from the first look!

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schizophrenia
very clear and good idea, congrats guys

------
pyUser
simple and great idea! vote up it is.

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mayk
it's very useful. good luck...

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csertoglu
firehose of a firehose. i like it. one day, there will be some semantic sense
made out of this.

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c4urself
much better than youtube, clear and to the point, simple. great job!

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noob007
just 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>

With '-' as delimiter or some other char/word

~~~
bekirdag
it does something similar. Here are some examples: <http://roll.io/queen>
(plays 1 song from queen) <http://roll.io/queen> play:all (plays 25 songs from
queen) <http://roll.io/queen> play:2 (plays 2 songs from queen)
<http://roll.io/http://bt.ly/Ercv6> (the url of your txt file)

~~~
p4bl0
And you can go back to your playlist too: <http://roll.io/#4dxpto!0>

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matthewcieplak
Interesting. Seems like a less flashy version of instant.fm:
<http://instant.fm/p/90>

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noob007
very 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
wonderful idea

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instakill
Voted up if only for the title.

