
Nuclear – Popcorn Time for music - devcriollo
https://github.com/nukeop/nuclear
======
porkloin
It seems like calling this "Popcorn Time" for music isn't necessarily a great
comparison.

PT allowed streaming playback of torrented movies and was very clearly piracy
and illegal.

Meanwhile, this seems like an aggregator for existing free sources of music
(Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud).

That said, it looks like a cool hobby project and a great alternative for
folks who want/need a multi-source music client. Google Play Music was my go-
to service for a long time since I could not only get streaming access but
also upload my own local files to their servers for playback anywhere. Most of
that local music came from Bandcamp.

~~~
fjabre
I think everyone is tired of being ripped off by out of date copyright laws
and industry shenanigans. The music industry is full of blood thirsty lawyers,
big ticket prices, unjust YT algorithms, and death by a thousand cuts with all
the monthlies from music streaming services. I for one am fed up with this
oligarchy and am happy to see services like this pop up from time to time to
remind me that technology will continue to displace these brokers until it
murders the middle man entirely. I look forward to that day.

~~~
KozmoNau7
A little while back, a project named Supportify was posted here. It looks at
your most played tracks, and tries to find Bandcamp links for the artists, so
you can support them directly.

[https://tomduncalf.github.io/supportify/](https://tomduncalf.github.io/supportify/)

------
Deganta
Popcorn time was popular because it was way better than any of the legal
alternatives. You just had to open it, type the name of the movie/series and
you probably could start watching. You could also do this in the legal
alternatives, but the chance of actually finding what you were looking for was
pretty small.

Here I don't really see how this is better than Spotify/iTunes/Amazon Music.

~~~
skykooler
Spotify recently removed six songs in my "offline" playlist from its library,
so I can no longer play them. If this actually saves music files, that's a big
plus.

~~~
hannasanarion
You can use your own copies of music in Spotify. All you have to do is tell it
where to find them on your disk.

And if you connect with a mobile device on the same network as the computer
with the files on it, they'll automatically be transferred so you'll get them
on mobile too.

Two of my favorite bands (Blind Guardian, Kamelot) put only their last couple
of releases on Spotify, but with this method I can listen to their whole back
catalog.

~~~
vinceguidry
Reading through Spotify's docs, I really don't want to put control of my music
life in the hands of Spotify's tenuous relationship with the music industry.

~~~
hannasanarion
That's the point, you don't have to. The spotify software synchronizes your
personal collection between all your devices and uses it to fill holes in
their catalog.

Afraid that an artist is going to pull their stuff from spotify? Acquire
digital copies of that artist's work some other way, and spotify will slot
them right into your playlists where the old ones used to be. I did this when
SPV Records pulled Silverthorn, it was practically no work.

Even if the whole industry abandons spotify, it will still be unique and
valuable as a seamless way to synchronize your music library between all
devices.

~~~
vinceguidry
If the industry abandons Spotify, and my entire music life was wrapped up in
it, then I need to acquire 600+ individual music tracks from 400+ artists, if
I hadn't already done it already, all to continue listening to music the same
way I do now. The problem gets worse the longer I remain on the platform. And
that assumes I'll be able to get my data, about which tracks I need to
acquire, out when the time comes. If not then I'm really up Shit's Creek
without a paddle.

I'd rather pay more in the short term, paying for individual tracks, for a
solution that will work indefinitely, than set up a situation in which extreme
disruption of a part of my life I'm utterly reliant on can be afflicted at a
whim of a dipshit music exec who doesn't understand how people can become
reliant on music or worse, understands and does it anyway because it'll make
him more money.

~~~
hannasanarion
So you're saying, you're afraid of being reduced to small personal catalog in
an unlikely future apocalypse scenario, and you are solving this problem by
forcing yourself to use a small personal catalog today?

~~~
vinceguidry
I wouldn't call it unlikely. Music services have a history of getting shut
down. Sure, Spotify's star is bright now. But it could get acquired tomorrow
by a company that decides it doesn't want to support all my use cases. If one
of those use cases is something I'm reliant on, then Spotify all of a sudden
becomes totally worthless.

Whereas my personal catalog will never stop supporting my use cases.

~~~
hannasanarion
What music services have a history of getting shut down after 11 years of
profitability and complete cultural and market dominance? Spotify is hardly
comparable to Zune or whatever.

It's totally your prerogative to not use spotify or other music streaming
services, I'm just saying fear of imminent market apocalypse isn't really a
good reason to deny all of the upsides.

~~~
vinceguidry
Cultural and market dominance? Where can I get some of that Kool-aid? Spotify
is certainly more successful than _many_ of the alternatives, but it's a
crowded space. Apple Music, Amazon Music, Google Play Music, YouTube Music,
SoundCloud, Pandora, Bandcamp and 8Tracks are just the ones I've heard of. Any
one of these, including Spotify, is subject to acquisition, spinning out, or
outright shutdown at the whims of the music industry. Any of these events can
change the service such that it's practically useless.

The ones already shut down or folded into different companies with different
priorities include Rhapsody, Beatport, Rdio, Last.fm's streaming offering, and
the aforementioned Zune. Forgive me if I'm a little cautious and not willing
to depend on the magic of "the market," cue jazz hands, to ensure access to my
music, especially when I have a solution that's _already working_ that isn't
subject to those risks.

------
japanoise
>On an unrelated note, highly polarized opinions about languages and
frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming
experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating
computer programs.

How incredibly arrogant. It can't be that people have legitimate grievances
with elecron, like not wanting to use a program based on an incredibly bloated
and poorly designed platform, oh no, they just "lack real world experience"
and are "more interested in identity" (whatever that means).

High-and-mighty types like this are exactly why working in IT or contributing
to FLOSS is so draining at times.

~~~
sonaltr
While I get why people are annoyed by that message, I get and understand it.

It's super annoying when you are trying to create a desktop app and you get
issues (multiple of them) essentially going "Why are you using Electron? it
eats up my RAM, please use X framework and you should be fine"

This would be fine if:

    
    
      1. You attached that with a PR for said framework or
      2. You searched before and read this being answered earlier
    

From a maintainer's point of view - this is super annoying.

I'm sure the author built this to satisfy his itch first and open sourced it
because it might help others (either to directly use the product or to learn
from the code). It's super annoying when you have people who think they know
better come and tell you to use X because they have a problem with Electron
(not necessarily your app in particular but Electron in general). I say this
as it appears the author might be using arch linux and as a linux user, I
always appreciate an electron app vs no app (obviously a native app is better
but that's generally never the option - it's generally electron or nothing).

I'm sure it could have been worded nicely but eitherway it got the effect the
author wanted - it drives away people who'd be annoyed by Electron in the
first place.

~~~
zeveb
> It's super annoying when you are trying to create a desktop app and you get
> issues (multiple of them) essentially going "Why are you using Electron? it
> eats up my RAM, please use X framework and you should be fine"

It's super annoying when I'm looking for a desktop app and everything I find
is really a poorly-disguised web app which eats RAM.

Just develop programs for X11 & POSIX: every system, from Windows to Linux to
macOS to *BSD supports them to one extent or another.

~~~
floatboth
Please _don 't_ develop directly against X11 (or reach into X11 APIs when
using a UI toolkit that runs on everything else too).

~~~
CamperBob2
Why not?

~~~
floatboth
If we're talking about cross-platform: X11 is not native on Windows, it's not
native on macOS, it's not native on Wayland. (On the first two, it requires
deliberate installation of some X server, and you won't even get direct
rendering with that!)

Most annoying for me personally: it doesn't support proper HiDPI scaling. X11
apps are blurry on my HiDPI Wayland desktop, which makes me not want to use
them.

In general, X11 is absolutely inadequate for the modern world. It's a legacy
protocol that has the "any client can be a keylogger" security model, drawing
primitives from the 80s that no one uses anymore plus all the history of
bolting on more modern ways of rendering. (And don't get me started on the
input systems, of which there are several and no one knows how that code even
works.) And the protocol is synchronous, so you'll always have some slowdowns.
Oh and the fucking screen tearing! In modern display systems, every frame is
perfect, _by design_ , by _protocol_ design. X11 only has various "tearfree"
hacks in the server that work with varying levels of success.

------
joeblau
There was a time (Napster -> Bearsahre/Limewire/Kazaa) when I would have been
excited about something like this. As I've become more financially stable, and
have more hardware for music to integrate into I look at a project like this
and think: How can I share music links with my friends easily? How do I get
these songs on my watch? How do I get these songs on my phone? How do I play
these from my home speakers? How easy is going to be for my partner to do all
of the same things?

The user experience bar for a music service has gone up since the days of
Napster. If you primarily use one computer and that's your audio experience,
this probably works well. I've found that I'm increasingly playing podcasts
and music in different locations and going back to a centralized playing
source is not an experience I want.

~~~
vvillena
Ten years ago evey respectable device had DLNA support, an agnostic way to
browse and play all kinds of media content available on the local network.
Sharing a song with a friend could be easily done by sending the whole song
(duplicates were not an issue since well-formed MP3s usually included
Musicbrainz UUIDs that the media players compared), or by simply linking to
Youtube or Grooveshark.

DLNA is slowly going the way of RSS. It's too open of a standard for the
current times. Google is already mounting an Embrace-Extend-Extinguish attack
on it via the Chromecast protocol. I'm scared Bluetooth audio will be the next
to be forgotten. Meanwhile, cloud music services are current trend, and it's
not crazy to think they will follow the Nextflix-HBO-Disney steps and start
creating walled gardens full of exclusive content.

So, which options do we have now? Users can surrender power and gain
convenience by going with, say, Spotify. The app's slick, the multiple device
support is awesome, and the social features, while nowhere near
Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, are enough. Keep in mind Last.fm is more than 15 years
old. 15 years without progress on the music social media front. Also,
disappearing songs are a huge problem. A company that pulls a song from their
catalog without notifying the user is borderline evil. I feel connected to
music. It's almost like the company is deleting a memory from your brain,
hoping you won't notice its absence.

Another option is to keep living in the 00s and maintain a home music library.
You ensure no songs will disappear from your library without notice, which is
good. The bad thing is you are more isolated. There's no easy way to access
your library in other devices, there's no easy way to integrate a personal
library with a cloud service, and there's no easy way to share your
experiences with friends in the same way you can do it with Spotify.

What do I do then? I decided to go the Spotify way, while keeping a small
"memories" library which contains the more obscure songs, plus the ones I want
to keep with me forever. I'm wary, though. The day Spotify decides to become
more profitable, it will be over. Half the features will be gone, and we'll
have to start all over again in a worse position than before, because our
hardware will be less open than it is now.

~~~
Kolgrym
>Another option is to keep living in the 00s and maintain a home music
library. You ensure no songs will disappear from your library without notice,
which is good. The bad thing is you are more isolated. There's no easy way to
access your library in other devices, there's no easy way to integrate a
personal library with a cloud service, and there's no easy way to share your
experiences with friends in the same way you can do it with Spotify.

I have ~40k songs uploaded and available to stream for free anywhere with
google music. I'm still the kinda of crazy that maintains my own collection
locally and it stays sync'd automatically. It also serves as a free offsite
backup. Agreed that there is no easy way to share but I have vastly different
musical tastes from my friends so that's never been an issue for me, though
for a lot of people it might be a negative.

~~~
vvillena
I used Google Music until recently, just to unify the cloud library with my
personal library. The problem was how atrocious the Google Music player is.
It's a joke compared to Spotify, or to any desktop app.

~~~
joeblau
Does Spotify let you merge your personal library with their cloud library? I
used to use Google Music but I switched to Apple Music when they allowed you
to have a hybrid library.

~~~
vvillena
You can have a local library in Spotify, but it isn't synced. Google Music
allows you to upload your own songs and play them on all devices.

~~~
joeblau
Ah okay. Apple Music works the way Google Music does.

------
aquova
I have what is probably a very naive question, as I am not well versed at all
in Electron or web frameworks. I understand the complaints towards Electron,
but I also see the appeal of developing utilizing a cross-platform browser. Is
there a reason why developers can't simply have their application run in a
local server? (Jupyter Notebook is an example that comes to mind.) This way,
the user can use their browser of choice and doesn't have to have several
installations of Chromium, while the developer can still utilize the web. I
imagine it's more complex than this, but it's something I've been wondering.

~~~
aidenn0
Some reasons off the top of my head:

1) Local servers are a no-go for multiuser environments unless you want to
log-on every time you run your "native" app, as most (all?) browsers don't
support http over domain sockets and there is no authentication for local
sockets.

2) Managing the health of the service properly in a cross-platform manner is
complicated. With electron if the app crashes, it just crashes. With a local
server the browser tab just stops working. Sure technical users can figure it
out, but if you are targeting a gui over a console, presumably you are trying
to capture some fraction of non-technical users.

~~~
jpeeler
Ignoring the multiuser issue, could not some javascript be injected that
displays "crash" instructions (or even just closes the tab) in the event the
server becomes unresponsive? I'm not a web dev, but this sounds feasible.

------
woodlander87
Best part is the text in the LEGAL document:

# Legal information My lawyer tells me I am allowed to smack anyone saying
this program is illegal with a flyswatter.

~~~
chrismeller
So he’s allowed to smack flyswatter-owning people who say it’s illegal?
Awesome, I don’t own a flyswatter!

Isn’t English grand?

~~~
seba_dos1
No, they have to say that it's illegal by using their flyswatter.

However, that makes you safe anyway :P

------
ikeboy
Isn't that just YouTube or Spotify? Free music is freely given out legally
these days, don't see the need for this.

~~~
thieving_magpie
I wouldn't use this for my own moral reasons but we have different definitions
of free. In this case you use "free" to mean: providing personal data and
being subjected to a targeted marketing campaign in exchange for music.

~~~
snazz
Using youtube-dl circumvents both the personal data and the marketing. Just
convert to audio with ffmpeg, and then you can listen on your own devices with
a normal music player.

~~~
Retr0spectrum
You can use youtube-dl to download just the audio stream directly, no need to
remux with ffmpeg.

~~~
criddell
Are you happy with the audio quality with streams ripped from YouTube? I'm
guessing it's been compressed more than once and that can't be good.

~~~
snazz
Using the flag shown at [https://askubuntu.com/questions/423508/can-i-
directly-downlo...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/423508/can-i-directly-
download-audio-using-youtube-dl), you can see all of the different stream
qualities available (both audio and video). Some videos (particularly official
music videos) have pretty good audio, while amateur videos, remixes, and
parodies usually don’t sound as good.

------
superlopuh
People who build on Electron should understand the technical tradeoffs they
are making. On the one hand, they get a cross platform app, on the other, they
have an extra Issue in their bug tracker to move to another platform, with
occasional reminders thereof.

On an unrelated note, highly polarising comments about languages and
frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming
experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating
computer programs.

~~~
ourcat
I was recently tasked to build a cross platform win/linux/macos application.
After looking around a few options, I plumped for Electron. (Also since I can
write JS etc. pretty confidently)

Glad I did. The project was done way faster than I could have imagined. And
everyone else was amazed and pleased as punch with the result.

Job done. :)

~~~
chooseaname
Great job optimizing for developer productivity!

------
dmix
This looks great conceptually but the UX on my first run through was awful.

The prominent "Best new music" part had an Earl Sweatshirt album review, so I
wanted to listen to it, but you can't click the album title... only the artist
name. Then I had to sift through 30+ album covers (no titles... not ordered by
release date) to find the one that looked like the one I saw on the previous
page (it had a slightly different cover).

You'd think a "new" album would be at the top.

Then I double clicked the first song twice, then realize there is a popup that
has a "Play Now" button on a SINGLE click (unlike Spotify or Google Music). I
clicked that and it only added it to my "queue", I thought it was downloading
for a couple min, but nope I had to click "Play" at the bottom to actually
start it.

I went to another album, clicked "Play Now" on a song and it froze with the
logo pulsing fullscreen, and I had to restart the app.

This is basic stuff.

~~~
laaph
I'm getting the same results. I've puzzled with it for 20 minutes and have yet
to get sound out of it.

------
tambourine_man
Title suggestion: nuclear - Popcorn Time for music

It's nice to know the project's name

------
laaph
Once upon a time I used a program called iRate. It had an online database of
freely available music, and would download music, and you could rate the
music, and its algorithms would attempt to figure out what music you liked and
provide you with more of it. While the algorithms sucked, it was really nice
to listen to random music, with a menu item that said "download more music",
and get more music you had never heard of.

More recently, I used Songbird (which went through a few name changes). It was
a web browser that tried to include iTunes functionality. It really sucked -
imagine trying to take a normal web browser and make it twice or thrice or
more slower - but the idea was nice, you could go to music blogs, and click
the play button and listen to all the songs they linked to, and click the
download button if you wanted to keep the file.

I am trying to get Nuclear to work, just to see what it's about, but I
literally can't get any audio out of the program. That makes it slightly
useless.

I would love a program that collated legally available music and provide a
music player interface (preferably VLC or WinAmp style and speediness). There
is so much music out there that you would never have to listen to the same
song twice. Digging through SoundCloud and BandCamp and Archive.org would
provide endless music. Archive.org alone, if you wanted to avoid legal issues
(even though lots of music is available free streaming at the other two
websites I mentioned).

Perhaps I'll have to write this program myself. I already have too many
projects as it is, though.

------
kjullien
I love this, it's so simple (at least the idea is) yet nobody has done this.
(as far as I know). I use Popcorn Time almost daily and spent 60 700 minutes
in 2018 listening to Spotify, so it's safe to say I need my music, yet to me
120 Euros a year is 120 spent elsewhere or saved. I already have a VPN
subscription for Popcorn Time so this is really wonderful.

There was at one point an app that did something similar (I can't recall the
name), except it used YouTube instead of torrents which made it pretty useless
for me as I find 128kbps playback rate to be quite terrible.

"It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in the world,
if you know how to see it." (even if it is of dubious legality)

edit: nvm all that, got fooled by the title. This does not work with torrents
but with free music streaming services, which will clearly be inferior to most
premium services like Spotify, guess I'm starting another new side-project...

------
seanhandley
Not sure making the UI look so much like Spotify was a wise move.

~~~
mhh__
Looks worse, but just as slow!

------
manigandham
Reminds me of AudioGalaxy back in the day, nothing else came close to finding
anything. Eventually it shutdown and Grooveshark was ok for a bit but that
heyday in the early 2000s of music “streaming” was really something.

------
Malp
Didn't we already get a "Popcorn Time for music" (which didn't use legal
sources) with [http://aurous.me/](http://aurous.me/) ?

------
xj9
> Popcorn Time for Music

but where is the torrent client?

------
Yuval_Halevi
Don't call it popcorn time for music.

It looks good enough to stand by itself.

------
anonymous5133
Is this another program which publicly exposes your IP address...and thus
makes you vulnerable to copyright strikes from your ISP or potential legal
action?

------
z3t4
It's amazing that some guy in a garage can do a better job then 500 guy's in a
fancy office ...

~~~
mhh__
It's worse in just about every way than the 500 guys alternative, to be
honest. It's really slow, and try searching for a specific song, or recovering
from a crash, or working out what failed etc.

------
andrewmcwatters
I mean Spotify is built on CEF, so who gives a shit if this is on Electron or
not. It's not like there's a huge difference. Adding a piece of text to the
README just to alienate people isn't wise; it just makes the author look like
a tool, ripe for criticism.

------
aaaaaaaaaab
Ah, an Electron app... :)

Something tells me it doesn't support gapless playback. (I might be wrong tho)

