

Lightweight HTML5 Grooveshark Player - vinnyglennon
http://html5.grooveshark.com

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ashray
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
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
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. :)

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

~~~
eLobato
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
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.

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dsirijus
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!

~~~
imissmyjuno
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.

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wslh
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
if do not mind Ruby. I am sure you can use
[https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark](https://github.com/sosedoff/grooveshark)
and wget.

~~~
wslh
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.

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vinnyglennon
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
remora seems to be outdated

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aakashbarot
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.

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Mozai
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)

~~~
fastest963
Looks like its trying to run the site in strict JS mode. Do you have any
extensions that might be forcing this?

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notregistering
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.

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code_duck
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
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.

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um304
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
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.

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

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

~~~
kreddor
It's the same from Denmark. I guess most EU countries are cut off from
Grooveshark these days.

~~~
MartinodF
Surprisingly, it works fine here in Italy too.

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

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

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

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vially
Where is the volume button?

~~~
fastest963
I think the intention is that you change the volume on your phone.

~~~
vially
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.

