
Show HN: Google Music for Mac - kbhomes
http://kbhomes.github.io/google-music-mac
======
camus2
Google Music , Google play logo , a project ready from a DMCA takedown ...
dont be stupid, remove all the google trademark stuff or your project wont
live long in github.

~~~
rcthompson
I think you have the DMCA confused with trademark law. It may indeed get taken
down for legal reasons, but I don't see how the DMCA comes into it.

~~~
kcbanner
The image files of the Google logo are copyrighted.

~~~
kbhomes
I can understand how this might be legally contentious, but the only thing it
could be reported for is the name, I would think? The Google Play logo there
is not me embedding it into the app, since it's displaying the webpage itself.
Correct me if I'm wrong?

~~~
caitp
You want to avoid making it look like it's actually "endorsed" by Google, or a
product of Google's, despite interop with one of Google's products. The name
can be an issue here, so you might want to come up with something spiffier and
original, and point out that it works with Google's service elsewhere.

------
johannh
Looks promising! May I ask why you forked from the original
([https://github.com/JamesFator/GoogleMusicMac](https://github.com/JamesFator/GoogleMusicMac))?
Looking at the commit history it seems to be under active development.

~~~
kbhomes
Thanks! When I initially forked the repository, I hadn't planned on including
features like the theme or the notifications, but once I realized how much I
liked the product and wanted to continue to develop it, I figured I should ask
the original creator for permission to keep the fork independent and he
agreed. Very generous of him!

~~~
mtchavez
Outside of implementing the notifications this offers nothing for me that the
original one, from James Fator, doesn't already do. I dislike the table
display and the attempt at making the appearance be more Cocoa-esque in favor
of the Google web design. You might also want to think of changing the app
name and icon also as it is misleading.

------
ansimionescu
Thank you so much for this! It's just a Safari wrapper, but it's the first
native solution I've seen. Google is really horsing around with Google Music,
it's sad that I pay them the same amount I would (and did) Rdio and Spotify
and get treated with shitty Flash web players and no native apps.

edit: 15 minutes in – it's not extremely polished but I really love it!
Finally, no more annoying music.google.com Chrome tab.

~~~
cloverich
> no native apps.

To be fair, no native _desktop_ apps. Their android App is great - by my
experience much better than Spotify's. And while I do prefer a desktop app to
a browser app, their browser app is more feature complete than Spotify's
desktop App.

~~~
ansimionescu
The iOS one is, too, a poor web wrapper _yucks_. For instance, you can't
listen to your offline albums without Internet, because each time the app
starts it "loads the library", which is utterly frustrating and redundant.

------
dade_
Works well and looks great. It would better meet my needs with Chromecast
support, but I don't see a way to do this on MacOS without having embedded the
Chrome browser instead of Safari:
[https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/downloads](https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/downloads)
"The Google Cast SDK and API libraries support the development of Android,
iOS, and Chrome sender applications"

AirPlay audio streaming would also work for me, such as the way iTunes works,
but I assume that Apple keeps that locked down as well.

~~~
girvo
Iirc, AirPlay would actually be possible. Would be fiddly, but possible. I
have a plugin that lets me send any video in a web page to my Apple TV, and
that's just a safari plugin (so only JavaScript basically) -- considering this
is just a webview with wicked styling, I think it might be doable. I'm gonna
take a look myself actually...

------
benburton
I use Google Music extensively from within a Fluid wrapper, and the key thing
this doesn't seem to do that that solution does is keep music playing and
background the app when the window is closed.

Other than that, this is fantastic!

~~~
andrewpi
Agreed, generally closing the window shouldn't terminate the app on OS X. So
far that's the only negative I can find, otherwise I love the app!

------
rch
Looks like iTunes, which happens to be a product that I truly dislike. I'd
rather see some differentiating features indicated front and center, and not a
derivative-seeming screenshot.

------
cespare
If you just want to control Google Music via native keyboard shortcuts (and
you're using Chrome), I made this a while ago:

[https://github.com/cespare/playctrl](https://github.com/cespare/playctrl)

I use it on Linux and OS X.

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phaer
IANAL, but I guess you might want to add a big "this product is not affiliated
with google" disclaimer on your page?

~~~
threeseed
He's using the logo, trademark and strongly implying that this is either (a)
created by Google or (b) sanctioned by Google.

The disclaimer is a waste of time. The guy is acting like an idiot and can
expect a cease and desist pretty swiftly.

~~~
schrodinger
"Acting like an idiot" for building a nice app ass a free open source project
and sharing it? Come on, let's be constructive here! That wasn't necessary!

------
mahyarm
Now I want an extension to integrate the media keys for firefox, like this
extension for chrome:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/swayfm-unified-
mus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/swayfm-unified-music-
medi/icckhjgjjompfgoiidainoapgjepncej?hl=en-US)

Notifications would be nice too.

------
lallysingh
Looks beautiful. They say that they're not affiliated with Google a few times.
I hope that if they get pinged by Google, it's something close to the Jack
Daniels letter[1].

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2012/07/26/the-worlds-
nic...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2012/07/26/the-worlds-nicest-cease-
and-desist-letter-ever-goes-viral-sells-books/)

EDIT: Actually, isn't it terrible that this is the first thing that we think
of? This is distinctly _not_ a problem in the open source world. It doesn't
help Google, either. Ugh.

------
mikebracco
For those who have been looking for a native app to use hotkeys check out
Alfred ([http://www.alfredapp.com](http://www.alfredapp.com)). With Alfred you
can use the workflow feature to control Play Music via hotkeys (which you can
use no matter what tab is active or if Chrome is the active app). I blogged
about this a while back: [http://mikebracco.com/blog/control-google-play-
music-with-ho...](http://mikebracco.com/blog/control-google-play-music-with-
hotkeys-using-alfred)

------
turing
Great work. It looks really slick, and from the comments so far it appears
many people are excited to have a native app. That said, I'd be interested to
here _why_ exactly people want a native app. The web app already has
notifications and has suited me just fine, so I'd be interested to hear what
others find useful about a native app.

~~~
aroch
I don't use Chrome as my main browser and Google Music experience sucks in FF
(I wonder why....) and isn't even that great it Chrome itself. Maybe its
because I have all 20K song slots used across 3000-odd artists but its still
annoying. So I keep a chrome instance open just for GMusic. You can't hide the
application if you want to use notifications, if you do hide it the
notifications trigger foregrounding. Also, native notifications are always a
plus in my mind.

I would like to see an _actual_ native application that caches songlist /
artist and doesn't run like shit. But I'll take what I can, I guess. On the
otherhand, the Android experience is phenomenal.

~~~
Shebanator
Why do you think the experience sucks in FF?

------
shazow
Very cool, I've been looking for something like this. I wish I could use an
Application-specific Password rather than my full Google password + OTP.

But I don't suppose that would be feasible with a Safari wrapper.

Also when I first loaded it, it complained about the lack of Flash, but
navigating around and playing music worked just fine.

~~~
vegardx
Just curious, why would you want Application-specific passwords? They're far
more insecure and still have access to all your Google services. Application-
specific password would only make sense if Google actually let you limit
access to a certain subset of Google-features.

~~~
Velox
They are not necessarily more insecure? And the great part about them is the
fact that if an app goes rogue then its password can be revoked. Also, while
they can access my data, they can't change data. No one can log in with an
application specific password and steal my account.

~~~
vegardx
They are one less factor needed in order to access an account that has 2FA
enabled, so in that regard, I consider them less secure.

You're right about the part where they cannot hijack your account, but change
data? Sure they can. They can delete all your emails, calendar events,
contacts, images on picasa, the list goes on. It has unrestricted access to
all Google-services associated with your account.

------
otisfunkmeyer
LOVE THIS! I have wanted this for so long! It's such a breath of fresh air to
have a native app like this!

------
fuddle
"The Google Play music player is currently available in select territories."
\- Damn, its not working in Canada. Why isn't this released by Goolge already?
A Google version of iTunes which can synch with an Android device would be a
great addition to OSX/Windows.

------
hardoncollider
Is there any option to disable the vertical expansion of the song rows when
hovering over them? The effect bothers my eyes and makes browsing distracting.

Otherwise, what an awesome execution; I've been looking forward to an app like
this for a while, just surprised Google wasn't the one to produce it.

A+

------
thrownaway2424
How do you actually launch this on Mavericks? My Mac just complains that the
App isn't signed.

~~~
chm
Have you tried Right-click -> Open?

~~~
mikehearn
This isn't snarky, it's the right answer! Mavericks prevents opening unsigned
apps when you double-click, but Right-Click -> Open will launch a pop-up
asking "Are you sure you want to open this?", allowing you to bypass the
protection. It's a real thing.

~~~
chm
I wasn't being snarky, thanks for making it clear!

------
amaks
What an awesome app! Few things I missed: 1\. Chromecast support. 2\.
Navigation back/forward?

------
h-go
No one seems to have pointed out the already native Mac app: G-ear
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/g-ear-
player/id513751032?mt=...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/g-ear-
player/id513751032?mt=12)

------
captn3m0
I converted the stylesheet to a userstyle[0] so it can be used in any browser
as well.

[0]: [http://userstyles.org/styles/98492/google-music-mac-
theme](http://userstyles.org/styles/98492/google-music-mac-theme)

------
vosper
There's also G-Ear player, available on the app store. It works very well,
though it's not as good at search as the web app is - so sometimes it's easier
to add music to your library using the web app.

~~~
terinjokes
Also a G-Ear user. Developer is extremely responsive, and supports enough of
All Access to fit my needs.

------
Kudos
If all you want is media keys support, Bearded Spice does the job. It supports
a bunch more web apps too, like Youtube and spotify.

[http://beardedspice.com/](http://beardedspice.com/)

------
k-mcgrady
Works great and could get me using Google Music again. I wish Google would
realise that for some things desktop apps are better than the browser
currently and they should support that.

------
pedrocr
Is there a good self-hosted Google Music like solution? I already have my
music on my servers, and would love to be able to just point Linux/Android/iOS
clients to it.

~~~
myko
Subsonic is good:
[http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp](http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp)

Honestly though I'd just use Google Music.

~~~
pedrocr
Using Google Music is probably the least effort way of going about it. I need
to figure out if there's a simple way to batch import from Linux.

------
seivan
I've seen [http://audiobox.fm](http://audiobox.fm) if you meed more than just
Google Music as a storage.

------
revisionzero
Wow, this is exactly what I wanted a few months back when I was using Google
Music extensively. This may get me to re-subscribe. Great job!

------
sudomal
One thing that stuck me about Google Music is its lack of built-in support for
last.fm. Was kind of hoping this had it.

~~~
kbhomes
Does Last.fm support mean just scrobbling, or are there other features you
might like? I'm not a Last.fm user but I'd be willing to take a look into
including support down the road!

~~~
Wheen
For me personally, just scrobbling.

At this point, that's the only thing stopping me from using it. Looks great,
but I'm a stat freak and I need my scrobbling.

~~~
rza
Plug -- I maintain a Chrome extension that does exactly that:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-
lastfm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-lastfm-
scrobb/llpepekkleeoeiloijhcafgpjdnhhcbl)

------
michaelghayes
there is somehting similar that I have been using on windows for a while. I
really love being able to use media keys
[http://vhanla.deviantart.com/art/Google-Music-Desktop-
Player...](http://vhanla.deviantart.com/art/Google-Music-Desktop-
Player-413683928)

------
Spittal
I would love to see an out of browser version of Hangouts, but this is
definitely nice to have.

~~~
calebegg
The Hangouts Chrome extension isn't out of browser, but it's pretty close, and
I like it a lot.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahada...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahadagoaajjgafhacjanaoiihapd?hl=en)

It has its own Gmail-style chat UI at the bottom of the screen.

~~~
terinjokes
And it gets completely confused if the Google Account Chrome is logged into is
different than the primary account you're logged into on the web.

Or at least that's my experience with it so far.

------
ryandetzel
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

------
auvi
If it is not related to Google then why they are using Google all over the
places?

------
arcticf0x
Does it sync music from Mac to an android phone over a local wireless network?

~~~
Lexarius
It's just an interface to Google Play Music, which already makes your music
available on your Android.

------
pacemkr
Chromecast support would be cool, not sure if this is possible though.

------
jdalgetty
Looks great. Would love a way to build more complex playlists!

------
joeblau
Now all I need is a Google Music Spotify Library importer.

------
Khabu
This is what I needed! Waiting for Chromecast support...

------
meerita
I'm testing it right now and it looks pretty nice.

------
wak47
yaaaa this is like rly good. dwn w/ the p4triarchy.. fuck capitalism fuck
stephen king (his books are rly skaree)

------
sebastianavina
What I really want is Google Drive for Linux

