

Show HN: Playlistful – Collaborative playlists for parties - GotAnyMegadeth
http://playlistful.com/about

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GotAnyMegadeth
Hello, I made Playlistful because I like hosting parties where everyone gets
to contribute to the music, but hated people skipping each others songs,
accidentally deleting the whole playlist, and queuing up 3000 songs so that no
one else gets a turn.

This is the first web app I have ever made, and my first time using any of the
languages/tools involved.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks a lot

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mattchamb
At the risk of suggesting anything Microsoft on HN, have a look at the Xbox
music API. It has search functionality as well as streaming (for people with a
music pass). It will also give you some artwork to display as the song is
running. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dn546671.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dn546671.aspx)

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
Thanks for suggesting it, I hadn't even heard of it! I'll take a look. It
would certainly make sense to use more than one source for the music so that
the whole thing doesn't go down when YouTube change their mind on who can use
what.

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JoshTriplett
Very nice!

Could you add host-side configuration of an upper limit on video length, after
which the remainder is automatically skipped? That would handle the case where
someone (accidentally or otherwise) chooses an excessively long video (for
instance, a version looped for several hours), to avoid the host having to
manually skip it.

Related to that, you might consider letting the host designate a privileged
client, so that the person running the party can hook that up to their phone
to control skips and similar, without going directly to the party machine
hooked up to the big screen and sound system. You might also offer options for
consensus skips: "if more than N people want to skip a song...".

I like that if you fullscreen the video, it stays that way when a new video
comes up; that makes this useful for more than just music. (Please do keep
that working if you add non-YouTube support.) However, you might consider
making a fullscreenable container that puts the video at almost-fullscreen,
but still shows Playlistful and the party ID.

It looks like on the Playlist screen you replace the username with "You", even
as a substring of the user's name: I tried it out with users "Foo", "Not Foo",
and "Random", and when "Not Foo"'s song came up, Foo's Playlist screen showed
it as "Chosen by Not You".

You might consider letting people add a YouTube playlist, or for that matter
let users with a YouTube account choose from their favorited/liked/etc videos.

~~~
johnmurch
Why couldn't you just have a skip button with a limit (e.g. 4 skips needed
until song is skipped) then let anyone click skip or have it be a bit more
smarter and everyone gets 1 free skip for each X minutes and then if they want
more - they can pay (like piano bar) where that $ could go towards
drinks/food. Okay, maybe over thinking, but at least let others choose to skip
if 4+ people choose that. Just a though - pretty slick - I wonder what other
cool things this concept could work for.

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JoshTriplett
With many people around, someone might have to wait a while to have a
video/song come up; it shouldn't be possible for a single person (other than
the host) to skip a song. On the other hand, if a significant fraction of the
people connected to the party want to skip something, skip it; if it was
skipped close to the beginning of the video, bump that person's next request
higher in the queue as a replacement.

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mcintyre1994
This is really nice, congrats!

Since it's YouTube would you consider chromecast support from the host
machine? I'm honestly not sure exactly how it works but it could be neat to
have the videos on the TV and that's quite often where the best sound system
is.

Also have you considered letting people set the party url? Taking advantage of
the fact most could probably come up with a reasonably unique and memorable
name and the fact you only need to keep them around for a few hrs or a day -
it could make the connection easier.

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GotAnyMegadeth
Thanks! I haven't looked into Chromecast yet, but I agree it would be a good
idea.

Don't tell anyone, but at the moment you can pick the party URL by changing
the id parameter in the URL after clicking start party... Though it is
definitely something I'm considering adding official support for.

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mru2
Nice! I like how your homepage is clutter-free. The music starting as soon as
a track is added is also a nice touch.

How do you "fairly" pick between queued songs? Do you rotate through every
user one song at a time, or is there a scoring system involved?

I made something similar, but with the music coming from deezer instead of
youtube, if you want to check it out : [http://poll.dance](http://poll.dance)

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
Thanks! At the moment it randomly selects a user with one or more songs queued
up, and then picks their top song. I think that I will refine this though as
sometimes someone gets picked 6 times in a row and everyone complains.
Especially if that someone is me, it looks suspicious...

Cool, I'll check that out. How long ago did you release it? I've been looking
for something like this for ages.

~~~
mru2
Maybe you could order the users by how long they waited to have one track
played. This way, everyone has the guarantee to be able to play at least one
track.

And thanks! It's not released officially yet, I'm still hacking on it on
weekends, and beta testing it in parties. I may post it on hacker news when
the spotify integration is ready

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ealize
Nice. Suggestion: A QR Code for the party link would be really helpful.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
Thanks! That's a really interesting suggestion that I hadn't thought of...
Maybe make it have a printable option of something so you can stick it around
your house before the party starts.

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anmonteiro90
This really solves a problem I'm sure everyone has at house parties.
Congratulations, you make me feel ashamed I didn't come up with this first :)
Good luck

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amarcus
It would be good if it faded into the next song rather than have the 1-2 sec
delay while it switches to the next video.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
I think that is something where my music taste has directed how it works. I
would never dream of fading a metal or classic piece of music into another
one, but I bet that it would be great for other genres of music. Perhaps I
could include an option when the party is started up. I know that there are
programs specifically to do this kind of thing aren't there? Anyone know of
any good examples? I suspect you'd need to match the beats up somehow.

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lukifer
Cool idea! The other strong use case I see is an office with shared background
music.

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basch
[http://juk.io/](http://juk.io/) is another version of this. very slick

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lavingiasa
This reminds me of the chromecast app qca.st that does a very similar thing
using GPMAA

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ahulak
This post reminded me how much I miss Turntable.fm :(

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aeontech
there's [http://plug.dj/](http://plug.dj/) \- not a bad alternative, though I
miss being able to upload my own tracks to turntable.

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dang
This post was penalized by the voting ring detector, but we turned that off
because we want to see original work on HN and because there's a genuine
discussion here.

All: please don't try to promote your submissions to HN by getting friends to
upvote them. If friends are trying to do you a favor, try to call them off.
The HN software identifies most of this as voting ring activity and penalizes
the story.

~~~
mkdir_home
I'm very interested to know how the voting ring detector works. I assume you
use semi-supervised learning algorithms?

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sleepychu
My guess is that it detects natural access to the post by browsing new/top
etc. versus direct link access followed by a vote and disconnect plus perhaps
some vote distribution detection (i.e. a cluster of direct access votes
indicates a ring)

I imagine full disclosure would simply encourage more sophisticated voting
rings :P

