
Open source music search/play app for all OSes - yamalight
http://mielophone.github.com/
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nopassrecover
Cool in principle, but the usability and latency of the app are ruining it for
me at the moment. Still I'm sure these will be fixed. Would be good to get
some recommendations in there somehow too.

For reference, just annoying me at the moment are 1) menus on side are barely
noticeable, 2) menu on side is hard to click, 3) when trying to click menu I
end up clicking outside the app more times than not due to latency on show 4)
not obvious how to navigate app, 5) whenever I click anything it may or may
not happen, and may happen 30 seconds later while I'm doing something else, 6)
I'm not sure if the Download button is working, nor where it is downloading to
if it does. On the plus side, when I did eventually get a song to load it
played the correct song so could be a cool YouTube alternative.

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yamalight
Thanks for your feedback :) 1-4. ok, that seems to be the biggest problem,
everyone is not happy with it >_> 5\. hm. can you provide more precise
example? may be even create an issue in github? 6\. it's not implemented yet,
sorry. will be enabled in next update :)

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nopassrecover
1-4, I'd suggest just leaving the left menu up all the time for now as a
stopgap until you can play around with some new ideas (e.g. I might then start
with a smaller menu / expanding to bigger on hover, rather than just a hint of
purple). The UI looks pretty cool, but it has to be usable. I think there's a
search box too, as it popped up now and then. I'd try making that always
visible for a bit and see what people think.

I think 5 is perhaps a latency issue, and because there's no feedback when
things are happening it seems non-responsive For instance, if it's buffering a
song ready for playing, a progress bar or even a spinning circle would be
nice, rather than me clicking Play a few times because I'm not sure what's
happening. Likewise, when I click a song to open up the "Play or Download"
right menu, nothing tends to happen a lot of the time, and I'm not sure if it
has ignored my clicks, or whether it's just doing it's thing and catching up
(I suspect the latter). Ideally, if you can open up the right menu (the Play
or Download one) as soon as I click a song, even if you then have to do
loading stuff before play works it would seem more responsive. Just remember
the user needs feedback to know something is happening.

Regarding download button, perhaps "grey it out" for now, and put a "coming
soon" near it or something?

Anyway, these are nitpicks that are easily fixed, I think the app itself is a
pretty awesome effort.

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yamalight
okay, noted. thanks a lot for this piece of feedback :)

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jwingy
Awesome app. I've been thinking of an app like this in the back of mind for a
while. Since I'm usually too cheap to buy music, I often hit youtube to listen
to specific songs, but it's always a bit of a pain to listen to music that
way. This should make things much easier :)

<Edit> After playing with it for a little bit, I've got some suggestions:

\- Not the most intuitive interface...took me a little bit to figure out where
some things are.

\- Since the songs are mostly streams from various sources, things can be
slow...could use some sort of feedback when a user has activated an event or
clicked a button

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm finding Youtube great for listening to music. It has a bunch of features I
never used for video, that I do now for audio like playlists.

When active listening I love the serendipity of listening to a song and having
10 semi-random choices to jump to, plus the ability to read the comments and
find out about covers or other versions or other artists to check out,
definitely the best place to find new music even if it's not ideal for syncing
with iPods.

I've also got it hooked up to XBMC so that I can route the playlists through
my home theatre setup.

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harph
Very nice app, tried it out on Kubuntu 11.04 without problems. The streams run
pretty fast for me, so that's a plus.

Hopefully you'll work a bit on the user interface, as others have mentioned.
Good luck!

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yamalight
thanks for feedback. will do my best :)

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guard-of-terra
The author seems to be Russian; I don't understand why it doesn't dip into
vk.com music database. It is vast, and combined with well-groomed metadata
databases from other services, it would rock.

There are apps which do - for example, "last.fm free music player"

<http://www.lastfm.ru/group/Last.fm+free+music+player+users>

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chrischen
Or even YouTube or grooveshark.

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yamalight
youtube support will be added in v0.2.0, and grooveshark guys said I should
come to them again when I have more users

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listic
How critical is the Adobe AIR technology to the functioning of this app?

I'm not sure if it is a good thing to rely on since it seems to be laggy and
Linux support was discontinued:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime#cite_n...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime#cite_note-0)

~~~
yamalight
it's done completely using actionscript 3 and adobe flex. if you remove all
stuff like file downloads you can run it in browser, but for it to work as a
desktop app air is a must.

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moondowner
Nice effort, and working w/o problems on Linux!

Two comments/suggestions 1) Not very intuitive interface - on aspect of
navigation, can't figure out how to get back from screen to screen. 2) Maybe
adding support for playing songs from filesystem as well will be good.

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yamalight
2\. that's a nice idea, thanks :)

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chrischen
Does the fact that it's open source make it harder to shut down? Seeqpod was
also an mp3 search engine like this but it was shut down.

Echonest also provides an mp3 search via its api.

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yamalight
I hope so. I mean, app itself only searches the web for public sources. I
assume you cannot really call this piracy or pirate software since it doesn't
hacks anything :)

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fidrelity
i like the look of your tool.

my top feature request: playlists! and i think you need to increase feedback
for the user. e.g. when i click 'play all' i see nothing that tells me that
the click worked and that it will begin playing in a few seconds.

keep it going!

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yamalight
thanks! already was told several times about more feedback, will try to
improve this :)

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digitalgravy
What sources does the app use? Plugins are all compiled SWFs :(

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yamalight
there's sources for plugins on github here: <https://github.com/mielophone/>
and here: <https://github.com/mielofan/>

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suivix
Seems nice but would I want to use this and Spotify?

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yamalight
in some countries spotify doesn't work

