
Show HN: YouFM - A new way to listen to music on Youtube - ashraful
http://www.youfm.org/
======
cjstewart88
Neat, I made <http://www.tubalr.com> about 2 years ago and have been working
on it every since. It made its way onto Mashable, Techcrunch, and several
other blogs this past Dec/Jan.

Something to keep in mind, eventually YouTube will start blocking certain
videos from being played on your site. This took a while and mainly started
happening when traffic picked up. Theres no good way to pickout blocked
videos, heres a function I use to weed through some of the blocked videos:
[https://github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr/blob/master/app/assets...](https://github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/main.js#L43)

Also, all of Tubalr's codes in github if you're interested:
<http://www.github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr>

Good Luck!

~~~
ashraful
Has it really been two years? Tubalr was actually the inspiration for this. I
really loved it, particularly the old UI (the new ones great too).

Thanks for the link to the js to avoid blocked youtube vids. It'll definitely
be a lot of help.

~~~
cjstewart88
Yup, Sept 12, 2010 will be the 2 year mark o_O

No prob, shoot me an email cjstewart88@gmail.com if you need anything.

------
p4bl0
This is a service I would really like. There's also youtify[1], but neither
work for me (with youtify Soundcloud works but not YouTube). The music simply
never starts.

That's too bad because such a "music mode" is something I would love to see on
YouTube. It's not that I constantly listen to music on YouTube, that would be
a waste of bandwidth, but I use YouTube almost exclusively as a music/artist
discovery platform, then I download the musics I like once and for all. But I
would still appreciate a lot to be able to actually have a _working_
playlist/queue feature on YouTube, and also to be able to desactivate the
video display (and download) to only keep the sound.

[1] <http://www.youtify.com/>

EDIT: I guess the best service of this type I've seen yet is <http://roll.io/>
(which works for me on top of that). I was discussed on HN here:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665090>

~~~
ashraful
Hiding the video and letting users download the music or the video is against
Youtube's TOS.

~~~
p4bl0
It's too bad that hiding the video is against YouTube's TOS. Most of the time
the video is a single static image anyway.

About your second point, I didn't ask for "letting users download the music or
the video", when I said that I download the music it can be from many sources,
most of the time .zip or .rar files that the artists put on mediafire or some
services like this.

~~~
jjwiseman
But if you hide the video, YouTube has no way to show the ads it wants to show
you.

~~~
p4bl0
Ah you're right. I didn't realize that because I'm using AdBlock+ so I don't
see ads.

------
cwp
Love the idea! I mainly use YouTube to find interesting music, and this would
(will?) make that easier.

The interface seems sketchy though. Sometimes clicking on a song in the
results list doesn't do anything. Other times there's a little flash, but it
doesn't switch to playing that song. Sometimes it selects the song and the
video appears to load, but it doesn't actually start playing. In general, the
UI is frustrating because it _looks_ clean and polished, but a gesture has the
desired effect only about 75% of the time.

Another issue I found is that sometimes I get what seems to be the wrong
video—it's not the song listed, and appears to be completely unrelated.
Several times I got a video of somebody narrating a Dickens novel, and once an
Asian game show of some kind. It could be wrong metadata on the YouTube side,
but it happened often enough that I doubt it.

If you sort out these issues, this could be awesome.

~~~
ashraful
The video not playing properly is an issue with the Youtube Chromeless player
I used. I probably messed up the javascript somehow. I'll have it fixed when I
implement the new UI.

The wrong video issue is simply the result of the first video result from
youtube being wrongly tagged. I can't really do anything about it.

~~~
dpacmittal
For the wrong video, maybe you can see the likes to dislike ratio? That would
filter out lot of bad music too but I guess that's not what you want.

Another way is to use some API to look for the song title and duration, and
match it with the duration of youtube video with +-10 seconds.

------
rane
Like the idea of having a Spotify-like UI for the vast amount of music on
Youtube.

Not so much like the fact that it's pretty much Spotify's interface copied to
the smallest detail.

~~~
bbrian
I've never seen Spotify and thought it was just like iTunes, but with the
controls at the bottom.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Pretty much that, and darker shades of grey.

------
nosecreek
You may want to set cursor:pointer in your css. At first I didn't think I
could click on a track to play it because it just showed the default cursor
or, worse, a text-selector cursor.

------
jfc
Brilliant. I listen to music on YouTube alot; this is something I've been
looking for. Easy to use, very clean look.

As soon as you implement the playlist feature, I plan to use it.

One question: What sort of limits do you have on the searching? I have a song
I listen to on YouTube and when I type in the song or artist, it doesn't come
up.

~~~
ashraful
I'm searching iTunes, and then searching youtube with the query "<song title>
\- <artists name>" and then playing the first result.

Sometimes iTunes does not have a song, or the query doesn't return the correct
video.

I'm trying to figure out a way to solve these cases, but haven't come up with
a decent solution yet.

~~~
jfc
Ah, makes sense. The song isn't in iTunes; I recently requested that Apple add
it to their database.

Thanks for the clarification. This site is awesome.

------
nightpool
Really cool. It would be really useful though if I could sort the results, for
example, by album/track number. Seems like a REALLY useful service
nonetheless. Congrats.

EDIT: Also, sometimes people combine multiple songs into one youtube video,
for example <http://youtu.be/J0FawK4G_AY> They seem to show up in your player
as only the first song. This is a lot more complicated then my first
suggestion, but some sort of detection of that (and maybe the possibly _more_
common case of full album videos) would help save some confusion when users
play one song and get another one for free. (BONUS!)

EDIT2: Also, allowing only one video for any given song has issues, for
example, when the first result is a live video or otherwise bad quality. Maybe
just a right click menu that lets you select "See alternate videos"?

~~~
ashraful
Will do the multiple videos thing in the next version.

~~~
nightpool
Cool! Any thoughts on sorting (and possibly adding a bit more metadata to sort
with)?

~~~
ashraful
I'm looking for a good API to use that provides enough metadata. Spotify is
probably a good choice. I'll add the sorting.

------
weego
Confusing UX. I assumed that "top 100 hits" button would give me the top 100
hits for my search term, rather than the search button only being implicit.
The placeholder text is a bad position for instruction (as a rule, not just in
this case) because it's gone when you are in need of the signpost of what to
do.

------
bradcarter
Earlier this year I had developed my own app to listen to music through
YouTube because I was finding myself using YouTube to just listen to songs I
wanted to hear: <http://www.deskamp.com>

With all these new YouTube music apps coming out recently you'd think 2012 is
the year when YouTube reigns supreme for music listening.

------
elteto
I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Youtube has
pretty much all the music that I listen to but it's playlist handling is
borderline unusable. Sometimes I wonder if this is something they do on
purpose so users can not convert Youtube into a personal jukebox. Overall,
great project and kudos to the developer!

------
dysoco
The UX is really good a nice to the eyes, some suggestions:

I searched for "The Who" and almost 90% of the songs weren't by The Who, but
instead song titles with "who". "Bob Dylan" worked fine.

Please, add support for lyrics, that would be simply awesome, and something
Grooveshark is lacking.

Some songs just don't play, not sure why.

The search box is like "broken", I can't select with the mouse.

But it's great!

~~~
ashraful
The search results are sometimes quite weird. For example I can search for
"The Who" now and get all the songs for the artists. I'll change the iTunes
API I use now to Spotify's (or Last.FM's) soon.

Sometimes if you click on a song before the javascript for the music player
loads it doesn't work. I'll do my best to fix it soon.

------
izad
Cool, my last two web apps (<http://beepmunk.com> and <http://choruzz.com>)
are somewhat similar to this.

I love the UI but search results can be improved IMO. Maybe you could utilize
Last.fm API for search?

~~~
ashraful
I use Last.FM to find similar songs. It appears in the right sidebar when you
play any song.

I didn't use Last.FM for the main search, because I couldn't get the album
name directly from the keyword search (the JSON has the title and artist
only). Getting the album name would require querying the API for each search
result which again I tried but takes about 30 sec for the results to appear.

I am considering using Spotify's API though since iTunes gives strange results
sometimes.

------
NathanKP
Very cool! Is there a way to make the video larger if you want to actually
view the video instead of just using the site as a music player?

Perhaps make the area below the video player clickable so that it makes the
video appear in a larger area above the song list.

I am very impressed. Great work Ashraful!

~~~
ashraful
Thanks a lot.

I finally decided to try my hand at coding and this is the result of about 2
weeks of learning. I decided to skip the tutorials and books and jumped
straight into coding. The code's mess but it works and that's great.

I still have a lot to learn, but I do plan on adding three features:

1\. Have new searches not interrupt the current song. 2\. Make the video
resizable. 3\. Add playlists. I actually asked a fellow HN-ers to help out
with this because I don't think I'll be able to handle databases yet.

Glad you liked it.

~~~
samirahmed
I would also recommend hiding the auto-suggest right hand side bar until
everything is loaded and then sliding it into view when ready. I suggest this
for 2 reasons,

1\. I initially clicked the song and the first thing I noticed, before I the
music played was the "this might take 90 seconds dialog" and I was ready to
kill the tab thinking.

2\. Just the fact that it says this might take a long time, is a 'downer', its
better to make that view visible when it is ready so that user doesn't have to
ever know of the fact that you have a process that takes 90 seconds.

~~~
ashraful
Thanks for the tip.

------
sachitgupta
If you use the iPhone, YouTunes lets you do the same thing and create
playlists for your favorite songs: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtunes-
live/id519596476?mt=...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtunes-
live/id519596476?mt=8)

------
drucken
This is cool.

Would be nice to know how popular a particular tune was, i.e. at minimum
Youtube Views and preferably also Likes/Dislikes as columns so you could order
by them.

This is useful for many reasons, e.g. someone recommended a band and you do
not know the easiest way to get into it.

------
navs
Beautiful! I just wish there was a way to disable the video player on the
bottom left, but seeing as how you're using youtube I don't see that being a
possibility. Here's what I immediately love about this: no registration.

------
jebblue
Slick idea (providing it's legal), very nice interface not too dark, good
balance, far better than what my 1992 html mind could dream up.

I tried some Bon Jovi tunes, every one I tried worked but Blaze of Glory, No.
34 on your list, odd.

Nice idea and site!

------
jaredsohn
The search delays get annoying. Have you thought about caching search results
on the server? It seems that would be especially useful if everyone is
listening to the same playlist (as is the case now.)

------
Gigablah
Just a heads up, "view new releases" is misspelt as "view new realeases".

------
kenkam
Nice work ashraful. The interface looks great and is easy to use. Just one
small suggestion for improvement: could you make the mouse cursor to be a
pointer when hovering over the rows of videos?

------
kmfrk
Nicely done, but I would love a separate column for the bitrage/quality of the
music. Most of the music on YouTube is subpar bitrate, and music should
usually be heard in decent quality. :)

------
strictfp
Nice app. But I suspect that this will draw more attention to the possibility
of using YouTube as a music service and therefore increase the risk of these
videos taken off YouTube.

~~~
ashraful
Nowadays almost all the music videos on Youtube are legal. Most of them are
from VEVO's official channel. So the risk of them getting taken off youtube is
quite low.

------
itmag
I want technical details on how it works behind the scenes, plz :)

~~~
ashraful
It takes your search term and queries the iTunes API. Using the search
results, the Youtube API is queried for the search term "<song name> \-
<artist name>". The first video result is taken (it may or may not be the
correct video but usually is).

The video is played using Youtube's Chromeless Player.

Similar results are displayed using Last.FM's API.

------
holyjaw
Solid execution. Looks beautiful, easy to use. Works. Thumbs up.

------
fredsted
Neat idea!

I also made something similar that allows you to easily make playlists from
YouTube videos: <http://instadj.com>

~~~
ashraful
Thats really cool!

Is the code available somewhere? I'd love to take a look at how the search and
the playlist thing works.

------
joering2
very cool and clean design. the only thing you need to change is that horrible
scroller that you left untouched.

this will be perfect for you and will perfectly match the design:
<http://jamesflorentino.github.com/nanoScrollerJS/>

edit: next to "time" column pls put the "# of views" -- this will help me
discover whats popular in my search.

------
craft
I'm not going to discuss technical stuff - I REALLY like top hits
functionality. Well Done!

------
guard-of-terra
I type in cyrillic text: [барто готов] press enter and land on a blank, broken
page.

------
startupkitchen
A friend did something a little similar with this site -
www.ransomnotemusic.com

------
3amOpsGuy
I'm impressed! Works better than i expected. Excellent, thank you for sharing.

------
knowaveragejoe
Awesome idea, would be perfect if I could change the quality settings though.

------
esalman
Nice to see a decent app designed by a fellow Bangladeshi on HN.

------
arrowgunz
I like the Spotify like interface. Good job. Looks neat.

------
maxbernstein
Nice, Ash! Coming with playlist functionality soon.

------
sbi
This reminds me of songza from several years ago.

------
K2h
couldn't get song to play from ipad2. everything else seemed to work, the
search is surprisingly good, and I like the UI.

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csmeder
How about full screen video for party mode?

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zephjc
Needs a favicon ;) Very cool!

------
muratmutlu
This is genius

------
aysar
Decent xcution, but rather slow :/

------
arkitaip
The blatant theft of Spotify's look and feel makes me not want to use this
service.

Screenshot of Spotify <http://i.imgur.com/Um0HM.png>

~~~
rationalbeats
Never used Spotify before, but the screen shot you just posted looks just like
iTunes to me.

~~~
jzukoff
Spotify and iTunes may have similar UI but this site and Spotify are
identical. One can assume Spotify was inspired by the design of iTunes, since
well, lets be honest, its how everybody now pictures their music players. This
site on the other hand had done nothing new at all, its blatant theft of
Spotify's interface.

