
Show HN: YouFM - A new way to listen to music on Youtube  - ashraful
http://www.youfm.org
======
ashraful
A little background: <http://ashraful.me/?p=7>

~~~
Daiz
>YouFM is a simple music streaming site that searches Spotify for the data and
then plays the music video from Youtube.

No wonder it couldn't find anything for most of the artists I tried, then,
despite a whole lot of their stuff being on YouTube... And for the one it did,
the song matching seemed incredibly spotty (try searching for Huoratron and
playing the song A699F, for example).

Some other feedback: You should probably add some tooltips (I assume the
circling arrow on the far right of the bottom bar is for "repeat" but it'd be
nice to have a tooltip confirm the assumption), and for some reason the volume
slider seems pretty unresponsive - you need to hit it in a rather exact spot
to set the volume automatically to a specific level.

~~~
ashraful
Actually in the next update, I'll add direct results from youtube for searches
that doesn't return anything from Spotify. I just have to figure out how to
get the song metadata in a meaningful way for those.

~~~
rwar
Have you taken a look at <http://www.discogs.com/developers/> ?

~~~
suoloordi
also last.fm: <http://www.last.fm/api> and musicbrainz:
[http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Versi...](http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2/Search)

------
jack-r-abbit
Good stuff. I'm giving it a try. I like to listen to a wide variety of music
and like to give things a good number of listens before I part with my money.
I like the idea of sourcing from YouTube as it takes all the guess work out of
what is legal and what isn't (as least from a listener point of view) so I can
focus on listening. So thanks for building this.

The Playlist seems a bit dodgy. There is no indicator that the item was added.
After I added something (and didn't get confirmation) I went to the playlist
to see if it added... but it said it was empty. So I went back and added it
again. Again, no indicator and still showed as empty. So I went back and added
a different song. And now the playlist has 2 items (the first one I tried to
add twice and the second one). So I removed one item... and now the playlist
says it is empty again. I added another song and now it says two again. So it
seems there is something wrong with the count to determine if a playlist is
empty or not. And without the indicator that something was added, I was quite
confused.

I think it would be cool if you could incorporate some way to link to
somewhere to buy songs/albums. Not sure how others feel about that. But if I
was going to buy something, I'd gladly click through an affiliate link to
support the site.

~~~
ashraful
Yea, there are some quirks with the UI particularly the BackboneJS bits. I'll
be fixing them soon.

I'm holding off on the monetization stuff (buy songs) until I can work out all
the bugs.

------
zavulon
Doesn't work if you type something with a space in it. For example, typing
"Municipal Waste" gives you an error page, and the URL looks like this:

<http://www.youfm.org/#/search/municipal> waste

~~~
ashraful
It does work actually. Although when you share the link the space messes up
the hyperlink, I should probably turn spaces into "+"s.

If you're getting an error that says "Oops something went wrong", thats
something that pops up now and again (Can't figure out why). Refresh the page
and it should work.

~~~
epa
Hello,

Got the "oops somethign went wrong" error on my first search.

Searched for "Hoodie Allen", and did not work. When I added underscores in the
link, it worked. Searched again from the home page with the same term and it
worked..

------
udfalkso
Well done! I think I'll use this. A few suggestions:

\- You should add custom page titles for each album, search result, etc. It's
hard to figure out what's what in the Back menu in my browser because they're
all the same.

\- Would be nice to have a way to drag multiple songs, or an entire album into
a playlist.

\- When dragging, droppable zones (playlists) should highlight, and when
hovering over them the highlight should get even stronger so I know it's ready
to be dropped.

\- History doesn't seem to work.

~~~
ashraful
Good suggestions, I'll definitely make these improvements. I also need to make
some improvements to the UI (didn't get a chance to test it properly outside
chrome on osx, seems to have a lot of annoyances on other browsers and
platforms)

Ctrl click or Cmd click should let you select multiple songs that you can then
drag onto playlists.

~~~
udfalkso
Cool, thanks. I guess I tried to use shift. Might also be nice to let me drag
an album name and include all the songs if I do so.

------
pthulin2
Looks nice! Looks a lot like Youtify though, which is open source and
welcoming contributors.

<http://www.youtify.com/>

~~~
itsuart
Awesome site, thanks!

------
Jonovono
Cool. I made something similar awhile back and been meaning to update it. It
allows you to search by artists and then see all of their albums and you can
easily add an entire album to a playlist.

Click "Album/Artist" search. Or youtube search to search like you normally
would on Youtube.

<http://tunesicles.com>

------
dools
"Oops something went wrong!"

If anyone is seeing then same error and wants to make some quick youtube
playlists while waiting for youfm.org to overcome the "HN spike" you could
check out my little thing at <http://www.cueyoutube.com/> :)

------
mrboombastic
I started working for a company late last year involved with providing an
online radio experience. We tackle the same problem of providing a seamless
music listening experience.

<http://www.earbits.com>

------
stuaxo
Looks alright, a bit off putting the picture of Bonno at the start, but heh
ho.

------
egze
Nice UI. Please fix the issue when a song is blocked by copyright holders. In
Germany it happens a lot and then a player just keeps retrying to play a song.

------
minikomi
Here's a similar rough thing I made but it uses last fm data :
<http://fmix.heroku.com>

------
OliverLassen
I have made something similar, but not as finish..
:D<http://songbird.apphb.com>

------
ntaylor
You have a competitor, in case you hadn't already noticed:
<http://www.tubalr.com>.

~~~
ashraful
Yes. Youfm was actually (partly) inspired by Tubalr back when it was first
launched (almost 3 years ago I think).

~~~
cjstewart88
Glad to have inspired you :). Tubalr was launched Sept 12, 2010. Just curious,
how are you able to embed vevo videos?

------
kall
There's a german music radio station by that name. If you get popular with
this you should check what kind of trademarks they have.

------
jaredsohn
YouFM v1: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404007>

~~~
khet
Missed it the first time, I am almost glad it was reposted.

~~~
ashraful
More info: <http://ashraful.me/?p=7>

------
jepper
Nice site, one of the nicest looking youtube streaming sites. Good clean UI.

You need a favicon though, was hard tot find it amongst all my tabs.

------
gnaz
Its a nice project but I was wondering if there's any larger objective to this
than just creating this for the sake of it

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chuhnk
It doesn't like Beethoven apparently and says "oops something went wrong",
same goes for Moonlight Sonata.

~~~
ashraful
That error comes up randomly (internal server error). Not sure why it happens
or how to prevent it.

I ran a search for "Moonlight Sonata" and got results just fine:
<http://www.youfm.org/#/search/Moonlight> Sonata

------
ubojan
Simple and responsive UI, I like this site. Please add favicon for easier
bookmark navigation.

------
Kiro
How do you solve authentication considering it's run against a backend on a
different domain?

~~~
ashraful
Its not on a different domain. Everything's on youfm.org which is hosted on
heroku.

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quasque
Very nicely done. Feature suggestion: importing playlists from other services,
e.g. Spotify.

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acchow
I don't know what's going on anymore. I can't get it to NOT play 2 songs
simultaneously.

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waxy
It's nice, but how is this different than from any other yt player out there?

~~~
ashraful
The interface is better for listening to music (I hope). Also, the search is
run on Spotify so you only get music results.

~~~
lucaspiller
Good idea using Spotify to get metadata. I did something similar a few years
ago, mine was a bit different in that instead of searching for a specific
artist you get different channels you can watch, similar to MTV. One of the
issues I had then was that you don't just get the official videos in results
for popular songs [0], how do you solve that?

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PJ+%26+Duncan+Le...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PJ+%26+Duncan+Lets+Get+Ready+To+Rhumble)

~~~
ashraful
I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns.

For more obscure artists/songs or for those with generic names, YouFM might
play the wrong video if Youtube returns the wrong result. I'm not sure if
there's any way to fix it except crowd-sourced curation.

~~~
jdonahue
> I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns.

I had thought of a similar idea to what this website does (using song metadata
from a cleaned source like Spotify and then play the song through YouTube).

The way I'd imagined doing the song to YouTube mapping was through
crowdsourcing - you could rank the YouTube results for each song based on
number of listens and votes on your website. By default you would play the top
ranked video for a song, but allow users to see alternate video links
(probably hidden behind menus) and play those instead if they want (or if they
have accounts, you could allow users to individually mark a video as being
their preference for a particular song, etc.), probably also incorporating
these plays into your ranking. You could also use crowdsourcing for further
metadata about the video - e.g., some music videos have long intros/outros
that you wouldn't necessarily want to hear when you're just listening to
music, so you could allow people to submit and vote on start/end times for the
'song' part of the music video.

Anyway, I really like the interface! It's much cleaner than any other attempt
at this I've seen.

Edit: I missed your mention of crowdsourcing at the end of your post, whoops -
sounds like you've probably already thought of most/all the ideas in this post
:)

~~~
ashraful
Yes, I did consider making the exact process you described for videos. Held
off on it to launch earlier. Maybe in the next version I'll finally add this.

I'm primarily a designer (just learning to code php and ruby) so I'm happy
that you liked the interface.

------
angryasian
in all honesty its similar to grooveshark. There are so many of these types of
sites and my issue is just that I don't want to keep searching and creating
playlists.

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darkchasma
I feel this will be shutdown before the end of the week.

~~~
ashraful
No reason for it to be shutdown. All music videos are from Youtube (provided
legally by the original artists, their labels or Vevo) and I followed
Youtube's requirement of not hiding the video player when playing songs (which
a lot of similar sites do, and is against Youtube's TOS)

~~~
yoshyosh
Is this the smallest allowable size you can make the videos legally?

~~~
ashraful
200px by 200px is the smallest allowed.

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glitch273
Beautiful site :) Really well done on the UI/UX side.

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BaconJuice
Are you planning on making a mobile friendly version?

~~~
ashraful
It should work on mobile devices, although a few tweaks in the CSS is needed
to make the UI adapt properly. I'll make those in the coming weeks.

If I find people using the site regularly, I'll create a mobile app for it.

~~~
BaconJuice
I'm sure with this been on front page HN it will gain some traction =P Also
although the site loads find on an iPad..it seems to be very off. Just FYI.

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jole
I really like the idea :) Interface looks great.

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photon_off
Make a turntable.fm for YouTube videos.

~~~
kall
That already exists. It's called <http://plug.dj>

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hanzenlim
how did you manage to remove the ads? and how long did it take to implements ?
BTW impressive project!!

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OGinparadise
I am trying to use it but the "working" image is still spinning. Anyway, what
happens when /if Youtube shuts you down? Google is getting into streaming
music and has Play so they might consider you a competitor.

I am hoping that you have a plan B and didn't spend all your time and savings
in this.

~~~
kreutz
Buzzkill

