>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.
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.
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.
Thanks. I'm a designer by trade(madebyargon.com) so good user experience is a very important factor for me. I'm glad you think YouFM is relatively bug-free but I think there's still a lot of UI inconsistencies and bugs in YouFM. But I'll be working on it and hopefully improving it. I also hope to improve the overall speed of the site.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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/ :)
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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.
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)
Google plans to introduce a music subscription service soon, and it might be tied to Youtube. If they are doing anything similar to this, they will probably find a way to shut it down. I hope they don't though.
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.
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.
