Show HN: CloudPlay - A music player for YouTube, SoundCloud, and more

[ammmir]

This is an app I've been working on for the past couple of months (see [1] for some background). A lot of us listen to music while coding or designing and I wanted to build something that makes it as pain-free as possible. I'd love to know what you guys think!

[1] http://amirmalik.net/2012/08/09/cloudplay-a-music-player-for...

[jancborchardt]

Oh nice, this looks slick. Do you know of the functionally similar http://youtify.com?

It’s an open source web app, see http://github.com/youtify/youtify

[ammmir]

Thanks! I can't believe I never noticed Youtify before, it's amazing. I think we'll see a lot of similar functionality to go across different services.

[rabidsnail]

Very cool.

Feature suggestions:

* Add last.fm scrobbling

* Add Grooveshark as a source

* Group tracks into albums (you can get the metadata from musicbrainz and last.fm)

* Use last.fm similar tracks (http://www.last.fm/api/show/track.getSimilar) to automatically queue up the next track

[ammmir]

Last.fm scrobbling has been the #1 request to my surprise! Track grouping is one of the next features, just need to think more about the browse process. The Echo Nest also has a great API for finding similar tracks that I was planning on using, but I'll look at Last.fm, too... thanks!

[jordanlev]

Cool idea! I recently built out a fun side project to scrape local music listings and display youtube videos for each artist (so if you want to go out to live music but don't know any of the bands playing you can quickly listen to music samples): http://stl.showspinner.com

A big problem though is when there are no youtube videos for artists. Your app makes me realize that tapping into the SoundCloud API might be a good addition, though. Any caveats I should be aware of?

[vikramhaer]

Are you planning on keeping this mac-only? Any reason for not making it browser-based? looks great, would love to try it

[ammmir]

It's definitely coming to mobile (probably iOS first) if there's enough interest. There are already a few browser-based players that search multiple services, and I wanted something that doesn't require me to hunt down which browser tab is playing music :)

CloudPlay is basically Spotlight for Music. (Spotlight is the Mac indexing service/always-running-app that lets you quickly find and open files on your system.)

EDIT: To answer your actual question... it's Mac only for now, since I'm an army of one, but other platforms may come depending on demand.

[jc4p]

This is freaking awesome.

Is there any way to make it so the play/stop/previous/next shortcuts you have right now work off the respective keys on the keyboard? I'm really used to hitting the pause button on my computer so and if I do that right now Spotify start playing random music while I'm trying to pause this app.

[ammmir]

Thanks :)

Are you using a custom keyboard? Right now I've only mapped the Apple media keys (using the Option-Shift prefix since iTunes takes over the non-prefixed ones and Mac App Store apps can't trap them, giving Spotify/Rdio the upper hand).

[brady747]

I'm not on a mac but good luck, I've been waiting for someone to do something like this or similar for a while. For those people looking at alternatives I recently found and am enjoying - tomahawk-player.org

[cjstewart88]

Looks nice, I made this(http://www.tubalr.com) about two years ago and have been working on it every since with pretty much the same vision and hopes.

[ramanujam]

It would be great if it let me import my playlists from Youtube. Also, option to close the video pane when the song is playing would be nice. Congrats on the launch. Very nice implementation.

[ammmir]

Thanks! Import of favorites and likes across different services is coming soon! The window itself closes if you click away from it to another app :)

[aw3c2]

It would be ace if you could add jamendo.com and archive.org as sources for free music. Also maybe http://be.electrobel.org/

[ammmir]

Fantastic suggestions! A lot of these sites don't have APIs, so I'll probably need to put together a little scraper.

[ajcronk]

Most of my music is in iCloud, so it shows up in CloudPlay, but it doesn't actually play. Any way that CloudPlay can fetch songs in iCloud?

[ammmir]

hmm.. are you using iTunes Match? I believe iTunes uses a private API to stream music, so unfortunately there's not much I can do until I find another way. In the meantime, I should probably hide non-local iTunes tracks.

[alexkiwi]

Thankfully a native player for http://console.fm, congrats on releasing Amir!!!!

[xam]

I think this would be even better if it were integrated with podcasts as well.

[ammmir]

Currently it uses whatever is in your iTunes library, so you can play any downloaded podcasts, but you're right, a podcast directory/download feature would be great!

[jmathai]

Congrats Amir! Missed you at the recent nReduce meetings :)

[evertonfuller]

Fantastic tool for copyright holders too.

[codenerdz]

Shoutcast pretty please :)

[gdilla]

bandcamp as a source would be great too. lots of great music there.