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Show HN: Google Music for Mac

193 points| kbhomes | 12 years ago |kbhomes.github.io

99 comments

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camus2|12 years ago

Google Music , Google play logo , a project ready from a DMCA takedown ... dont be stupid, remove all the google trademark stuff or your project wont live long in github.

rcthompson|12 years ago

I think you have the DMCA confused with trademark law. It may indeed get taken down for legal reasons, but I don't see how the DMCA comes into it.

Aqueous|12 years ago

It seems like he may be making a play to get this acquired by Google so that they can offer a desktop app. That's why the branding. I can't think of a better way to get Google's attention than to blatantly violate their trademarks - though it might be the legal department, not M&A, that reaches out to him :-)

bliker|12 years ago

Can someone point me to some relevant information on this kind of problems? Like unofficial clients and their legality and pitfalls.

RexRollman|12 years ago

Plus, its ugly with the lego.

johannh|12 years ago

Looks promising! May I ask why you forked from the original (https://github.com/JamesFator/GoogleMusicMac)? Looking at the commit history it seems to be under active development.

kbhomes|12 years ago

Thanks! When I initially forked the repository, I hadn't planned on including features like the theme or the notifications, but once I realized how much I liked the product and wanted to continue to develop it, I figured I should ask the original creator for permission to keep the fork independent and he agreed. Very generous of him!

ansimionescu|12 years ago

Thank you so much for this! It's just a Safari wrapper, but it's the first native solution I've seen. Google is really horsing around with Google Music, it's sad that I pay them the same amount I would (and did) Rdio and Spotify and get treated with shitty Flash web players and no native apps.

edit: 15 minutes in – it's not extremely polished but I really love it! Finally, no more annoying music.google.com Chrome tab.

cloverich|12 years ago

> no native apps.

To be fair, no native desktop apps. Their android App is great - by my experience much better than Spotify's. And while I do prefer a desktop app to a browser app, their browser app is more feature complete than Spotify's desktop App.

Touche|12 years ago

I prefer a nice web app that I can use on any OS than nice desktop apps and neglected web apps that you get with some of the other services.

pkulak|12 years ago

There's a couple, actually. G-Ear Player is totally native, and then there's gTunes and omPlayer. Yours is the only one that's open source though. Nice!

adamkittelson|12 years ago

They could really use a Sonos integration as well.

dade_|12 years ago

Works well and looks great. It would better meet my needs with Chromecast support, but I don't see a way to do this on MacOS without having embedded the Chrome browser instead of Safari: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/downloads "The Google Cast SDK and API libraries support the development of Android, iOS, and Chrome sender applications"

AirPlay audio streaming would also work for me, such as the way iTunes works, but I assume that Apple keeps that locked down as well.

girvo|12 years ago

Iirc, AirPlay would actually be possible. Would be fiddly, but possible. I have a plugin that lets me send any video in a web page to my Apple TV, and that's just a safari plugin (so only JavaScript basically) -- considering this is just a webview with wicked styling, I think it might be doable. I'm gonna take a look myself actually...

benburton|12 years ago

I use Google Music extensively from within a Fluid wrapper, and the key thing this doesn't seem to do that that solution does is keep music playing and background the app when the window is closed.

Other than that, this is fantastic!

andrewpi|12 years ago

Agreed, generally closing the window shouldn't terminate the app on OS X. So far that's the only negative I can find, otherwise I love the app!

rch|12 years ago

Looks like iTunes, which happens to be a product that I truly dislike. I'd rather see some differentiating features indicated front and center, and not a derivative-seeming screenshot.

phaer|12 years ago

IANAL, but I guess you might want to add a big "this product is not affiliated with google" disclaimer on your page?

kbhomes|12 years ago

Oh you're very right, I had that added to the README of the repository but forgot to add it to the website. Thanks for the heads up.

threeseed|12 years ago

He's using the logo, trademark and strongly implying that this is either (a) created by Google or (b) sanctioned by Google.

The disclaimer is a waste of time. The guy is acting like an idiot and can expect a cease and desist pretty swiftly.

lallysingh|12 years ago

Looks beautiful. They say that they're not affiliated with Google a few times. I hope that if they get pinged by Google, it's something close to the Jack Daniels letter[1].

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2012/07/26/the-worlds-nic...

EDIT: Actually, isn't it terrible that this is the first thing that we think of? This is distinctly not a problem in the open source world. It doesn't help Google, either. Ugh.

turing|12 years ago

Great work. It looks really slick, and from the comments so far it appears many people are excited to have a native app. That said, I'd be interested to here why exactly people want a native app. The web app already has notifications and has suited me just fine, so I'd be interested to hear what others find useful about a native app.

philwebster|12 years ago

Media keys are actually really nice to have. I use Rdio's desktop app which has similar functionality and it is really handy not to have to sort through browser windows to find controls.

aroch|12 years ago

I don't use Chrome as my main browser and Google Music experience sucks in FF (I wonder why....) and isn't even that great it Chrome itself. Maybe its because I have all 20K song slots used across 3000-odd artists but its still annoying. So I keep a chrome instance open just for GMusic. You can't hide the application if you want to use notifications, if you do hide it the notifications trigger foregrounding. Also, native notifications are always a plus in my mind.

I would like to see an actual native application that caches songlist / artist and doesn't run like shit. But I'll take what I can, I guess. On the otherhand, the Android experience is phenomenal.

shazow|12 years ago

Very cool, I've been looking for something like this. I wish I could use an Application-specific Password rather than my full Google password + OTP.

But I don't suppose that would be feasible with a Safari wrapper.

Also when I first loaded it, it complained about the lack of Flash, but navigating around and playing music worked just fine.

vegardx|12 years ago

Just curious, why would you want Application-specific passwords? They're far more insecure and still have access to all your Google services. Application-specific password would only make sense if Google actually let you limit access to a certain subset of Google-features.

shazow|12 years ago

Er, I take back about the Flash and playing music thing. No flash = no music.

otisfunkmeyer|12 years ago

LOVE THIS! I have wanted this for so long! It's such a breath of fresh air to have a native app like this!

fuddle|12 years ago

"The Google Play music player is currently available in select territories." - Damn, its not working in Canada. Why isn't this released by Goolge already? A Google version of iTunes which can synch with an Android device would be a great addition to OSX/Windows.

hardoncollider|12 years ago

Is there any option to disable the vertical expansion of the song rows when hovering over them? The effect bothers my eyes and makes browsing distracting.

Otherwise, what an awesome execution; I've been looking forward to an app like this for a while, just surprised Google wasn't the one to produce it.

A+

thrownaway2424|12 years ago

How do you actually launch this on Mavericks? My Mac just complains that the App isn't signed.

chm|12 years ago

Have you tried Right-click -> Open?

inanov|12 years ago

You should allow apps downloaded from places other than App Store. Go to Security & Privacy under System Preferences, and on the general tab, select "Anywhere" under "Allow apps downloaded from:" option.

kbhomes|12 years ago

If it doesn't let you launch, you may need to find the app in Finder and open it from the right click menu. Seems that OS X requires you to do this so that it knows you explicitly want to launch it. It remembers this after the first launch so you can use it normally afterwards.

amaks|12 years ago

What an awesome app! Few things I missed: 1. Chromecast support. 2. Navigation back/forward?

vosper|12 years ago

There's also G-Ear player, available on the app store. It works very well, though it's not as good at search as the web app is - so sometimes it's easier to add music to your library using the web app.

terinjokes|12 years ago

Also a G-Ear user. Developer is extremely responsive, and supports enough of All Access to fit my needs.

Kudos|12 years ago

If all you want is media keys support, Bearded Spice does the job. It supports a bunch more web apps too, like Youtube and spotify.

http://beardedspice.com/

k-mcgrady|12 years ago

Works great and could get me using Google Music again. I wish Google would realise that for some things desktop apps are better than the browser currently and they should support that.

pedrocr|12 years ago

Is there a good self-hosted Google Music like solution? I already have my music on my servers, and would love to be able to just point Linux/Android/iOS clients to it.

bombtrack|12 years ago

I've always wanted to do something similar. The 20k track limit on Google Music makes me prune my online collection every so often which is annoying. I think it would be a fun project to write a basic web streaming player that pulls mp3s from S3/Cloudfront. I would gladly pay Google a fee to increase the storage limit though.

garbage_|12 years ago

Plex ?

revisionzero|12 years ago

Wow, this is exactly what I wanted a few months back when I was using Google Music extensively. This may get me to re-subscribe. Great job!

sudomal|12 years ago

One thing that stuck me about Google Music is its lack of built-in support for last.fm. Was kind of hoping this had it.

kbhomes|12 years ago

Does Last.fm support mean just scrobbling, or are there other features you might like? I'm not a Last.fm user but I'd be willing to take a look into including support down the road!

ryandetzel|12 years ago

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

auvi|12 years ago

If it is not related to Google then why they are using Google all over the places?

arcticf0x|12 years ago

Does it sync music from Mac to an android phone over a local wireless network?

Lexarius|12 years ago

It's just an interface to Google Play Music, which already makes your music available on your Android.

pacemkr|12 years ago

Chromecast support would be cool, not sure if this is possible though.

jdalgetty|12 years ago

Looks great. Would love a way to build more complex playlists!

joeblau|12 years ago

Now all I need is a Google Music Spotify Library importer.

Khabu|12 years ago

This is what I needed! Waiting for Chromecast support...

meerita|12 years ago

I'm testing it right now and it looks pretty nice.

wak47|12 years ago

yaaaa this is like rly good. dwn w/ the p4triarchy.. fuck capitalism fuck stephen king (his books are rly skaree)

sebastianavina|12 years ago

What I really want is Google Drive for Linux