This is really cool - do you think it would be possible (I'm not necessarily suggesting you implement it) to do some basic NLP to get artist/title from YouTube video names, meaning you could search for an artist and see what's available?
Clearly it wouldn't be perfect, but a reasonably consistent format seems to be <title - band>. It might be possible to use a combination of "links to" and video viewcounts to acts as indicators of authenticity? I mean, I've hardly done much research into this, but I know when I look for music on youtube I almost always use those metrics to determine which videos I'm going to listen to, as it were.
I might could throw in suggestions as your typing your search, so if you started typing "Band of Horses" it would hit last.fm and pull back a handful of their song titles and allow you to quickly choose from those if you wish. Let me know if this is kind of what your talking about or if im way off. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
Since you're already using the last.fm api, might I suggest you add a simple scrobbling feature. If I were to use Tubalr often I would really want to be able to scrobble all the songs I've listened to through it.
I'm thinking about adding a set of features that allow you to register, login, and favorite songs. Maybe when you favorite songs they can also be "scrobbled" if your account is connected with last.fm.
Chrome 14, 10.7 OS X. Was only able to get the first video to play when I went to ONLY. I watched a video in entirety. Clicking a video title or next would not switch videos.
AOL Radio used to offer single artist radio stations. Now that AOL Radio is powered by Slacker, they dropped this feature. As far as I know no other internet radio service offers this. Now your tubalr does (at least, in a sense). Which makes it stand out, at least to me. Thanks for the nice site!
EDIT: I see if you reload the site and pick the same artist again, the same videos come up in the same order. Some randomization would go a long ways.
Thanks, glad ya like it. As far as how the similar search works, heres how I do it. First I hit last.fm and grab the top 20 similar artist, then I simply hit YouTube's API and grab the top video for each artist and throw all the videos into one playlist.
It's clean and simple and maybe useful but the only problem I see is it replaying the same popular songs over and over. I put in Mumford and Sons and Little Lion Man was in the playlist several times over just because it's one of their most popular songs and there are variations and what not. If you could put in some kind of function that doesn't show videos more than once or twice that'd be handy.
I agree this can be a bit annoying, some artists/bands have better results than others. I'll look into sorting out videos that appear as duplicates and replacing them with more videos. Thanks for the feedback.
No problem. Do you have any way to weed out covers and other possibilities? I haven't seen any come up but just curious how you implemented it or if it is even a problem at all.
I'll look into this, its a similar feature another user wants to filter our the words "and" and "with". I've noticed its a problem if you search for something like "Nine Inch Nails Acoustic", a lot of junk shows up that im not interested in. Thanks for the suggestion.
Wow, this is wonderful. I have always been shocked at how commonly people Youtube for music and how much better that system could be. You've chosen a great problem to solve.
Feedback:
• I love the Similar button.
• Perhaps the links to the videos could be outline or something, right now it's hard to distinguish them from eachother because it's a mass of text. I mean of course the design of this is very minimalistic and the main focus here is the function, but for now that would be my main design criticism.
• You should filter for the word "with" preceding an artist's name in the video title. Also perhaps "and", or any sort of list of names after an occurrence of "with," because I got one video for the query "Avi Buffalo" that was "Look Out for My Love Jeff Tweedy with Avi Buffalo, Solid sound August 15 2010," which is of course not Avi Buffalo at all.
EDIT: Also, the ability to search while still keeping the current song playing at the top would be nice.
I agree with the playlist being a litte hard to read, I'll do some research and figure out if theres a better way to show the playlist.
As far as filtering out videos with the keywords "with" and "and", I'll have to do some testing with this and see if the results are better. My concern is what happens when a user searches for something like "Coheed and Cambria", tons of the videos would be filtered out. I guess I could only filter out "with" and "and" if its not in the original search.
Can you elaborate on how you think searching while listening should work?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to give me some feedback.
Sorry, I just saw this. Searching while listening would basically work how you have now but if there's already a video playing the system wouldn't stop it and change it to the first result for the new search, until the user clicks on a link in the results.
Very nice, a good idea cleanly implemented. One suggestion would be to query amazon recommendations for similar artists to help work out what to play. This is only because then you could also possibly allow people to buy or add things to their wish list from your site. If you were thinking about revenue that is.
Good idea, I'll look into that, I've been thinking about putting a link to either Amazon or iTunes for those interested in purchasing music. Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad ya like it!
Cool. My first impression is that this is also a good tool to get news on artists - because the first band I looked up was the Stone Roses; and I was gobsmacked (as the English say) that the first hit was of their press conference announcing their reunion. Big news to me, and way more important than rewatching an old video!
Something you might want to address : I've searched for The Prodigy, and I got "Amanda Bynes' 2010 Maxim Cover Shoot". I'm not sure where that came from!
Thanks! Ya, sometimes unrelated videos will slip in, I'm always thinking of ways I can mitigate this. I'm sure you didnt mind the Cover Shoot video though ;)
Thanks!! I have been waiting for this. There's lots of stuff on Youtube that isn't anywhere else. Suggestions: Let me search for Youtube playlists. Somehow, songs could be connected in a network of similar songs by mapping the playlists. Also, let me create link for the current playlist/song.
Hey Gee, I plan on adding an easy way to get the url of the current playlist so you can share with friends. The URL's currently exist, just no way to easily copy them for sharing.
Songza.fm allowed you to listen to music from YouTube in 2007, although lacked the Pandora-like features. In 2010, YouTube blocked their use of the API.
Interestingly, they pivoted into a 'better Pandora' where they license music, allow playing similar songs, but also let users hand-pick songs for playlists (that for licensing reasons can only be played by other people).
This is pretty cool! I use YouTube for music all the time -- I'm not quite sure. I keep finding music apps that aren't quite right, and don't have what I want to hear (or not set up how I want to use them), and I end up back at YouTube, which indeed sucks for this.
No useful advice at the moment, beyond a vague suggestion to revisit the domain name choice (if somehow you're not wedded to this one by now, and you see many other folks with reactions like mine). I'm still not quite sure of the intended reading, but first I saw a slightly jumbled "tubgirl"(!), then I saw "two-baller"; now I'm stuck with a reference to "tubal" (as in tubal ligation? ...) with a flickr-style ending. Maybe just put an "about" link somewhere that gives a hint?
I'm surprised your the first one to bring up the name, I've had friends question me about it... but no worries, I have a reasoning/meaning behind it.
I originally liked the word Tubular(used mostly in the 80's, or by people mocking the 80's to describe something 'awesome' or 'excellent' ie, good.); however, that domain was taken. Then I started thinking about variations of the word, and went with Tubalr. I went with this version of the word because it has the word Tuba(a musical instrument) in it and in my head sounded cool :P. So with that in mind, I thought it was cool to have a name that came from a word meaning "awesome", "excellent", or "good" AND have a musical instrument in the name.
Hope that clears up the name a tad bit. Oh, I pronounce the word something like: Tube-u-ler
"Tube" in French (from France) also means "a hit" on the radio, a top-40 song. Plus, Tubalr has great Michael Oldfield resonance (Tubular Bells was the first record I ever bought). Ace name.
79 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadClearly it wouldn't be perfect, but a reasonably consistent format seems to be <title - band>. It might be possible to use a combination of "links to" and video viewcounts to acts as indicators of authenticity? I mean, I've hardly done much research into this, but I know when I look for music on youtube I almost always use those metrics to determine which videos I'm going to listen to, as it were.
http://www.tubalr.com/just/Band+of+Horses http://www.tubalr.com/similar/Fleet+Foxes
Also, a simple API I threw together: http://www.tubalr.com/just/Band+of+Horses.json http://www.tubalr.com/similar/Fleet+Foxes.json
Thanks for the feedback!
EDIT: I see if you reload the site and pick the same artist again, the same videos come up in the same order. Some randomization would go a long ways.
Also, that is a pretty great font for your logo. For anyone else interested he uses "Pacifico": http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/pacifico
Feedback:
• I love the Similar button.
• Perhaps the links to the videos could be outline or something, right now it's hard to distinguish them from eachother because it's a mass of text. I mean of course the design of this is very minimalistic and the main focus here is the function, but for now that would be my main design criticism.
• You should filter for the word "with" preceding an artist's name in the video title. Also perhaps "and", or any sort of list of names after an occurrence of "with," because I got one video for the query "Avi Buffalo" that was "Look Out for My Love Jeff Tweedy with Avi Buffalo, Solid sound August 15 2010," which is of course not Avi Buffalo at all.
EDIT: Also, the ability to search while still keeping the current song playing at the top would be nice.
As far as filtering out videos with the keywords "with" and "and", I'll have to do some testing with this and see if the results are better. My concern is what happens when a user searches for something like "Coheed and Cambria", tons of the videos would be filtered out. I guess I could only filter out "with" and "and" if its not in the original search.
Can you elaborate on how you think searching while listening should work?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to give me some feedback.
Good work.
Something you might want to address : I've searched for The Prodigy, and I got "Amanda Bynes' 2010 Maxim Cover Shoot". I'm not sure where that came from!
Example URLS: http://www.tubalr.com/just/Muse OR http://www.tubalr.com/similar/Jack+Johnson
Interestingly, they pivoted into a 'better Pandora' where they license music, allow playing similar songs, but also let users hand-pick songs for playlists (that for licensing reasons can only be played by other people).
http://evolver.fm/2011/03/30/songza-attempts-to-reinvent-net...
No useful advice at the moment, beyond a vague suggestion to revisit the domain name choice (if somehow you're not wedded to this one by now, and you see many other folks with reactions like mine). I'm still not quite sure of the intended reading, but first I saw a slightly jumbled "tubgirl"(!), then I saw "two-baller"; now I'm stuck with a reference to "tubal" (as in tubal ligation? ...) with a flickr-style ending. Maybe just put an "about" link somewhere that gives a hint?
I originally liked the word Tubular(used mostly in the 80's, or by people mocking the 80's to describe something 'awesome' or 'excellent' ie, good.); however, that domain was taken. Then I started thinking about variations of the word, and went with Tubalr. I went with this version of the word because it has the word Tuba(a musical instrument) in it and in my head sounded cool :P. So with that in mind, I thought it was cool to have a name that came from a word meaning "awesome", "excellent", or "good" AND have a musical instrument in the name.
Hope that clears up the name a tad bit. Oh, I pronounce the word something like: Tube-u-ler