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Had to guess for an instrumental piece and some black metal screams.

Otherwise a fun concept.

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Do you remember when Internet Explorer used to pop a dialog for each cookie interaction request?
Love the concept! Would love it even more if you could opt out of seeing the album art which can give huge hints.
Yeah, I think to do this right you need to block all visuals. I was able to guess nearly all of mine correctly just from visual clues.

Part of the reason I did so, however, was because the lyrics were often drowned out by the music. Hard to guess when you can barely hear what’s being sung.

Yeah, one opening screen included "#tamilsoundservice". :) (Tamil is one of the languages) I suppose I could try to ignore the video, but it was fun trying to use it for clues. "Oh they look like Bollywood dancers so I'll guess Hindi." This backfired on me when I tried guessing one based on the subtitles I saw, which I assumed were for karaoke, but the answer was completely wrong. I guess they were for translation, not karaoke.
Yup, I didn't even have listen to most of them, just looked at the text available.
Doesn't this mess up your YouTube what-to-watch-next suggestions?
I never stay logged into Google via a web browser, but I’m sure it would otherwise.
Fun, and shows how little I know about language.

Few nitpicks:

- Some videos are blocked on copyright claims, would be nice if they would auto-reload - sometimes my mouse would reveal the title of the video (alt text)

This is cool, though it doesn't say how many I got right or wrong. It says my score is 285, but is that good or bad?
Audio only would be far better but it might be easier just to start the video 15 seconds in.
I definitely was able to use some external clues from the videos even though they try to blur the hints. I would not necessarily guess Armenian from Turkish immediately but I am sure able to differentiate between Latin derived Turkish script on the screen and Armenian script.
A good side effect of this game is that you can find great songs from cultures that aren't as well represented in popular culture.
Nice idea! Couple of bugs I came across during my game:

* an age-restricted video can show up (I am not logged-in to YouTube)

* a video is not guaranteed to actually have lyrics. Ony of my songs was a "danish" fully instrumental anime soundtrack

Another bug is that sometimes the video isn't available in my country.
Is that really a bug with the game, or a bug of YouTube/BigMedia licensing bullshit? /s
I'd say, both. I wish the licenses were fluid across apps/platforms.

Say, I have a right to listen to Madonna from my Youtube Music subscription? A game, with the given permission to access my "music licenses" should be able to use that.

There's a report video button on top of the video for these. Far too many incorrect videos ruins the game a bit: You're on a streak and no video means you can lose 3 lives. I've reported about 50 videos so far.
Thank you for taking your time and reporting those songs, we are actively developing our systems with the huge help of those reports! It means a lot!
Agreed on the calls for letting the player hide album art and start in the middle of the track. Also had a bug where a Spanish song was classified as Latin.
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Honestly would prefer if it was audio-only. Too many ways to glean clues otherwise.
Enjoyabe.

Still, I can guess the languages of 2/3 of the songs without hearing a word, by various letters on the screen (Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Hindi, Arabian, often Turkish, Kazakh, Chechen by their special letters). Faces and style often help more than the sound, too. (My highest score in solo mode without a timer is 104 so far).

Death metal tracks, highly distorted hip-hop tracks, ethereal choral track are usually hardest to determine.

Besides, it's a nice intro into various kinds of music all over the world, and across many decades. Worth playing just for that.

Heavy metal isnt too hard, just pick one of the Baltic countries or Finnish.
Mongolian black metal sounded pretty powerful. (But Mongolian has some pretty characteristic features which are easy to distinguish even then.)
Ya the Mongolian was weird. I too would pick Mongolian if the Baltics were not there. Something about being in the Soviet orbit.
I initially thought the challenge WAS to guess based on the screen. (Since there are no instructions)
If you’re on an iPhone you can power off then on to get to the Lock Screen. iOS will tell you the name and artist of the video that’s playing.

I don’t know if there’s a way for the author to disable that. But I think it’s a valid part of the metagame to use that information when guessing. Kinda like how the top geoguessr players use camera artifacts to deduce where the photo was taken.

Tried it. The second video was not available in my country (Portugal), and there is no option to report this, only "video is removed" (it's not, just region-blocked)
Wow, this is super fun, and a great sampler of a wide variety of music!

I was curious about the composition of music, therefore a friend and I created/curated frequency-domain visualizations of a variety of music in different languages and interesting sounds using the Welch power spectral density estimation algorithm and Fast Fourier Transform. The visualizations are fun to look at and with some practice you can distinguish the different instruments and vocal tracks in each song.

Chinese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cWixC3PVP8&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Russian / Ukrainian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysqIz8-pRSE&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsJtqF5hCyE&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRjxDSIx3Zs&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNY3HOnJiUc&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXCdJ1Lh-48&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

A few other examples which might be interesting:

1. Dialtone using dual-tone multi-frequency signaling and 56K dial-up modem connection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomWraKuDFg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

2. Deluxe Multitone Car Alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uKcvZL7HM&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

3. Composition using only sounds from Windows 98 and XP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-jr9sS6Y&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

4. Piano Music (Ballade Pour Adeline): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAfrEk429w&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

5. Electronic Music Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllJLIX1glg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

6. Chiptunes (Mortimer's Chip-disko from Supertux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWHAHPbYc0w&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Like it ! Love to hear music from all over the world!!
Is this a direct clone of languageguesser.com?
Definitely feel like I'm playing a bit more GeoGuessr than Langoguessr. First one was a music video where I could get a good guess on the location by the style of license plates and background scenery. Second was a still frame shot of an album cover featuring the Armenian flag. Third one had no defining features and suddenly I wasn't so good at the game!
Hey we just included an audio only mode, you might wanna try that too! It is our first pass of the system as described in our first comment here, we would be glad if you can share your experience!
Just tried. Too many videos unavailable, probably due to geographical issues.
Needs to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese. 'Chinese' is not really a language.
I wish it weren't song-based, though it's an understandable implementation.

As others have noted, there are often many cues 'n' clues even before a single word is uttered. But also, I have trouble enough picking out words in my native tongue, let alone when transmogrified by musical prosody and accompaniment.

Today I learned that Polish sounds nothing like what I thought it sounded like :)

It gave me a completely instrumental song. Luckily the title was visible so I was still able to guess.
There's the report option for that. I got one too but they should be eliminated pretty quickly if the creator is actually acting on reports at all.
We definitely are! Reports are too important for us, we are actively evaluating reports and our first update has improved our system too much thanks to reports we got from community. We are glad that we have such a cooperative community.
#2 on 'Infinite with Timer Limit' on the second attempt where I didn't get trolled by broken video.

Found some absolute bangers from unexpected countries. Better than any ML algorithm in terms of recommending interesting music.

Feedback:

* Broken videos are a problem.

* I don't have time to report broken video during play.

* I often wanted to check out songs, but no time to open/save them during play. I want some way to look up tracks after a session.

* The pop-up after each guess is animated. Animations are resource intensive and take up too much time. Do you need a pop-up at all?

* I want to (clearly) see my HP during the game.

* As someone else mentioned, the video images often give away the answer. Picture of Shiva? Probably Sanskrit.

I love the idea!

The indian subcontinent kinda has an unfair advantage to popping up with their 20-something languages. Very hard for me to distinguish between them, and the rest of SE Asia tbh.

Should definitely only play the audio to make it harder.

I found a slovak song that was singing in English, but I recognized the surname and put 2 and 2 together.

Europe also has 20-something languages.
52 with at least a million native speakers according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe . Of course, limiting it by number of speakers will exclude languages with strong political or cultural presence, just to mention a few, Maltese, Icelandic or Welsh.