The ones I loved are all dead.
I loved, loved, loved Grooveshark. It had all the music in the world, all the explorability one could ever want and now its dead. And taken my playlists with it.
Winamp. Dead.
To be fair though, streaming sorta contributed to its death.
Still. Like Kurt Cobain, it was awesome while it lasted.
This is my definition of the perfect music player:
- Must not disappear or shutdown in the next few years, I put years into my Grooveshark playlists only for it to shutdown. Never again.
- Has a gigantic catalogue, I’m unreasonable, I want all the music. Ever.
- Has infinite explorability, I can bounce from user to user, playlist to playlist and find awesome new music
- Simple, light, fast and Native. It cannot be a web app because I want it to be open in the background at all times and respect the mac’s media keys.
- Keeps track of my play history and queue.
- Simple enough to hit shuffle and leave it on, but also has enough features to click around and get lost.
ARE THESE REALLY MY ONLY CHOICES ?
Spotify & Rdio
There ain’t no Spotify in India and Rdio is dead.
Saavn & Ganna
Gigantic focus on Indian music which is awesome, except the music that I listen to is 99% English and their catalogues suck.
Apple music/iTunes
Bloated, complicated and painful to setup.
Vox
Sooo close.
This is the one player that I considered the most seriously.
It’s painfully pretty, has soundcloud integration and even has a clunky, but working youtube search kinda thing.
Ultimately however, its main focus is playing local files on your harddrive and it really feels like the designers at Coppertino are a little too in charge.
Function takes a backseat over form at Vox and that starts to irk as you use it more and more.
Music.163.com
These guys are epic. This is the closest to a Grooveshark clone, but ultimately its in chinese and Google translations aren’t as good as they could be.
There is a half glass full solution to a music player that fits the bill though.
Supposedly something like 60% of all music listening is done on Youtube
And that kinda makes sense. Youtube is like Google Search now, its practically muscle memory. As soon as you think of something you want to see or hear, you search Youtube.
I find myself doing it often.
It’s incredibly rare to not find what you’re looking for on Youtube.
However, Using Youtube as a music player sucks. It’s incredible as a video player, but playlist management, recommendations, up-next and most other features are geared towards a video platform.
So, if you mashed up the usability of Winamp with the catalogue of Youtube, would that be a great music player ?
I started work on this about 10 days ago
I don’t know as yet if its a great player, please try it out and let me know what you think.
It’s got all the basic features you’d be looking for and I’m improving on it everyday.
If your interest is piqued, here’s some things you may want to know.
- Mac only, tested my macbook pro running Yosemite
- Access to every single song on Youtube
- Totally not inspired by the late great Winamp
- Early Alpha, so will crash on you
- Pulls popular music from reddit & the community
- Improvements coming weekly, please give feedback, I promise to listen
- Download it from here (3.7mb) — https://freeda.in/Swipeytunes.zip
