It seems like calling this "Popcorn Time" for music isn't necessarily a great comparison.<p>PT allowed streaming playback of torrented movies and was very clearly piracy and illegal.<p>Meanwhile, this seems like an aggregator for existing free sources of music (Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud).<p>That said, it looks like a cool hobby project and a great alternative for folks who want/need a multi-source music client. Google Play Music was my go-to service for a long time since I could not only get streaming access but also upload my own local files to their servers for playback anywhere. Most of that local music came from Bandcamp.
Popcorn time was popular because it was way better than any of the legal alternatives. You just had to open it, type the name of the movie/series and you probably could start watching. You could also do this in the legal alternatives, but the chance of actually finding what you were looking for was pretty small.<p>Here I don't really see how this is better than Spotify/iTunes/Amazon Music.
There was a time (Napster -> Bearsahre/Limewire/Kazaa) when I would have been excited about something like this. As I've become more financially stable, and have more hardware for music to integrate into I look at a project like this and think: How can I share music links with my friends easily? How do I get these songs on my watch? How do I get these songs on my phone? How do I play these from my home speakers? How easy is going to be for my partner to do all of the same things?<p>The user experience bar for a music service has gone up since the days of Napster. If you primarily use one computer and that's your audio experience, this probably works well. I've found that I'm increasingly playing podcasts and music in different locations and going back to a centralized playing source is not an experience I want.
>On an unrelated note, highly polarized opinions about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs.<p>How incredibly arrogant. It can't be that people have legitimate grievances with elecron, like not wanting to use a program based on an incredibly bloated and poorly designed platform, oh no, they just "lack real world experience" and are "more interested in identity" (whatever that means).<p>High-and-mighty types like this are exactly why working in IT or contributing to FLOSS is so draining at times.
I have what is probably a very naive question, as I am not well versed at all in Electron or web frameworks. I understand the complaints towards Electron, but I also see the appeal of developing utilizing a cross-platform browser. Is there a reason why developers can't simply have their application run in a local server? (Jupyter Notebook is an example that comes to mind.) This way, the user can use their browser of choice and doesn't have to have several installations of Chromium, while the developer can still utilize the web. I imagine it's more complex than this, but it's something I've been wondering.
Best part is the text in the LEGAL document:<p># Legal information
My lawyer tells me I am allowed to smack anyone saying this program is illegal with a flyswatter.
This looks great conceptually but the UX on my first run through was awful.<p>The prominent "Best new music" part had an Earl Sweatshirt album review, so I wanted to listen to it, but you can't click the album title... only the artist name. Then I had to sift through 30+ album covers (no titles... not ordered by release date) to find the one that looked like the one I saw on the previous page (it had a slightly different cover).<p>You'd think a "new" album would be at the top.<p>Then I double clicked the first song twice, then realize there is a popup that has a "Play Now" button on a SINGLE click (unlike Spotify or Google Music). I clicked that and it only added it to my "queue", I thought it was downloading for a couple min, but nope I had to click "Play" at the bottom to actually start it.<p>I went to another album, clicked "Play Now" on a song and it froze with the logo pulsing fullscreen, and I had to restart the app.<p>This is basic stuff.
Once upon a time I used a program called iRate. It had an online database of freely available music, and would download music, and you could rate the music, and its algorithms would attempt to figure out what music you liked and provide you with more of it. While the algorithms sucked, it was really nice to listen to random music, with a menu item that said "download more music", and get more music you had never heard of.<p>More recently, I used Songbird (which went through a few name changes). It was a web browser that tried to include iTunes functionality. It really sucked - imagine trying to take a normal web browser and make it twice or thrice or more slower - but the idea was nice, you could go to music blogs, and click the play button and listen to all the songs they linked to, and click the download button if you wanted to keep the file.<p>I am trying to get Nuclear to work, just to see what it's about, but I literally can't get any audio out of the program. That makes it slightly useless.<p>I would love a program that collated legally available music and provide a music player interface (preferably VLC or WinAmp style and speediness). There is so much music out there that you would never have to listen to the same song twice. Digging through SoundCloud and BandCamp and Archive.org would provide endless music. Archive.org alone, if you wanted to avoid legal issues (even though lots of music is available free streaming at the other two websites I mentioned).<p>Perhaps I'll have to write this program myself. I already have too many projects as it is, though.
People who build on Electron should understand the technical tradeoffs they are making. On the one hand, they get a cross platform app, on the other, they have an extra Issue in their bug tracker to move to another platform, with occasional reminders thereof.<p>On an unrelated note, highly polarising comments about languages and frameworks are characteristic of people who lack real-world programming experience and are more interested in building an identity than creating computer programs.
Reminds me of AudioGalaxy back in the day, nothing else came close to finding anything. Eventually it shutdown and Grooveshark was ok for a bit but that heyday in the early 2000s of music “streaming” was really something.
Didn't we already get a "Popcorn Time for music" (which didn't use legal sources) with <a href="http://aurous.me/" rel="nofollow">http://aurous.me/</a> ?
Is this another program which publicly exposes your IP address...and thus makes you vulnerable to copyright strikes from your ISP or potential legal action?
I mean Spotify is built on CEF, so who gives a shit if this is on Electron or not. It's not like there's a huge difference. Adding a piece of text to the README just to alienate people isn't wise; it just makes the author look like a tool, ripe for criticism.