More and more people today use YouTube as an instant music player. However, it has drawbacks – for example, while it’s fine for single tracks, it can’t serve as the music video jukebox users would love to see. The problem is finally solved with Tubeify coming in, mashing up Youtube, Last.fm, and Billboard, convenient for both musical time travelers and casual listeners. This new service allows you to search for, play and queue video clips in your favorite web browser.
Although the service has just appeared, it’s clear that it will become one of the best YouTube jukeboxes around, with its great search capabilities and outstanding usability. The most attractive feature of the service is the Billboard “timetravel” option, which allows you to pull up the Billboard chart for any week you wish, starting from 1964 and then listen to the songs leading the charts then.
The author of the idea of Tubeify is Tomas Isdal, a student of University of Washington PhD, well-known for BitTorrent-related research projects like OneSwarm or the DMCA printer study.The current idea, Tubeify, isn’t a research anymore, but just a good way to turn YouTube into a great music player.
Before, many people were annoyed by the videos stopping when another song was being searched for, as well as by many duplicate search results. In addition, the playlist couldn’t boast rich functionality. However, YouTube had the decided advantage – a huge archive of music with lots of both licensed and unlicensed tracks.
Tomas simply tried to make it feel more like a familiar desktop music player like iTunes and Spotify. At the same time, the player was supposed to be web-based to make people able to use it anywhere. The result of his attempt is quite a useful mashup of Billboard, Last.fm and YouTube.
The searching of the Tubeify is handled by the Last.fm api. It differs from YouTube by the fact that the current track goes on playing while another is being searched for. The search results serve as so-called “lazy playlists”, able to be “pinned” to the sidebar so that you could easily access them later. Drag&Drop support makes adding tracks to playlists the easiest thing. Finally, the most exiting feature is the possibility to share playlists with your friends – just paste the playlist links anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, email) to provide your friends with instant access to it.
Visit Tubeify here.
Visit Tubeify here.
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