Sort of like Pandora for YouTube

January 1, 2012 6:43 PM

Tubalr is a music video playing service for YouTube. Type in a band name and click "only" or "similar" and it will play a stream of music videos only from that artist or from a selection of similar artists. Creating an account will allow for marking videos as favorites and enable saving of playlists. Also available are genre-based playlists rather than using artists as seeds.

Tubalr does not use Pandora-like music DNA information to determine similar artists. It seems to use the descriptive information for each video, so you might find some surprises in your playlists.

According to the blog, tubalr works (sort of) under iOS, is publicly on github, and has been undergoing refinement for over a year.

posted by hippybear (27 comments total)

I found Woven Hand stuff I'd never seen before, so cool! I didn't see a way to make the videos bigger.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:10 PM on January 1, 2012

This is great. Thanks for posting.
posted by New England Cultist at 7:11 PM on January 1, 2012

I didn't see a way to make the videos bigger.

The same full-screen button that you're accustomed to on YouTube videos is there and works just fine.
posted by hippybear at 7:13 PM on January 1, 2012

Thanks for posting about my app hippybear :)

If anyone has any suggestions or feedback please feel free to chime in!
posted by cjstewart88 at 7:19 PM on January 1, 2012 [7 favorites]

Welcome to MetaFilter, cjstewart88!
posted by hippybear at 7:21 PM on January 1, 2012

I'm loving your thing, cjstewart88. Excellent results so far for similar::Rednek
posted by Edogy at 7:31 PM on January 1, 2012

This is a wonderful thing! However, on a few tries I have seen only about 10-12 titles on the right from the artist and one cannot scroll to any other titles contained therein. Is this a limitation that can be improved?
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 7:33 PM on January 1, 2012

Seekerofspledor, what browser and OS are you using? I know scrolling the playlist currently does not work on iOS devices.
posted by cjstewart88 at 7:35 PM on January 1, 2012

I entered Elliott Brood and selected 'similar' and it's playing 'All The Money I Had Is Gone' by The Deep Dark Woods.

Winning.
posted by jimmythefish at 7:35 PM on January 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't have a functioning scrolling playlist in Chrome 16.0.912.63 running on MacOS 10.6.8. I get the list of songs, but there is no obvious way to scroll the list of songs to the right, and some basic mouse movements and clicking around yielded nothing.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM on January 1, 2012

hippybear, if the list is long enough it should be scrollable with the mouse wheel or if you hover over the list you should get a little scrollbar to fade in. You're only given 20 songs, and if the title of the videos are short enough it might not have to scroll.
posted by cjstewart88 at 7:48 PM on January 1, 2012

Ah, okay, 20 song titles are displaying there. Seems to be working fine, then.
posted by hippybear at 7:54 PM on January 1, 2012

Neat! I like this!
posted by carter at 8:23 PM on January 1, 2012

cjstewart88: I love your app and you seem like an honest, hardworking and passionate individual! I was wondering what your plans are for the future of this app: will you start charging for accounts or premium features? Will there ever be ads other than the ones embedded in youtube?

I would like to urge you to make this an open source project. I am so curious how you do it! Is it a home brew similarity algorithm? It's also really impressive that it only shows actual videos, and none of those still-image-song posts that come up with a simple youtube search. You've developed some wonderful stuff here and I really respect your dedication and openness to feedback. Seems to me that making this open source would be very consistent with those values.

Either way, great job! it
posted by Truthiness at 9:37 PM on January 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

Truthiness,

Thanks a ton man for the positive support, getting feedback like this keeps me going.

As far as the future of the app, If there was some way to make money off the app that didnt take away from its original roots I would be down for it. I've thought about charging for a feature that allowed you to create custom playlists or charging for other features, but for now I want to keep it simple and focus on getting people to get behind the app.

The entire code base is up on github and I'm open for pull request, I'm not sure if I consider it completely open source. If having its code on the net for others to see it is open source, then I guess it is. https://github.com/cjstewart88/Tubalr

Thanks again!
posted by cjstewart88 at 9:48 PM on January 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've been looking for something like this. Will definitely check it out.
posted by neversummer at 11:09 PM on January 1, 2012

This is a great idea. Every time I want to listen to a band I find myself scrolling down the list until someone's playlist comes up but this looks far superior.
posted by tmt at 6:46 AM on January 2, 2012

Great stuff. I've tried throwing a few obscure artists at it (Butterbeans and Susie, Rise Robots Rise, Dan Leno), and, in most cases, it's returned good hits. Surprisingly, Dan Leno did the best of the three. Rise Robots Rise did the least well, yielding a bunch of videos from Rise of the Robots, but "Rise Robots Rise" did much better (although a Similar search never resolved).

Looking forward to playing with this some more. Thanks for developing it, cjstewart88.
posted by the sobsister at 8:21 AM on January 2, 2012

Really glad you guys are liking Tubalr! Thanks neversummer tmt and the sobsiter!
posted by cjstewart88 at 9:16 AM on January 2, 2012

cjstewart88, I'm running Firefox (I think it's 6) on Windows XP Pro, but still no scrolling (It's "greyed out")
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 10:50 AM on January 2, 2012

Seekerofsplendor, I currently have no way to test on Windows XP, if you have chrome I'd suggest for now use that. Overall I need to do some usability testing and get that on point. Thanks for the feedback!
posted by cjstewart88 at 12:50 PM on January 2, 2012

Erm... am I the only one having issues wrapping my tongue around the name? Something I'm missing?
posted by progosk at 1:52 PM on January 2, 2012

Definitely enjoying this!
posted by beltedweir at 3:10 PM on January 2, 2012

The way I pronounce it: "tuba"-"ler"
posted by cjstewart88 at 3:26 PM on January 2, 2012

Nice mix for Spacemen 3. I'm off to buy some heroin.
posted by a non e mouse at 2:29 AM on January 3, 2012

My Windows firefox works great.

I love this.
posted by rakish_yet_centered at 7:34 AM on January 3, 2012

cjstewart, thank you, thank you, thank you for answering Part 2 of my YouTube AskMefi question.

Seriously. Thanks.
posted by IAmBroom at 12:46 PM on January 3, 2012