Monday, December 15th, 2008
The Cloud Player: Web-based iTunes using jQuery
Category: Examples, jQuery
, Sound
Eric Wahlforss, the founder of SoundCloud, wrote in to tell us about “The Cloud Player“, a iTunes / Songbird clone written entirely in Ajax:
we just released an open-source itunes-clone built in jquery (and app engine, soundmanager 2, soundcloud api), complete with smart playlists, drag’n’drop, keyboard shortcuts, load-as-you-scroll playlists, playlist sharing, waveform display of tracks, etc. we’ve extended jquery ui a bit for this to happen.
It’s using soundcloud.com as the primary music source, and the SoundCloud JSONP API to access the track metadata, available at http://soundcloud.com/api.
I like how it shows the waveform of the entire track at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, it’s limited to the rather tiny music selection on soundcloud’s service, but since it’s open-source, the future is interesting indeed.
Eric sent along a playlist with some of his electronic playlists: http://www.thecloudplayer.com/share/3e718.
Nice work!
Euh, no sound?
FF 3.0.4 on Mac. Flash 9
Nevermind. It just looks like it is playing, but then after some seconds it does indeed…
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any songs to play in Safari or Firefox 3.
I think their API is having a mild heart attack at the time of writing, but the service is neat, and the waveform preview of the track is a cool feature.
They seem to be overwhelmed :)
The interface is cool, just too bad it mimics iTunes one of the worst players available.
How is it one of the worst? I don’t think it’s terribly great, but it has its positives.
@rboucher you are right, soundcloud.com had a slight API hiccup earlier today due to the sudden traffic spike, but now it’s back up again.
@fyzbo could you tell me what you don’t like about the iTunes UI and the cloud player UI? Then we can fix it! You can even dive in yourself as the code is open-sourced..
If you want to checkout a couple of “let’s play around with the technology” things I did:
http://www.ajaxpro.it/labs.php
there’s an attempt to iTunes as well!
cheers
Wow I think that is absolutely awesome!
very nice clone of itunes . i think you could make it better by adding other features such as the banner rotator found in itunes webstore .here’s an article explaining this concept :
http://youhack.me/2011/08/11/create-an-itunes-like-banner-rotatorslideshow-with-jquery/
You can see a live demo at this page here :
http://youhack.me/2011/08/11/create-an-itunes-like-banner-rotatorslideshow-with-jquery/
what do you think guys ?
P.S. where is the rss feed to subscribe here ?