Easily play your Dropbox music from Youtify

Do you use Dropbox? Do you have music in your Dropbox folder? Have you ever wanted to play that music from Youtify?

If so, today is your lucky day. With our new Dropbox integration, it's easier than ever to play your Dropbox music from Youtify.

1. Connect your Dropbox account.

2. A new folder "Apps/Youtify" is created in your Dropbox. Put your music files in there.

3. A "Dropbox" item is added to the left menu in Youtify. Click it to see the contents of your "Apps/Youtify" folder.

Does this mean Youtify gets access to all my Dropbox files?

No. Youtify only gets access to the "Apps/Youtify" folder in your Dropbox.

What happens if someone else tries to play my Dropbox tracks?

If you add a Dropbox track to one of your public playlists and another user tries to play it, a YouTube alternative video will be played instead.

Spread the word!

If you like this, please spread the word on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ or support us with money on Flattr.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Youtify is a web application, which means you can use drag n drop and right click, just like on any desktop application but there are also a couple of keyboard shortcuts to make your navigation faster.

Esc: Close any dialog or exit fullscreen mode.

Space: Toggle play/pause for the currently playing track.

Ctrl/⌘ + →: Play next track.
Ctrl/⌘ + ←: Play previous track or jump to the beginning.

Ctrl/⌘ + ↑: Increase volume.
Ctrl/⌘ + ↓: Decrease volume.

⇥ (Tab): Change focus between playlists, search box and playlist content.

↑/↓: Moves the selection between tracks.
⏎ (Enter): Plays the selected track.

Shift + ↑/↓: Select more tracks.
Ctrl/⌘ + A: Select all tracks.

Ctrl/⌘ + F: Filter tracks or menu depending on focus.

v15 (The New Youtify) Released

Malmö, Sweden - 4th Sep, 2012:

Today the 4th of September, Youtify, the world's leading web music player with built in crowdfunding, announces a complete redesign that is available from today on. This new version also integrates Last.fm to give users the ability to scrobble and get recommendations.

- I am very happy with our new design, says Karl Tannergård one of the co-founders of Youtify. We have been working on making it easier to navigate and be visually appealing for our users.

In Youtify v15, the new design gives more space to the video and playlists. Since the new icon set is font-based, Youtify scales up beautifully when increasing the browser's font size. This is useful for running Youtify on a big screen.

The home screen makes it easy to discover new artists

The other new feature on Youtify is the ability to scrobble what you listen to. After having scrobbled a few songs, you get back a list of artists that you might like based on your play history.

- One of the most requested features since launch has been the ability to scrobble to Last.fm, says Per Thulin, the other co-founder of Youtify. There is so much great music out there and we wanted to make it easily discoverable for our users, and recommendations from Last.fm helps us with this. The next big thing is just around the corner waiting to be heard.

For further information, please contact:
Per Thulin
Youtify
per@youtify.com
+46 722 32 36 68

Karl Tannergård
Youtify
kalle@youtify.com
+46 704 25 85 85

About Youtify
Youtify was created by Per Thulin and Karl Tannergård and was launched on May 8, 2011. Youtify works as a skin for YouTube, SoundCloud and Official.fm, allowing for fast and easy search among music from international superstars as well as independent artists. With the integrated support for Flattr microdonations, Youtify has a unique way for fans to support artists.

WOWHack, Last.fm Recommendations and Music Identification

Right now I'm in Gotherburg, Sweden, at WOWHack, a hackathon organized by EMI, Spotify and the Way out West Festival. I'm here with music hacker Jens Nockert and are working on one of the most requested features since the beginning of the Youtify project: Last.fm scrobbling and recommendations.

Jens Nockert and Per Thulin doing the live demo - photo by possan

1. To get started, connect your Last.fm account in Settings.

2. If you have scrobbled before, you should be seeing recommendations on the new home screen. Otherwise you have to wait until you have scrobbled a few tracks.

On artist pages you can discover similar artists:

When we scrobble tracks, we have to provide the correct song and artist names. This is tricky for us as YouTube and SoundCloud lacks a structured way of identifying tracks. That's why we go through a series of steps to identify the song being played:

• First we look at the track/video title to see if we can extract the artist and song names from there, e.g. "Robyn - Call your Girlfiend" is a common way to name tracks.
• If the initial check fails, we send the song link over to the Echo Nest API for an analyze of the waveform and identification of the song (does not work for YouTube videos).
• If we can't extract the artist/song names from the track title, and we can't get an answer from Echo Nest, we use the uploader name as the artist name and hope for the best.

This method is not bulletproof but works surprisingly well. However, a better way for identifying YouTube videos and SoundCloud tracks would be great for what we are doing.
That's all! Hope to release this baby soon!

v14 (Sour Princess) Released

Last release was v13, Amsterdam, where we focused on bringing social aspects to Youtify. Today, we are proud to release the next step in evolution, v14, Sour Princess - the refined release. This time we have focused on performance improvements and bug fixes, but as per usual Youtify-style, it also comes packed with exciting features:

• Improved Flattr Toplist where a new trending algorithm is used, making it feel more alive
• A new "Popular Playlists" toplist.
• You can now view and subscribe to users on YouTube and SoundCloud (Official.fm is coming).
• Flattrs are now made automatically after songs have finished playing (needs to be turned on in settings). We now also show buy links for tracks that support it if you prefer to support artists that way.
• We now sport a new incredibly good looking logo!

There have also been 300+ commits fixing small issues etc. For example you can now right click on an alternative being played to replace the blocked original. And for all of you speaking strange languages, Youtify is now translated to Norwegian, Portuguese and German.

Try it out: http://www.youtify.com/

Enjoy!

Auto-flattr songs as you listen to them

Even though me and Kalle are programmers here at Youtify, we constantly think about the music industry and how music artists should get paid. That's why we integrated Flattr about a year ago.

For you who don't know, Flattr is a microdonation service that makes it easy to support online creators with as much money as you want. Sort of like a tip-jar for the internet. If you've been using Youtify, you've probably seen the "Flattr buttons" next to some tracks.

As we work hard on keeping Youtify's interface clean, we never liked having to fit in the Flattr buttons, and as users of our own service, we never liked having to constantly ask ourselves the question if the songs were "worth" flattring.

So today, we launch v2 of our Flattr integration. This is a complete revamp where we have removed all Flattr buttons from the interface and instead added the ability to automatically flattr songs as you listen to them. If you have already connected a Flattr account, you need to go to the Youtify settings panel and activate this feature.

I want to support music artists! How do I set up a Flattr connection?

1. Create a Flattr account and add money to it.
2. Log in to Youtify, click "Settings", locate the "Flattr" section and press "Connect".
3. You are done! Now you will make a small Flattr donation each time you have listened through a song.

Will this ruin me if I forget about it and listen to music all month?

No! This is the beauty of Flattr: you select a monthly budget, and at the end of the month this money is split among the creators you "flattred".

Which songs can be flattred?

For YouTube and Official.fm, the videos/tracks must be registered with Flattr. For SoundCloud, all tracks can be flattred. If the uploader has not connected their SoundCloud account to Flattr yet, the donation will be in a pending state.

I'm having a party and I don't want to flattr all music that will be playing!

Go to settings and disable the auto-flattr feature. Remember to turn it back on after the party is over!

How will you further develop the Flattr integration?

We already have plans for more improvements regarding this feature. If you have ideas, you are welcome to create issues on our GitHub page. Thanks!

Mozilla Marketplace: Initial Feedback

The upcoming release of Mozilla Firefox will feature something called "Mozilla Marketplace", which is basically a way to install web pages on your computer so that they work like native apps. This is great news for all our users who have requested the ability to run Youtify in a separate window that can be navigated to using Alt+Tab / Command+Tab etc.

So go ahead and install Youtify as a native app (you need to be running a Firefox Nightly build).

The marketplace is still under heavy development from the Mozilla team, and our initial impressions are both good and bad.

The good:

• It's nice to have Youtify in a separate Window and the ability to Command+Tab / Alt+Tab to it.
• The marketplace UI works great and has proper support for multiple owner accounts connected to the app. This is useful for a team building an app together.
• An installed app gets away from browser extensions that could cause incompatibility issues, like HTTPSEverywhere in Youtify's case.

The bad:

• When clicking "Login" in Youtify, the login page (managed by Google) gets opened in the default browser, not the app window itself. We might be able to work around this by running the login in a popout window, but even better would be if there was a way to open the link in the app window itself.
• One thing that we hear a lot from our users is that they want to be able to use the keyboard music controls, e.g. the play/pause buttons.  Is there a way for us to receive these input events?
• Is there a way to remove the File/Edit menu visible on the Windows OS (see the screenshot below)?