Jotheyali – Web Playlist Player
I prefer a vendor-neutral playlist of songs and media. The standard I like is JSPF (JSON XSPF). It’s also a standard feature that ListenBrainz supports, but unfortunately, it is limited to what’s available on MusicBrainz.
If you want to maintain playlists outside Listenbrainz, then try mbzlists. It’s a FOSS playlist creator, editor, and player. It also allows you to export the playlist into vendor-specific and vendor-neutral formats. However, it still depends on MusicBrainz for data. So limited to that universe of music.
I wanted a simple JSPF playlist player that would play media from different sources and could be shared as an open web URL. So, I created exactly that, Jotheyali – a simple Web playlist player that can play songs from various providers (YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Archive.org, and direct URLs to MP3, MP4, WAV, etc.) given JSPF playlist URL. A JSPF JSON playlist can be hosted anywhere on the web, including a GitHub gist, as long as it is CORS-friendly.
Here is my favorite series from DD, titled Samvidhaan: The Making of the Constitution of India, Kill Bill Vol 1 – Sound Track, or an example playlist that is a mixed playlist of media from different sources.
The idea is also to have a URL that I control for a playlist, where the individual items can be easily replaced in the future if required. For example, if this series were to disappear from YouTube, I could probably update the playlist to include an archive.org URL, assuming it is available. In my case, all JSON playlists are documents stored in a CouchDB database, which is an additional plus.
There are still some minor bugs and partially implemented features, such as YouTube sometimes requiring a second click, and a MusicBrainz-based Playlist (parts of the code are present but hidden), etc. I will fix them in the coming days. But please let me know if you find this helpful.
Other interesting stuff:
- If you are looking for a collaborative playlist maker/player, then you might like Jukebox, which is a FOSS project, self-hostable, but limited to YT.
- Joybox – A pinboard for audiovisual media. Collect, play, and share multiple platforms in one place. This app is closer to what I wanted, but it is not JSPF-based.
