RockRaptor, a free music streaming directory I'm working on

Hey guys,

About 2 years ago (after Grooveshark closed), I noticed that a lot of music was available legally and for free on the internet (on YouTube, SoundCloud and more), but often you had to switch websites and it was hard to keep track of all the good music, because not all music is available in one streaming service (not even the big commercial ones).

So I started creating a platform (RockRaptor) that indexes all of this great music, and puts it in one place.
It allows you to listen to the songs, create playlists, submit new songs and more.

RockRaptor is built using these technologies:

• C# (.NET)
• TypeScript / JavaScript
• HTML5
• MySQL
• Sphinx

I would love for you guys to check it out and give me some feedback.
I know a lot of features are still missing, but I'm working hard on it.

The website: RockRaptor

Two thinks I immediatly noticed is that you can't 'play now' or 'play next' a song when you have a queue and that I found no way to change the volume on the website.
Also when you only have 1 song in your queue, it just keeps repeating itself, when I was expecting it to just stop playing. I haven't checked your 'logged-in-users'-features, but this may be something you could tweak in your user settings.

I like the idea of this website and wish you good luck rolling it out ;)

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Originally Posted by Joorren

Two thinks I immediatly noticed is that you can't 'play now' or 'play next' a song when you have a queue and that I found no way to change the volume on the website.
Also when you only have 1 song in your queue, it just keeps repeating itself, when I was expecting it to just stop playing. I haven't checked your 'logged-in-users'-features, but this may be something you could tweak in your user settings.

I like the idea of this website and wish you good luck rolling it out ;)

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Thanks for the feedback. These are certainly things I have to look for.

Playing as next song is available from some places, but indeed not everywhere. I should fix this.
A volume knob is on my todo-list already, so that will be implemented.
I'm still not sure if i need to make the queue repeat after it has finished or not. Maybe this is something I need to put in user settings.

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Originally Posted by bramdebouvere

Thanks for the feedback. These are certainly things I have to look for.

Playing as next song is available from some places, but indeed not everywhere. I should fix this.
A volume knob is on my todo-list already, so that will be implemented.
I'm still not sure if i need to make the queue repeat after it has finished or not. Maybe this is something I need to put in user settings.

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You should add features with the possibility of finding alike songs, playlists etc pretty much like on Spotify, but way better organized and coded.

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Originally Posted by redk0ke

You should add features with the possibility of finding alike songs, playlists etc pretty much like on Spotify, but way better organized and coded.

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Yes, related songs / albums / artists / playlists were already on my todo-list, as well as genres and more.

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Originally Posted by bramdebouvere

Yes, related songs / albums / artists / playlists were already on my todo-list, as well as genres and more.

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Keep this updated! Would love to hear whenever you make an improvement.

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Nice idea and nice implementation. I like seeing the usage of .NET and TypeScript in the web area, good job :)

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Originally Posted by Future

Nice idea and nice implementation. I like seeing the usage of .NET and TypeScript in the web area, good job :)

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Thanks :) It always suprises me that not a lot of big websites use .NET. Of course, the basic ASP.NET and Entity framework tend to be a little slow, but if you stay away from those, I think you can create some websites that perform decently. I wrote my own ORM, for example, but there's also a lot of good open source ones available that are much faster than the defaults that Microsoft offers.

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Originally Posted by bramdebouvere

Thanks :) It always suprises me that not a lot of big websites use .NET. Of course, the basic ASP.NET and Entity framework tend to be a little slow, but if you stay away from those, I think you can create some websites that perform decently. I wrote my own ORM, for example, but there's also a lot of good open source ones available that are much faster than the defaults that Microsoft offers.

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Yes I agree, tbh I find it more secure and way more easy to use than PHP and other concepts. I don't know if it's really that much slower but for extendability and maintainability it's overkill imo. EF is just so easy to use and the MVC implementation is great. And... it's got a decent IDE and is actually compiled as a .dll....

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Originally Posted by Future

Yes I agree, tbh I find it more secure and way more easy to use than PHP and other concepts. I don't know if it's really that much slower but for extendability and maintainability it's overkill imo. EF is just so easy to use and the MVC implementation is great. And... it's got a decent IDE and is actually compiled as a .dll....

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More secure than PHP? Then you must be one heck of a bad PHP developer.
Nothing by Microsoft is good other than their IDEs.
MSSQL, IIS and Azure is just fucking shit.
ASP.net is fucking expensive to host on a server compared to PHP and other languages.
In my opinion, Microsoft hasn't released any good software ever, other than their DLL and IDE packages.
Even their OS is shit lol.

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Didn't intend to start a discussion about php vs asp here, but when I'm speaking about security it's things such as built-in SQL injection protection or the simple fact that by far not as many companies use it (compared to php). There sure are some kind of backdoors but not as many people are trying to constantly find them. It's a weak but existing security bonus, if you ask me.

I agree with the OS part (hence why I'm staying win 7) but it took PHP 7 versions to start realizing that compiling is faster than interpreting (lol). Also I've yet to find a good IDE for PHP that is not overpriced but very limited at the same time or just complete shit (Eclipse). And well.. don't even get me started on debugging functionalities...

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Originally Posted by Future

Didn't intend to start a discussion about php vs asp here, but when I'm speaking about security it's things such as built-in SQL injection protection or the simple fact that by far not as many companies use it (compared to php). There sure are some kind of backdoors but not as many people are trying to constantly find them. It's a weak but existing security bonus, if you ask me.

I agree with the OS part (hence why I'm staying win 7) but it took PHP 7 versions to start realizing that compiling is faster than interpreting (lol). Also I've yet to find a good IDE for PHP that is not overpriced but very limited at the same time or just complete shit (Eclipse). And well.. don't even get me started on debugging functionalities...

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Yeah, but I'm not using PHP7 lol, its fucking shit.
NGINX with HHVM is the way to go since it uses a JIT compiler.

Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text or PHPStorm is what I currently use for coding, but yeah there's not really any good IDE. You can easily debug by installing PHPUnit or so.

Generally I just enjoy PHP compared to ASP.net, but well its just a matter of preferences.

SQLi can easily be prevented if you use PDO, otherwise you're just stupid when it comes to SQL in PHP.

You should check out my micro PHP framework once I decide to create a development thread on here.
Currently it's only on Devshit

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Meh, you could say I'm Visual Studio addicted / damaged :D I've been working with it for 5 years now and it features all languages I need to work with. Would even work with PHP, using a plugin. I have to admit I like Entity Framework a lot as well. So when I have to do some web development, I'd choose the default and supported Microsoft architectures :/

Thanks for the tips, I'll take a look when I consider trying php another time :P

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Originally Posted by Joorren

I found no way to change the volume on the website.

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I've added a volume control now.

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Originally Posted by redk0ke

ASP.net is fucking expensive to host on a server compared to PHP and other languages.

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That does change a little with .NET Core though, since you can host that on Linux. It also uses less resources.

What advantages does this have over already existing apps/sites? i.e Spotify? Other than yours having all songs on one

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Originally Posted by Lewis

What advantages does this have over already existing apps/sites? i.e Spotify? Other than yours having all songs on one

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It's free to use and it doesn't have any annoying audio ads. It's also a lot faster than for example the Spotify web player.

Because RockRaptor streams from different platforms, it can also contain music that isn't available on Spotify. Although this is somewhat limited right now (and sometimes things go the other way around), more streaming platforms will be added in the future, making this an important feature.

Of course, the website is currently still in alpha, and lacks a lot of features that commercial streaming platforms tend to have. But I'm working hard on it.

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Originally Posted by Lewis

What advantages does this have over already existing apps/sites? i.e Spotify? Other than yours having all songs on one

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I would never pay for spotify if I knew of this site. I mean, I have my own sources of music, but if I didn't, I'd of chosen this site over spotify. Just because paying is a hassle.

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Originally Posted by Future

Nice idea and nice implementation. I like seeing the usage of .NET and TypeScript in the web area, good job :)

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True. .NET reaches the same speed as PHP but could be also faster, is much more secure and offers more features. Well, playing games on Windows with high detailed graphics is only possible because of Microsofts DirectX (OpenGL sucks for commercial usage), is Microsoft really that crappy? :P. Maybe you look at Erlang, if you search for some native high scalability language. RockRaptor is awesome, keep up the good work!

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Originally Posted by 404

I have my own sources of music

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Tell me about it, maybe I can integrate it into RockRaptor?

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Originally Posted by RockstarNorth

RockRaptor is awesome, keep up the good work!

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Thanks, will do!

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Originally Posted by bramdebouvere

Tell me about it, maybe I can integrate it into RockRaptor?


Thanks, will do!

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By means of "own sources of music" it's probably just torrents.

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Originally Posted by redk0ke

By means of "own sources of music" it's probably just torrents.

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Never mind then, I'm trying to keep it legal :p

I use Youtube, Vkontakte.ru and mp3skulls.top to get my music. Spotify is overrated and would never even consider using it.

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Originally Posted by Joorren

Two thinks I immediatly noticed is that you can't 'play now' or 'play next' a song when you have a queue

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Changed the buttons too now :) Now you have the option to play now, add it to the end of the queue or play as next song