Link to tracks that aren’t on Funkwhale

petitminion

wvffle whatever I search for or listen to (using their providers) would be registered by them.

so if we use the youtube official libray we have to send user data ? can't we block this ? ( in the case the user doesn't have to use an apikey ofc)

gcrk

petitminion Before we can talk about the technical solutions, we need to agree on how the feature is supposed to look like.

You seem to want to implement a download from youtube to serve the file and I really don't think its a good idea. Its likely not permitted and we would need to start fighting youtube. The scope of the feature is to link to third-party platforms, lets stick with this.

petitminion

gcrk You seem to want to implement a download from youtube to serve the file and I really don't think its a good idea. Its likely not permitted and we would need to start fighting youtube. The scope of the feature is to link to third-party platforms, lets stick with this.

Plz don't focus on youtube, it's just an example. Waht I want is to implement a backend solution for people to have third party streams available. I want this backend to be compatible with both audio download and stream using official clients. This way funkwhale can support every use case.

Once we have this, the frontend can choose to display the third party links, or to implement a stream of whatever third service. And users can start developing and using whatever plugin they want.

gcrk

petitminion Plz don't focus on youtube, it's just an example

I am well aware and this is just an example in my post, too. You can replace it with any commercial provider, none of them allows downloading their tracks using an API.

petitminion Waht I want is to implement a backend solution for people to have third party streams available. I want this backend to be compatible with both audio download and stream using official clients.

And I don't want this. If people want to listen to music from YouTube, they should go to YouTube. If people want to listen to music from any commercial provider, they should go there and listen. If people want to download music from youtube and upload it to Funkwhale, they should use youtube-dl. I have no interest in starting a legal fight with YouTube or even risking it. We neither have enough developers to maintain this nor enough funding to go to court.

petitminion This way funkwhale can support every use case.

I don't want to support every use case. I want to support specific use cases and deliver good quality. A YouTube or commercial-straming-service bridge is most likely broken all the time, which causes a lot of frustration.

Beyond this, your plannings are far beyond the scope of the funding and as I explained earlier: We get funding for linking to streams on external platforms and finding those streams is a requirement for downloading or streaming, so lets get this right first before we dream of a all-in-one-super-solution.

petitminion

gcrk I am well aware and this is just an example in my post, too. You can replace it with any commercial provider, none of them allows downloading their tracks using an API.

People could implement non commercial providers. It's the freedom of each admin and user to choose whatever plugin they will use and how. We just propose technical solutions for them to use streams. Which streams services, tracks, licences they use or download is not up to us.

gcrk have no interest in starting a legal fight with YouTube or even risking it. We neither have enough developers to maintain this nor enough funding to go to court.

Yes I totally agree on this. That is why I don't think we should implement a solution to download from any specific commercial streams providers has a core part of funkwhale. But let people make they own choices based on their own country, laws and will. I agree that if one day we choose has funkwhale community to stream content from a commercial provider we should use their official api and client.

gcrk I don’t want to support every use case. I want to support specific use cases and deliver good quality. A YouTube or commercial-straming-service bridge is most likely broken all the time, which causes a lot of frustration.

Newpipe works like a charm... And again this is up to admins and users. They will implement and maintain the plugins they want.

gcrk Beyond this, your plannings are far beyond the scope of the funding and as I explained earlier: We get funding for linking to streams on external platforms and finding those streams is a requirement for downloading or streaming, so lets get this right first before we dream of a all-in-one-super-solution.

yes I totally agree on this. If we agree on using mb stream url data we can continue the technical discussion of how to retrieve stream url and how to maintain them in the MR.

If we want user to add stream url in funkwhale. We need a frontend design. Personaly I don't think this feature would be useful. I would rather push people to tag their files with mb and put the url stream there.

The missing part in here is the frontend design : how we would display the links ?

petitminion

I think most of the time the link is added to releases in musicbrainz.
We could associate the release links to the fw album, to the fw tracks and to the fw artist to display them where we want.
In the UI I would add an external link in the tracks page, the album and the artist page.

In the artist page we could use the musibrainz artist links and if there is none we could suggest some links from the artist track/album.

mjourdan

Let's take a real life example, like the title "No, not me" by The Blasting Company. It is part of an E.P., alongside six other titles.

The title has this recording page on MusicBrainz. We observe that the right sidebar has a button "listen on ListenBrainz", which send to a separate site, which itself streams content from Youtube. The page is said to be an "Instant Playlist" with only one track in it.

The E.P. has a release page on MusicBrainz. This page also has a "listen on ListenBrainz" button. The later sends to a release page on ListenBrainz. In addition to this button, there is also an "external link" section in the sidebar, which holds links to Discogs and Bandcamp.

Do you have any idea:

why there aren't links to Discogs and Bancdcamp right from the "recording" page on MB?
why there is no link to Youtube from MB, while there is one to LB which actually knows a URL pointing to Youtube?

As the title page on MB seem to not even have external links, I wonder if it would not make more sense to have no track page at all for tracks that are not hosted on Funkwhale? Then we would simply have an album page with a grayed out list of tracks, and a section below that to find the album on external platforms.

For the album page, as Discogs doesn't have the actual data, shall we blindly fetch all external links, or if we should allow only a specific subset of known streaming platforms?

Same question for the artist page, which has no less than 12 external links on MB?

petitminion

mjourdan

There is links to bandcamp or discogs. It just depend if a user added theses links into mb database. In the exemple you provided, you can add the link yourself if you want.
I don't think using Listenbrainz link is what we want here. We want to use the external link attribute. Lb use the youtube api to guess the youtube url of a tracks. This explain why the have a link. This is something we could do on our side, but the guessed dimension of the link should be displayed in the ui.

As the title page on MB seem to not even have external links

Recording page have external link too.

if there is too much external link we can add a arbitrary limit and only display streaming or download links (mb api display the type of link but I didn't find any doc)

mjourdan

where? I can't find them on the recording page?
I don't think either. Thanks for the explanation for how the Youtube link works!

If I take a few other tracks as exampless, none of them seem to have external link either:

mjourdan

Mockups have been updated to cover the special case of external links, for both track and album pages:
https://design.funkwhale.audio/#/view/e3a187f0-0f5e-11ed-adb9-fff9e854a67c?page-id=6ca536f0-0f5f-11ed-adb9-fff9e854a67c&section=interactions&index=0&share-id=0b1bb873-5fc1-8192-8003-09085485d750

Please tell me what you think of it!

petitminion

I just added the bancamp link for the example you provide : https://musicbrainz.org/recording/11fcae7c-c48f-465a-ac77-f972188ab195

Please tell me what you think of it!

I don't have acces to the linked page.

mjourdan

petitminion

My bad, half the timeI copy the wrong link. I've edited the previous post with the right url.

petitminion

its nice ! I would only change the wording to something like : "This track could not be found by this instance in the Funkwhale network. Probably..."

petitminion

maybe we could even be more verbose and explain that if the pod is not federated a lot, lots of content might be missed

mjourdan

petitminion

Such explanation seems interesting for the admin panel. For users without privileges, it's best to keep it short as there is not much they can do anyway.

petitminion

If nobody has has something to add I think we could start coding this next week.

petitminion

mjourdan I think its important that the user understand some instance a not globally federated while some others are. They can try and use another instance

mjourdan

Migrating from one instance to an other is a bargain. Advertising such possibility will make more sense the day we offer the proper tooling to find a better instance, and to actually migrate the data and account information.

petitminion

mjourdan For me it's not advertising for such a thing. Saying "this pod cannot find this content" is just describing the reality while saying "there is not such content in the network" is maybe telling a lie. I'm only suggesting to be accurate.

mjourdan

petitminion

The mockup reads "this content could not be found on the Funkwhale network", so I don't think it is any less accurate than "this pod cannot find this content"?

petitminion

mjourdan I think it is. Has I said, “this content could not be found on the Funkwhale network” means the funkwhale network doesn't have this content. “this pod cannot find this content on the Funkwhale network” means the content might exist on the funkwhale network, but we can't find it on the actual pod