I was looking for something for scrobble.life that a user requested recently, didn't have a lot of luck to find it, it was kind of a "meh" solution, but while looking I kind of stumbled upon some info I wish I had known earlier.
What this changes.
The thing with youtube is, the "legal" way to use it is the way we do now, if a song is scrobbled and info has been fetched for it from different sources, there's usually a youtube link applied to it as well. This means that someone on scrobble.life can easily click on a song they see and it'll load the youtube embed with that song (99% success-rate). The reason we however can't have a youtube-search bar is because that'd tap us out quickly on API restrictions as it's all running through our site/server.
What some "grey-area" apps do, is they use innertube to search for youtube through their sites/apps which goes directly against their ToS, masking the video to only play the song is also against their ToS as that's Youtube Music which requires its own private subscription. So basically we can't search for music on youtube through our website and we can't play music without displaying the video.
Either way, there is however one upcoming platform I haven't heard of in years that is a lot more open to searches and currently has something like 1.5 million songs in their library: Audius. Some of you may know it since it is a crypto project focused on decentralizing music. Obviously it hasn't gotten that far yet considering the low volume of songs and marketcap, but it works. What this allows us to do:
We already had Audius as a scrobble connector on the extension - meaning if some of our users were playing songs from the audius platform, it'd recognize those tracks and log them in custom ops and display them on our website.
It allows for search and to play songs wherever you want - legally.
What this means is that aside from only searching for scrobbles on scrobble.life, we can now search for songs that haven't been scrobbled yet through the Audius library and play them directly on scrobble.life. No video, no potential ads, just songs directly on scrobble.life.
This also means we now have to build a web player for scrobble.life! (Which I'm currently building while typing this)
Another thing people have asked for is playlists which I'll be working on after this is finished.
The idea here is to not rely on solely one platform as most of them are centralized and may drop dead at some point or cut you off API-wise.
This is also why I already embedded 3speak videos and enabled scrobbling of 3speak content on the site and whatever future platforms may appear.
All while keeping things legal and according to ToS.
Other than that, I've been working some more on the holozing "tower defense" style scene in unity which is getting a bit further along.
Slow and steady!
