11 Apr 13, 2012 — https://sf.gl/657

InstaDJ – a quick way to assemble YouTube playlists

I made a website that lets you create YouTube playlists easily - and share them, too.

Everybody is online nowadays. Nobody uses CDs anymore. So at parties it’s common to see a laptop hooked up to a stereo where people go up and select songs on YouTube during the night. It kinda sucks though:

  • Music starts and stops randomly as people get drunk and start searching for songs while another is playing.
  • You need to get up and change the track when it stops.
  • It’s too hard to make a playlist on YouTube. You can’t really make one on the fly.
  • What’s more, you have to be logged in with your Google ID to make playlists. I don’t want random people to mess with my account (e.g. Gmail), especially drunk people.

Sure, there’s Grooveshark. But people who aren’t nerds can’t figure out how to use Grooveshark and will just go to YouTube instead. It’s too easy to interrupt a playlist, especially when you’re drunk. The add to playlist button is easily missed.

Grooveshark is also missing many songs due to silly record companies.

Other sites exist, I know. But no matter which one you use, people will inevitably go to YouTube because it’s got all the content and it’s what people know and love.

Even other "Youtube DJ" sites exist. I've been through a few. They either a) require login, b) are hard to use, c) can't autoplay, d) don't work.

So I got fed up with all this and made InstaDJ. It’s a dead-simple Web site where you can add YouTube videos to a playlist on the fly. Even drunk people get it.

InstaDJ allows you to search and queue YouTube videos, using a simple interface everybody understands, in a way which doesn’t interrupt the music.

What it does

  • Search YouTube videos
  • View user uploads and favorites
  • Queue YouTube videos
  • Auto-selects HD video if available
  • Generate URL to playlists
  • Share playlist
  • It's free and there's no ads
  • Easy to use, minimalist interface

I even find myself just using InstaDJ instead of playing music from my iTunes library.

Don't you want to try it out? Just click here to go to InstaDJ.com.

For the technically interested, it's built with the YouTube API, Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery. Enjoy.


11 Responses to “InstaDJ – a quick way to assemble YouTube playlists”

  1. luca

    Hi Simon,
    your website works very well! Thanks!
    I just would like to suggest some features that might be useful:
    1) option to automatically repeat the playlist when it’s finished
    2) give the ability to import own youtube playlists
    3) give the ability to save playlist in youtube as well!

    Thanks in any case, youtube playlists have been really a pain lately!

  2. Simon Fredsted

    Luca,

    Thanks for your suggestions. Great ideas.

    I’ll be adding those features to InstaDJ.com soon!

  3. Jesper

    Simply awesome. Thank you!

  4. DC

    Simon is the best :D

  5. luca

    thank you very much! (I’d offer my help, but I’m not a web programmer, though if you want help with translating the interface in Italian I might give a hand :))

  6. luca

    Ah, I’ve forgot an other useful feature would be randomly playing the songs
    (often it is easy to add the songs of the same artist all in a row, but it might be boring to listen them all together :))

  7. Simon Fredsted

    Ah, yes, shuffle. Cool idea. I’ll definitely be adding that. Keep the ideas coming! :-)

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  9. Jesper

    Hi Simon,

    Still an awesome webpage, am using it regularly, especially at parties.

    I have just purchased an ChromeCast, and to my big surprise, you can cast the video directly from instadj.com, making it an awesome tool for throwing non-stop music to the big screen.

    There is one issue though; only when in chromecast-mode, when a video is added to the playlist, it will start streaming instantly, which sadly defeats the purpose of the playlist a bit.

    Hope you will consider looking into it, i would be more than willing to provide further feedback.

    Kind Regards,

    Jesper

  10. Simon

    Hi Jesper,

    Thanks for your comment.

    I’d like to fix InstaDJ on the Chromecast, but I would need to be able to test it somehow.

    The first video should of course play automatically, if it’s paused or there’s no video, but not if there’s already a video playing from the playlist.

    In the meantime, I’ll try see if some of my friends also have a Chromecast.

  11. Fred

    Hola en github descargue el soucer de instadj tienes algún tutorial de instalación.
    De ante mano gracias, es muy buena página.

    Saludos

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