Erwin Blom, a well known figure in digital media circles in NL, kindly offered his online courses for free for a month. As I’m low on payed for work right now I grabbed the opportunity to dive into his courses to build digital stuff. This morning I watched his instructions how to start with Glide. It is a very, very user friendly tool to build an app. Well, not really an app, but more like a website with the interface of a mobile app. During lunch I explained to the Man and Daughter what I had learned and the ideas I got while watching the intro. After I finished talking Daughter reminded me she was allowed to watch the Frozen music clips. Unknowingly she inspired me to build my very first app.
The thing about the Frozen songs is that they are available on Youtube. The thing about Youtube is that I don’t want Daughter to spend too much time on it. Once watching one video, YT serves Daughter a new suggestion, and another one, and… You know this effect. As an adult I can look at the clock and remind myself how much time I just spent watching stuff. A nearly four year old doesn’t have that feedback loop, so watching Frozen songs actually means for me to sit down with Daughter on the couch and searching the songs on YT and watching them together. After watching them 132 times (or so) I’m kind of fed up with them.
After lunch I immediately signed in to Glide to solve this problem. I opened a sheet in Google (which is the only really bad thing about Glide, it’s entirely built on top of Google sheets), put in the URL’s of the Frozen songs, added titles and screenshots, rearranged them in Glide and voila, within 20 minutes Daughter now has an app to listen to the songs (Dutch version) without supervision of her mother. You’re more than welcome to install this app too. Or not.
Innovative š I stumbled over FreeTube recently. Itās still on my todo list but it may be suitable for you as well.
Any ideas how to Spotify to USB btw? My kids have old fashioned players to listen to music whenever they like. I donāt want smart devices for this.
I could use youtube-dl but thatās a lot of work for all the songs kids may want on their sticks.
FreeTube looks really interesting (i had to scroll past a lot of sex sites to find it though š here’s the url for others https://freetubeapp.io/).
As for Spotify, I know someone who downloads playlists as a DJ. He uses a piece of software to do that, but I don’t know the name if it. It is illegal though. So far I’m still in control of listening to music, but we have Sonos speakers in our home. Daughter has one of her own since recently. I create playlists for her she can turn on and off in her room. Most of the time she just ask for what she wants to listen to and I start the music for her.
Sorry bout that. Itās on my list and I didnāt check it out myself yet. Iāve just seen a screenshot with a short description and it looked really good.
Iām aware that itās not legal. We do have Premium and itās basically āDownload for Offline useā. Not happy for fancy speakers becauseā¦ little kids. They break stuff all the time and the old fashioned players, while cheap, seem to be more robust.