Thought I would write a blog post about what I built in 24 hours for Leeds Hack 2 last weekend. I kinda got distracted last week and not had the time to write this post.
You can look at all the projects that people finished over on the Leeds Hack Website.
So what did I write
I decided to write something that I had been pondering about for a while. It’s called Spotify Roulette and revolves around the idea of crowd sourcing a new artist or area of music to listen to.
Originally it started off with me posting on Twitter quite a while back asking for something new to listen to, to which @Stanton responded with Hybrid. (I can’t find the original tweet on twitter but it’s here on Spotwitfy) Which are actually quite nice to listen to and I have a nice Spotify playlist to listen to.
I was wondering if there was a way to automate this.
So thru the combination of the Twitter and Spotify Meta Data API’s, means I can post out to Twitter, await a response, parse out the Artist and then pop open Spotify with a random track by that Artist and if the requester wants a playlist can be generated, and thru a limitation in Spotify, drag and dropped into Spotify to listen further to the Artist.
In short
In short its pretty straight forward.
Just a handful of calls to a couple of different API end points to get an Artist ID from the name, then their albums and the tracks on these albums. Chuck in a little GeoIP to hopefully check the tracks are available in the requesters’ region.
Grab the first track, pop open Spotify and grab another 10 tracks to make a playlist.
Finally I used Nerf Guns to help demo! Russian Roulette stylee.
Responses
People on Twitter can either response with text, an artist which we parse out the @user and the hashtag word. Then look that up on Spotify.
Or a response can be either an HTTP open Spotify link or a Spotify protocol link. Either to the artist page, track or album.
if it’s the Artist, I can parse out the artist ID and look for albums and tracks.
Currently not playlist urls, but that’s easy to implement.
Technology
So we used,
- Twitter API, using @Abraham Twitter oAuth Library
- Spotify Meta Data API
- MaxMind GeoIP
- jQuery and jQuery UI
- Rick Astley
- Nerf Guns
Give it a Go
Give it a go and offer me some feedback.
Watch out for Rick Astley tho. He likes to crop up every now and again….
It’s still a little rough round the edges in terms of theme/layout.
Spotify Roulette (http://spotifyroulette.com/)
Future
Hopefully if people like it and use it I can expand further.
Perhaps use Facebook to share playlists, or another way to crowd source a new artist. And if Spotify release a HTTP API for generating and saving playlists then incorporate that too.