Inspiration
Although Spotify has many premade playlists, these are usually based on one thing, whether it be the artist, genre, era, or mood. Playlists that took more than one of these into consideration are rare, and most likely created by hand. This, we wanted to create a way for an app/algorithm to create these types of playlists with ease.
What it does
Sonicswype is a tinder-inspired webapp that plays a snippet of a track to the user. Then, the user swipes left or right depending if they like the track. The next track is decided by using Spotify’s related artist function. Liked tracks are ultimately stored in a Spotify playlist.
How we built it
We built mostly using django and the spotipy library.
Challenges we ran into
User authentication with OAuth and Spotify proved to be somewhat challenging. We also struggled with playlist generation and getting the database and views to play nicely with some of the edge cases of Spotify's API, such as artists without images.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We make extensive use of the spotify API, including the related artists section, artists' photos and song snippets. It makes a playlist right in the users' spotify for every artist they like. Overall the code is quite clean for a hackathon, with very few 'hacks' ;)
What we learned
We weren't all familiar with Django or full-stack dev, so that was a biggie for some of us. We all learned a lot about the ins and outs of the Spotify API and creating a somewhat complex database structure for liked/disliked artists. We also learned about how to serve audio in HTML.
What's next for sonicswype
The original vision of the webapp would have it not only create playlists where the user has explicitly selected the song, but could also automatically search for songs depending on the user’s previous swipes in the session. For example, if the user was swiping on slow, acoustic songs, the app would go to related artists and find songs that would have similar qualities using Spotify’s api classifications. Another feature would be to have the ability for the app to backtrack in its ‘finding’ of related artists and go to another related artist.
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