For the Record

The Idea:

Many of us apply music within our everyday lives. Walking back home with your headphones in, studying in the library, or just trying to drown out some other noise with new noise. With websites like Letterboxd where someone can rate and review a movie, or Goodreads where someone can rate and review books, surely there should be a website out there where someone can tell the world about what they think about music. And even if websites like RateMyMusic exist, it falls back due to its cluttered design as well as being filled with pop ups and a very overwhelming search experience.

What it does

For the Record is a website that rates either a solo song or an entire album. We were successful in making a database of a user as well as a friend system in order for you to gain recommendations from both your friends and from a Gemini AI that looks at your high ranking songs and recommends you even more songs as well. With FTR, you are able to share your thoughts of rhythm and rhyme to the world while expanding your music taste.

How we built it

With the help of Figma, we were able to make the base for our desired frontend development while in the backend, we created the necessary databases for the website. Little by little, we began to connect things together with the help of Github and VScode to create our desired website.

Challenges we ran into

This was everyone's first hackathon so we were all very confused on where to start. For some of us, it was the first time using SQL or Figma and then realizing how Figma is more like a blueprint of a website rather than creating a full website instead. And through our website, we were only able to host our website locally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating the website itself and applying the Gemini API were new feats for many of us, especially in the given timeframe.

What we learned

As there were three computer engineers on the team, we never really knew much about databases and some of us needed a refresher on needing github. Thanks to one of our members doing a crash course on how to apply git, or using SQL, we learned so much more than anticipated. Additionally, we all got to experience more frontend work and even with the struggle, we still took something away from it.