Harmony Radio

What It Does: 🎵

Harmony Radio connects music-lovers around the world by giving them a free and simple way to share their love for music. Users can utilize a chatbot where they can type the command “!submit {YouTube link}” to let their favorite songs be randomly selected to be chosen to be streamed.

To try it out now, click here for the livestream!

Inspirations: 💭

Last December, when Spotify Wrapped came out, we shared with each other our results, which detailed our favorite songs and genres of music. Much to our surprise, we all listened from all distant corners of the music world, crossing cultural and language boundaries. By listening to each others’ favorite tunes, we were able to learn so much about each others’ heritage, personality, and interests. Seeing the theme of global connections for this year’s HackSC, we got the idea to bring this pure form music-sharing to the world.

How We Built It : 🔨

We used YT-DLP to access music from YouTube links and FFMPEG to mix together various video sources and output them all as a combined video livestream. Our chatbot system and song scheduler were written in Python. Additionally, we used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build the website for the project.

Challenges We Ran Into: ⏹️

Creating the livestream mixer was extremely difficult for us as none of us before were familiar with FFMPEG or media encoding standards. Learning these tools and figuring out how to harness their incredible functionality took a significant amount of time, with continual insights throughout the project. Building a Twitch bot from scratch was also a fairly arduous task, especially since some of us had only little experience in Python. There were several Python libraries, such as Twitch.io and parsing libraries that we had to learn so that we could utilize them properly.

Accomplishments We’re Proud Of: 🥹

As a group, the first time we successfully built the chatbot and got a song to play made our collective bones “giggle ✨”as Brandon puts it.

Some of our successes in no particular order

Got Twitch Bot up and running (the bone giggling moment 🦴)
Translating command line tools to Python
Listening to too much good music along the way & getting done 🥲

What’s Next ⏭️

We hope to expand our livestream services to Youtube, as well as other, more regional-specific platforms, so that we can reach additional people across different more diverse hemispheres.

We also hope to utilize Twitch’s Polls feature once we become an approved Partner/Affiliate to create a voting feature when we hit a large enough listener count, creating an interactive element.