In the mood

Inspiration

We were inspired by being avid music listeners who are always on the lookout for new music to listen to.

What it does

In the mood generates a list of songs based on the mood of a text entered by the user.

How we built it

This application was created with Express and written entirely in TypeScript with a vanilla JavaScript and HTML/CSS frontend. It utilizes the powerful Spotify Recommendation API to retrieve tracks that the user may be interested in listening to based on their mood. On any request to the server, Express middleware checks if the client has a valid Spotify authorization token stored as a cookie. Once the user has been validated and Express has confirmed that, users can input their mood and the server makes a call to the Spotify API. Spotify sends back a LOT of data from a request like that, but we don’t need it all. The data is boiled down to the main things we need and sent back to the client as an array of JSON objects.

Challenges we ran into

The weakest link in this project is the “seed” data that gets sent to the Spotify API in order to get recommendations. If we added more artists, tracks, and genres, we would get a much broader range of recommended tracks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have created a functional back-end and front-end within 24 hours, something most of us had never done before.

What we learned

Some members learned how to work on a back-end for the first time, some members HTML, and we all learned how to effectively collaborate on a project.

What's next for In the mood

Another potential feature would be to implement persistent recommendations where user could create an account and log in with their Spotify accounts with OAuth2 and actually create playlists automatically like this.

Built With

• css
• express.js
• figma
• html
• javascript
• spotify
• typescript
• vanilla