LinkTune

You can add your friends.
a wide variety of songs are available for selection
A playlist of your friends' recommendations will be shown on your home screen.

Inspiration

As four avid music lovers, our team loved sharing our favorite songs with each other, whether that be while studying together, playing games, or even brainstorming HackRice project ideas. We noticed the inconvenience of sending multiple links to multiple chats, multiple times. Why not just have one space where we can share all of our favorite songs with all of our favorite people? Music is a shared joy. And the “shared” part of the joy should not feel restricted. It is through sharing that we connect with family, friends, and strangers; it is through sharing that we discover new songs, artists, and cultures outside of our daily tunes.

What it does

LinkTune stores a large database of users. Each user is able to pick a song from a large dataset and share it with their friends. The personalized playlist for each user consists of all the user’s friends’ recommended songs. Users can add friends by entering their username in our specialized search tab. The profile tab displays the user’s history of recommended songs, list of friends, and a profile photo that can be changed.

How we built it

We began developing our software using the Xcode IDE and the Swift programming language. Data is stored in Firestore and updated via event listeners. The user interface is designed with Storyboard, which connects user interactions to the underlying code. Our icons and overall design are crafted using Adobe Illustrator, providing a minimalist style inspired by modern trends.

Challenges we ran into

Given that this was our first hackathon, there were numerous challenges we encountered during our project, most of which stemmed from our new exposure to application development, Swift, and Firebase. With each function we created came many errors that we needed to learn to resolve before execution; thus, we spent the majority of the competition learning, but it was through learning that we were able to end up with a meaningful product. We were also new to the application design process, so we had to revamp our user interface near the end of the competition with the hopes of improving the visual aesthetics of our product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take particular pride in successfully integrating Firebase into our application, as Firebase was a completely new tool for our team. Although we had heard about this tool before, we never had the opportunity to work with it on a project of this scale, making this experience especially rewarding. Furthermore, we're impressed by how much technical and teamwork skill we gained throughout this competition, and our resulting ability to deliver an app with full functionality. This project not only expanded our technical expertise but also strengthened our confidence in building robust applications.

What we learned

Throughout the development process, we learned a variety of skills, including the app design and app development process, the Swift programming language, how to implement databases like Firebase, and how to navigate through Xcode. Additionally, we recognized the immense value of teamwork, as our collaboration was key to successfully bringing our project to finish. We all came in with different technical skillsets, and worked together to learn from and teach one another.

What's next for LinkTune

We would like to add a Spotify API to connect Spotify’s user and music database to LinkTune. Users can sign into LinkTune with their Spotify accounts and add songs from their playlists and Spotify’s music database. Most importantly, we hope for LinkTune to be able to add a real playlist of recommended songs to the user’s Spotify library. This playlist would be similar to Spotify’s Daylist, in that it is everchanging and a personally curated playlist for each user.