Inspiration

We strongly believe there's a lack of a collaborative music listening experience available to the public. People should be able to listen to their favorite tracks with who they want and where they want. MusiQ is the solution for these needs.

What it does

MusiQ establishes social rooms focused on listening to a queue of music that's shared between the room's members. Members who join the room are able to search for their favorite songs and add them to the communal queue and eventually have it played.

How I built it

Our platform's backbone is the Spotify API which is used to pull all data for the music, search for items and playback within the browser. Firebase is responsible for storing all of our website data and authenticating users. The website itself was constructed using a node.js server for the backend and a constructed front end built on React. Styling was implemented with the react-strap library and custom CSS.

Challenges I ran into

The Spotify API was one of the largest challenges of this product because of the complexity of playing back music. In addition, the authentication loop for using the API requires creating a new bearer token each hour and running through the Spotify login page.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Becoming familiar with the Spotify API and hosting it on a local node server was something really new and exciting. We feel accomplished with our ability to overcome hurdles with using the API and appropriately authenticating.

What I learned

This was a great learning experience on designing with React while consecutively trying to make use of an extensive API. Firebase was also something new and exciting to use, essentially setting up a server for authentication and data.

What's next for musiQ

MusiQ needs refinement for the client facing side and also needs to be more accessible. There are a few bugs with the functionality that need to be ironed out but we're confident in the platform we're building.