Inspiration
The three of us enjoy listening to music very much, but we enjoy it the most when we listen to it with friends. We came up with the idea to the app because we wanted to be able to enjoy the same music together even when we are away from our friends. But we didnt want to handle the complications of building a new playlist from scratch, or creating new accounts at various sites. We also wanted to be able to listen to the exact same songs at the same time and not just to the same playlist. Myusic answers exactly all of these requirements, while also providing a very quick, easy to use and intuitive interface.
How we differ from others
Although it may seem there are a lot of competitors or similar products out there, we are sure (By making market research and asking friends and family if they know of similar services), that there is no product that offers the same value that we offer. There are products that allow you to stream songs - but they require you to create your playlist from their website database, as well as a must to create an account. There are also some products that allow you to create playlists but their UI are very uncomfortable(such as youtube), and there is no streaming possibility.
How it works
Our app is cross platform, and is currently available for browsers and android phones. Once a user connects to the app, he can chose whether he wants to create a station or join one. If he chooses to create a station, the playlist will be formed from the songs on his phone (On a later version the same functionality will be available on Desktop as well). The station admin decides which songs to hear and his listeners, listen to the song which he decides to play at the moment - like in real radio stations. Every second the app uploads the current bytes of the song to a server, which is responsible of sending the data to the connected users. This way the users dont have to download whole songs, just the latest seconds broadcasted.
If the user chooses to join a station, he will also have an option to like and bookmark the stations. As well as view the most liked stations around the world.
Challenges I ran into
Myusic was actually the second idea we tried to develop in this hackathon. The first idea was to create a network API which is based on bluetooth connection, to improve the range the bluetooth can reach, as well as providing a simple API for future apps to use. We decided to abandon this idea after 8 hours of work, once we realized the libraries we needed for the project didnt exist, and we had to implement them to, which would take too much time. The second challenge was to think of a way to transfer audio files in real time with out having to download the whole file to the users phone first. The third challenge was working with UDP sockets in android, which had no library to work with, and caused us bugs we tried to fix for over 8 hours!
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are very proud of the UI and UX we provided, The three of us are not designers, yet we believe we put up with the goals we set in this hackathon. We are also very proud of not giving up although it seems there is no fast solution for our UDP socket bug. And finally we are very proud of how we managed as a team. We feel like we always stayed synchronized with each other, and managed to accomplish a lot of our goals.
What I learned
The first thing we learned is that we should come more prepared next time. We should think our ideas to more details, and try to think of the problems that would arise, earlier in the process.
What's next for Myusic
We have a lot of features planned out for Myusic:
- We will add Desktop playlist integration.
- A big feature we wanted to make is searching stations nearby, so you can listen to the music people near you are hearing.
- Adding sharing possibilities for streams on social networks.
- We decided that at first our app will be free for everyone, until we get a large enough user base. Then we will start charging money from station admins, or streaming advertisements on their streams once in a while. If the station admin decided he is willing to pay - no advertisements will be streamed on his station.
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