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our home page :)
Inspiration
As music producers, we love samples! We've lost countless hours making incredible sounds... only to realize we have no one to share them with! On the other end, sometimes we are at a loss for inspiration. If only we could find some inspiring sample to get ourselves going!
While organized sample libraries do exist, they're all behind a paywall. Having to create entire sample packs for people to see them gets demotivating really easily. We wanted an easier, more community driven solution. Now it exists!
What it does
Snippet.club is a free social media service where sound designers can upload samples and add descriptions, tags, and genres. Users can infinitely scroll through these samples, play each sample in browser, and download whatever they want. Discovering new styles of music and sound timbres are also super easy. The most popular tags are shown on the right hand part of the screen and results are filtered by genre on the left hand part. When a genre that consists of multiple subgenres gets chosen (for example, metal is a type of rock), all samples of those subgenres also get shown, giving attention to the niche subcultures that they normally wouldn't get.
How we built it
Keaton was who first proposed the idea, but with all our brainstorming ideas we had a good sketch of what we wanted it to look like. Bunny did all of the front end, which gave the look and feel that the site has. She tried to keep it simple, but also really familiar to music producers who know how to navigate through audio software. Aaron did the backend, which consisted of sending SQL queries to the dataset for all of the filtering and genre searching. He also built the graph dataset to find all subgenres of any given genre via a BFS.
The final stack is made up of Spring Boot, HTMX, PostgresSQL, and Google Object Storage.
Challenges we ran into
We used plain CSS, so we didn't benefit from the ease of a more traditional CSS format. The website uses many different programming languages, frameworks, and libraries, so turning all of these components into a cohesive website was really challenging.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We ended up with a working prototype with some functionality. The project is on Google Cloud and any computer can access it. The uploading and metadata the user fills out is completely functional and gets uploaded to the website for anyone to see. With some HTMX wizardry, the genre filter is functional too, and all the genres/subgenres are organized in a way where you know the relationships between each one.
What we learned
Communication and planning is extremely important for group projects like this. If your vision of the final product doesn't look exactly what everyone else has in mind, you'll find issues along the way. Additionally, we all dabbled into each other's work. Because we worked with a bunch of different skillsets and programming languages, we all learned a lot along the way.
What's next for snippet.club
The most obvious thing we weren't able to do was to create an account system. This could easily be done by linking GitHub accounts or something similar, but that was never implemented. That way, we could keep track of what samples the user downloads, so we could see which authors/genres/tags the user is interested in. Creating recommendations on the front page would be easy once we got that done. A follower system would also be really easy to implement, so people could follow sound designers they especially like. If we were to turn this into a real thing, we believe there's a real audience for something like this, especially music producers who make sample based work. We could get our name out there by sponsoring YouTube music producers, possibly by challenging them to make a track only using samples on our site.
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