SongQ

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Inspiration

Have you ever been to a party where no one can decide on the playlist? Songs keep getting skipped as people vie for music dominance? Never again! SongQ aims to be your ultimate party companion.

What it does

SongQ queues up your songs in a calm and orderly fashion. It connects to YouTube's music so it can be used for playlists or for YouTube parties where you want to show off your dank memes. Every time a song is played, people can suggest a song to be voted on next and vote for the next played song. If no suggestions are made or no votes are cast, the next song in YouTubes autoplay plays. But the only thing missing from this sweet rager is the pizza! You can also use our voting system to decide which pizza toppings to order for the group. You can also chat with your fellow partygoers. Decide when to vote on the pizza, tell the Prius owner to quit blocking your car in. You can chat about anything with SongQ.

How we built it

We used the Youtube Data API to search for Youtube videos. The webserver is Express running on NodeJS. We used Socket.IO for asynchronous communication between the server and all of the clients.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we wanted to use the Spotify API to queue up the songs. We ran into a problem because Spotify couldn't send us back any information from the player, so there was no way of determining when the song was over. So we couldn't start up another round of voting. We had had the idea of integrating YouTube videos into this when we started, so we figured we might as well use it for the music anyway as it has a good selection of music and might have songs that Spotify doesn't have access to. Formatting was a bit challenging between the mobile platform and the desktop. Creating the page elements for the phone screen from the desktop didn't always go smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished both the MVP of the song queue system, as well as one of our stretch goals (the pizza voter). We definitely had more features we'd like to have added, but we were proud that we accomplished so much in this time. We also collaborated very well as a team. We enjoyed working with each other even though we didn't all know each other before this event.

What we learned

We learned more about the Spotify and YouTube APIs and how they integrate with webapps. We also learned more about how hackathons work and how to work quickly in a time crunch.

What's next for SongQ

We have lots of ideas for future integration. We could use the pizza decider to also split the pizza bill. You could use the phone's NFC to pay cover charge for the party. Or you could upload selfies to vote for the best Halloween costumes! We also want to expand the song suggestion algorithm. We want it to be able to learn from every party and math its unique vibe. This has lots of potential for expansion and monetization. We hope to be able to continue this project beyond this hackathon and see how far we can take it. :)