SoundG8 - 4 | Devpost

Inspiration

Whenever hanging out in a social setting, specially as a college student, music always brings us together. However, about half of the time, we have to face a major barrier. Spotify vs Apple Music, and I'm sure it has happened to many of you. Trying to send a playlist to your friend or sharing a song to queue on a road trip, you name it. This barrier has been haunting us since the creation of these music streaming app.

Here is where SoundG8 comes in.

What it does

Our web-application, has the ability to break this border. By allowing users to connect and share their songs, playlist or favorite artists, no matter the platform they're on.

How we built it

For our front end development, we decided to use React.js due it's popularity and rich documentation, in addition some of our members had light experience using this software. Regarding our data storage, we decided to use Azure due to its flexibility and rich documentation. For the management of our server, we used Node.js/Express due to its high compatibility with React. Finally for our data retrieval we used the Spotify API and planned on used the Apple Music API.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we ran into was that we could not get our server to interact with our client properly. To counteract this, we decided to make our app fully local for the sake of competition. Another challenge we ran into was that an Apple Developer account cost $100. We didn't want to pay this for just the weekend so we only implemented our idea with Spotify. We did prove that our idea works in theory though.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While working on our project, we had the chance to work with the Spotify API. Working around this technology was by far our greatest accomplishment during this competition. While we did run into some challenges at first figuring out the API, it's capabilities different restrictions, down the line we enjoyed the time we spent exploring what it can do. It was truly a learning experience.

What we learned

One of the main things we learned from this project was how to work with a lot of teammates on one repository efficiently. Making sure pull requests had no conflicts and dividing up features evenly was key to us making the product we did.

What's next for SoundG8

We had a great time developing this application during the UIOWA Hackathon 22 edition. After a throughout team discussion, we decided we would like to carry on this project during our free time. In an optimistic future, we would love nothing more but to deploy this app within our campus as a starter an collect feedback from our fellow Hawks.