Tagify

Inspiration

We all spend a great deal of our time listening to music and for the most part streaming services do a decently good job at letting one create our own personalized playlists of the songs we like. However, we and many others end up having a massive playlist with a large variety of songs in it or numerous similar playlists with overlapping songs in them, tailored for slightly different occasions and we struggle to keep our music organized and accessible. We wanted to bridge this gap in music organizing and concluded that a custom tag filter feature is the best solution.

What it does

Tagify allows users to add tags, which can be anything from “sad” to “80s” to “instrumental,” to any song they want. Only the users’ imagination limits them as they can create custom tags or use some default ones that are based on data retrieved from Spotify’s API (like release date, popularity, energy, and more). Users can filter their playlists by one or more tags, making it easier to find music that fits a specific mood or occasion. A terribly time consuming process is reduced to just a few clicks through tag filtering.

How we built it

We developed a rest API from scratch utilizing the Express.js framework which is built on top of Node.js technology. Our rest API interacts with Spotify's API to retrieve information on songs and playlists of the user. Also, we used React.js for the frontend and Postgresql for the database. In the future we plan to work closely with Google Cloud to host our database and website online. In Particular, we are interested in using the Google App Engine service.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into quite a few challenges. One of the main ones was connecting the backend of our project to the frontend. We also had to learn how to effectively collaborate and share our code through GitHub. Also, building a website based on Spotify’s API requires a good understanding of how the API works. Spotify requires authentication to access the API, which means users must have a Spotify account and grant our website access to their Spotify data. This can add a layer of complexity to everything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having a partially functional deliverable and connecting the Backend calling Spotify API with our exceptionally looking UI and getting it to work seamlessly.

What we learned

A lot. To “fuck it and ship it.”

What's next for Tagify

We hope to finish the coding and launch a live version under our domain Tabify.tech so that everyone can enjoy and take advantage of this amazing organizing plugin for Spotify.