InstaSound (the real one)
From Music Hack Day
Contents |
[edit] InstaSound
The idea is to remove the barrier to discovering music in the real world. Uses your iPhone camera to scan album cover art to provide a quick mechanism of listening to an album before buying in a store, or gives you the option to purchase directly through iTunes.
[edit] Creator
Ben Novakovic & Mitch Malone from We Are Hunted
[edit] About the Hack
The hack is comprised of a few components & a few APIs. Accompanying the iPhone app is a simple frontend for viewing what people around the world are discovering. Obviously with more than a day's coding both the iPhone app & the frontend would become more feature-rich.
Component 1 - iOS App (built by Ben): We use the native iOS camera libraries for capturing the photo of the album art. We then give users the ability to edit the image to position it in the best possible position for recognition. Once the user has cropped the image, we resize & compress down as a jpg. We then utilize a 7digital API which specialises in album detection. We were previously using IQ Engine, but found we didn't get enough hits with any amount of noise in the photograph; even without compression. The 7digital API then returns us a specific 7digital id which corresponds to the album. We then take this id & post it to our remote server which then uses the 7digital release/details api endpoint to pull down the artist name & album name. We then do an iTunes lookup to pull in cover art, media, etc. This then gets bundled into a json packet which gets returned when we post the id to the remote server. The image is then loaded in on the interface, and using AVPlayer we queue up the playlist and you are done!
Component 2 - HTML5/CSS live feed (built by Mitch) The 2nd component to the project was a website which pulls in discoveries live in a nice HTML5/CSS3 interface where people can view what kind of music is being discovered; and also listen along. Users can also purchase music through iTunes from the website.
[edit] What APIs, tools or kit did you use?
Utilizes 7digital for cover art recognition, Amazon for cover art & iTunes/Amazon for audio samples. Also powered by Red Bull, coffee and beer.
[edit] Media
[edit] Source Code and Links
Links to code, resources, your blog or whatever
