Description as a Tweet:

Still waiting for your favorite song to play? Bring aux to the bourgeoisie with VibeQ!

Inspiration:

Most parties at umass have only one DJ who has control over the night’s music. What if the crowd got to choose what to play? This would mitigate the annoying requests to the DJ, who is busy playing pong, and would let everyone get a say in what music to play.

What it does:

Hosts create a party and guests can see all the public parties (for now there is no privacy of events and every party is public). You can see the queue of music playing next for each party and vote for the song you want to hear. When a song at the top of the list is next in the queue, it is sent to a Spotify playlist under the user's control. It is subsequently added to the Spotify App's playback queue, so no interaction is needed by the host to play the next voted-for song.

How we built it:

We used Firebase to store party and request information, used the Spotify OAuth API for authentication and to use Spotify's endpoints (such as adding to queue, creating a playlist), and ReactJS to tie it all together on a mobile iOS app. (Android should work as well)

Technologies we used:

Javascript
React

Challenges we ran into:

Our biggest challenge was finding the right method for authentication. Unfortunately the app is in no way secure from other people accessing music event queue voting, and there is no way to make an event private. This is something we would like to work on moving forward.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We are proud that we created a working app in so little time - and so little sleep - which can request and queue the most upvoted song at a party and connect it directly to a Spotify playlist and concurrently playing device.

What we've learned:

How to use the Spotify API, how to use expo in react native projects, and a web version 9 implementation of Google's Firebase platform.

What's next:

We were thinking of creating a party map, just like Snap map where you can see where other parties and friends are located. We were also thinking of having a paid feature to SuperLike a song so that it gets to the top 3 in the queue. The host will also receive notifications for all songs requested, and guests will receive notifications if their song is queued next.

Built with:

React.JS / React Native using Expo, Firebase-Firestore, Spotify Web API

Prizes we're going for:

Best Software Hack
Best Web Hack
Best Beginner Software Hack
Best Mobile Hack
Best Use of Google Cloud

VibeQ