Reactify Music were lucky enough to attend another awesome Music Hack Day this January, this time as part of MIDEM in Cannes.
A small pool of hackers (30) gathered at the music conference to put together new pieces of music software/hardware using the hottest API’s and sandboxes available on the web.
Our only criteria for this hack day was to make use of EMI’s new sandboxes of content that they’ve made available to developers. The OpenEMI project is intended to make prototyping new apps and services, which want to use front-line content, a much less painful process, with music licensing traditionally being the big stumbling block for first time devs. This initiative is something that Reactify Music are fully behind, so we felt duty-bound to making something impressive with their content, if not only to show other record labels that this could really work for the industry, and that they should seriously consider following suit…
With that in mind, we sat down to start hacking. Inventory:
- 100 questions to Paul Lamere about using EchoNest APIs (thanks, Paul!)
- 48 hours of hacking
- 15 espresso coffees (coffee machine in the hacking room = awesome)
- 10 changes of direction for the hack
- 8 shredded-carrot salads
- 7 hours of sleep total
- 5 different programming languages
- 4 OpenEMI sandboxes
- 1 red carpet event featuring Justin Beiber
Our presentation can be found at 41:47 into this round-up of all the hacks.
Everyone’s hacks were under the ardent gaze of not only the entire music industry, but a large swathe of the tech industry, too, so the pressure was really on for the presentations. Luckily, after a fair few refactors of the entire project, we came out with something we were pleased with, as it made good use of the OpenEMI content, and was something that could definitely been seen to work as both desktop and mobile apps. We hope to package this into an iOS app or game within the next couple of months and launch with a wide selection of EMI content. Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with that…
We would also like to thank Paul Lamere and Adam Lindsay for their help with all things code related, and Ben Wundersitz for the awesome GUI. Couldn’t have done it without you guys!
A big thank you to Martyn Davies and Dave Haynes for their organisational skills and enthusiasm. Roll-on the next Music Hack Day!
