SoundCloud API Blog

Berlin Geekettes All-Women Hackathon Roundup

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Late last year, six women crowded in to a Mitte cafe booth and listened to Berlin Geekettes founder Jess Erickson share her idea: Berlin’s first all-women hackathon. With SoundCloud’s Amelie Anglade the then newly-appointed the Berlin Geekettes Tech Ambassador, we agreed that it was a great idea to produce the hackathon as a partnership between the Geekettes and the women developers of SoundCloud.

Fast forward to the first weekend of March, when the vision became reality: after 24 hours of hacking, 80 women demoed 29 projects across a range of different platforms, from a belt transformed into a game controller to an app aimed to help toddlers learn to do everyday tasks.

Hackathon with a twist

This hackathon invited all types of projects: web, iOS, Android, hardware, and so on. And the hackers rose to the challenge. One women even turned her belt into a game controller, and demo’d it by standing on a chair and playing Tetris by tapping her fingers on what she dubbed The WonderBelt.

Achievement of a strong collaborative energy was an important part of what we set out to do. With over 120 applications, we accepted as many women as we could possibly fit into the generous space provided free of charge by Deutsche Telekom, complete with internet infrastructure and an onsite technician. In addition to API representatives, we asked attendees to identify themselves as ”domain experts” if they were willing to offer help and answer questions. We wanted to make the event also appealing to new programmers, as well as non-programmers such as designers and people with product ideas. We partnered with OpenTech School to host a prep-school training session beforehand, with a presentation by SoundCloud’s very own Duana Stanley. The result? A wide range of women with different backgrounds and experience levels working together.

And the Berlin Geekettes wanted to create a fun, healthy atmosphere, which is why we had a yoga teacher leading relaxation exercise classes and fresh organic meals (shout out to the amazing chefs!). Etsy joined the fun by providing a craft corner with instructions and materials for making plush birds. Many hackers took a break for a mental refresh, with stretching and stitching.

Lots of actually working demos!

We got the usual API mash-ups, such as HomeThingy which suggests apartments on ImmobilienScout24 based on your Etsy purchase history, Eye-MOO which sends your EyeEM photos to be printed as postcards, and Mood Swings which serves music from SoundCloud and images from Tumblr to suit your mood.

There were not one but three mash-ups using the SoundCloud and Readmill APIs, combining books and sounds in various ways: Soundmill (share highlights from your SoundCloud audiobooks!), BOOKBEAT (which also one the Best Student Project prize), and our staff pick GetUp-ReadUp (a noisy alarm clock that uses book trivia to make you feel alert).

More than one team built apps aimed at small children, including the overall winner: Monkey See, Monkey Do helps your toddler understand daily routines using simple pictures. The team included an illustrator who made adorable drawings of a monkey brushing his teeth, having a snack, and other toddler activities.

More, please

Dive in to the whole list of projects list of submitted projects on the hackathon’s official wiki. We were blown away by the quality of the presentations from so many first-time hackathon-attendees!

Removing 'hotness' parameter

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The /tracks endpoint has traditionally accepted an order parameter for ordering results by either creation date or 'hotness'. The method for calculating a tracks 'hotness' has never been clearly explained, but generally speaking is based on the number of likes and listens a track receives.

Recently we started to experience problems with the query that returns tracks ordered by hotness. In the past weeks, these problems started to effect and even cause outages for API users.

We have decided that the best way forward is to remove this parameter. Starting soon, GET requests to the /tracks endpoint will ignore the order parameter and default to ordering by creation date.

In the future, we look forward to releasing support for more stable and idiomatic search and order parameters. In the meantime, it is still possible to approximate the result sets previously returned by specifying order=hotness by manually sorting the returned tracks by a combination of favoritings_count and playback_count.

SoundCloud at PennApps

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend, we sponsored and attended our first PennApps, the world's largest student run hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Nearly 500 students participated from a variety of universities across the US and elsewhere. Students were given 36 hours to get into teams, hack on projects, then show them off to the judges. The results were astounding. In total, over 100 hacks were submitted. Here are some of my personal favourites.

Cloud Sequencer

The winners of the Best Audio Hack Prize, Cloud Sequencer is an app that allows you to hook up a midi keyboard to your browser, and map portions of SoundCloud tracks to the keys. The level of polish on this app was amazing and I'm happy to note that the team is working on making a public version available that will work with a midi keyboard or your computer's keyboard. Here's the team, Noah Klugman, Max Seiden, Gaurav Kulkarni and Yunxing Dai demoing their project.

SoundScultpr

This was fairly mind blowing. Four High School students, Jared Zoneraich, Kenny Song, Russell Kaplan, David Maginley built SoundSculptr. SoundSculptr uses a Leap Motion to enable users to create music by moving their hands. It's a fantastic idea and they pulled it off brilliantly. You can even upload the result to SoundCloud!

Astoria

Ever checked out a neighbourhood using Google maps Street View? Astoria takes this to a new level by allowing you to use your phone to "steer" your way through a city Grand Theft Auto style, pulling in venues from Yelp as you pass them, showing property values, and letting you listen to local sounds on SoundCloud. Get the full neighbourhood experience with this app. Astoria was built by Joshua Ma, Anisha Pai, Max Kolysh and Thomas Georgiou. Here's team member Anvisha Pai giving it a go.

LiveTale.us

I love apps that explore new ways of telling stories. LiveTale, built by Nathan Schloss, Yair Aviner, Ben Glickman and Tyler Cloutier lets users record snippets of a story or listen to previously recorded story tales plotted on a google map. Bonus points for deploying it live, so you can check it out.

Instagramaphone

This one made me laugh. Built by Dina Lamdany, Christopher Yan, Daria Jung and Nate Brennand, Instagramaphone allows you to record audio and then apply "Filters" before sharing it with the world. Such a brilliant concept and really well executed. Check it out and start playing with filters now. Oh, and they had a banana on their team. I applaud this.

I could go on, there were so many amazing hacks. Special mention to The Musical Toilet which lets users control SoundCloud with their, ahem, stream.

Coding for GOOD - SoundCloud API

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The web has come a long way. We have APIs that allow developers to create amazing applications quickly, and browser technologies have advanced to the point where JavaScript / HTML and CSS are necessary tools for creating apps. Despite this, there's still a skills gap and companies are having an increasingly hard time hiring for technical positions.

This is the main reason the folks at GOOD teamed up with the Apollo Group to launch Coding for GOOD. A series of coding lessons and final project. Participants with the top three submissions will be flown to Los Angeles to participate in a hackathon. The best of the three hacks may be offered a job at GOOD.

We were excited when GOOD approached us about contributing a lesson on the SoundCloud API, so I sat down with them in their New York office and did a quick walkthrough on using the JavaScript SDK to create a simple SoundCloud app. Check it out, and if you know of anyone new to using web APIs, have them take a look too.

Story Hack Boston Recap

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On Saturday, we hosted Story Hack Boston along with P2PU and Mashery at the MIT Media Lab. About 50 people from content and technical backgrounds joined us to create new story telling experiences. The crowd was pretty evenly split, which made for a lot of awesome collaboration.

This event was the first of it's kind for us, and therefore a bit of an experiment. Hack days that bring together people from a variety of disciplines around a specific topic can be really interesting and present their own set of challenges. Judging from the tone of the day and the outcome, I think it turned out really well.

There were 10 hacks demo'd in total. A couple of my favorites:

SoundStep - An iOS application that uses geolocation to tell you about stories that have been recorded in your hood! Amazing to see a working iOS app built and demo'd in a single day.
Story Prompter - A web application that pulls headlines from USA Today using Mashery's API and asks you to record a story about the headline.

We had some really great content hacks as well. See the full list on Hacker League.

Some reports on the day from happy hackers:

A huge thanks to our sponsors, P2PU and Mashery for making this event possible.

P2PU did a great write-up about lessons learned during Story Hack Day. We also got some nice coverage in BostInno before and after the event.