Originally I was going to do an physical drawing machine clock as my final. I got as far as a basic prototype, but my plans were waylaid when I got sick the last week and could not go into school to complete it. Since I could still work on software from home, I decided to expand on my midterm Playlist Timer project as my final, instead.

Setting Goals

The midterm version let you choose a genre and a time, then generated a playlist around that time based on Spotify’s search in that genre

I started with a list of features I wanted to add or change. These roughly went in two categories; interface (interaction with the website flow) and functionality (adding/changing capablities)

Interface

• Actually create the playlist in Spotify
• Playing the playlist straight from the webpage using Spotify’s Web Playback SDK https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk
  • As a next level, create a “virtual” playlist in-browser instead of automatically saving the playlist, making saving it an option if the user likes it
• Save your Spotify login when refreshing the page, if possible
• Apply for the app to be “public” so more people can use it

Functionality

• Improve time finding algorithm to get slightly closer results where possible (there are a couple simple improvements I could make)
• Change genre-based generation from search-based queries to recommendations based on seeds (https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-recommendations) for more interesting/relevent results
• Add more options for playlist themes:
  • search-based queries by artist
  • Recommendation-based queries by song
  • Using only someone’s saved trakks, if possible (perhaps using repeats) - https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-users-saved-tracks

Result

I decided to start with actually making the playlist, as that’s the biggest functionality change. After that, I made my changes to the algorithm and switched to using recommendations. I didn’t end up having time (hah) to do the rest of the improvements I outlined, but I’d still like to add them at some point.