I with you on wanting to teach and to try to find free ways to do it. I've started making some minecraft videos showing programming in Lua via a mod called Computer Craft. Right now it's more showing what I program than teaching how to program in a traditional sense, but I think that's part of it (and eventually I'll make "this is a variable" videos too)
TheIdOfAlan
joined 10 months ago
Initial metadata will come from the Spotify Web API. It provides the top songs and all the playlists for an individual. It also has a basic recommendation engine. The DJ will use all those as input to produce new playlists (which can be created via the API as well). I'm not doing any AI/Machine Learning. Just coming up with a bunch of if/then statements, randomization, etc... to see what I can pull off
Size could definitely be a concern. I've got no idea what my requirements will be, but I at least know what the constraints are. For a baseline, each image can be up to 256KB. In theory, you can have 10,000 playlists (each with an image), but I wouldn't actually want to have more than one or a handful at the most so that it doesn't get in the way of the actual user's playlists. Of course, there's a good chance you wouldn't get all 256KB. They may let you send in arbitrary data, but I wouldn't be surprised to find them erase anything that's not a valid jpg. Also, if they re-compress after upload, that would be another hurtle.
But, generally speaking, this is a way to allow folks to write arbitrary data to the net that you can use for syncing (or whatever, but syncing in my case) without having to run a database or user accounts. And, once you can do that, it's game on.
oh, a side-channel based on durations. Very cool idea. You've got me thinking of ways to use playlists where the duration of the songs is what's important. I don't think that's exactly the same as what you were talking about, but it's another potential way to store data. The docs says you can put 10,000 songs max on a playlist, but there's no limit to the number of playlists. Of course, that's also interesting because there's a plain-text "description" field. I don't see details in the API docs, but it sounds like maybe there's a 200character limit for those. Lots o bits to play with
(also, thanks for the compliment on the writing! that post took about three hours to write and edit so I really appreciate it)
9
Wrote up an idea about using profile images to store metadata for syncing open-source apps
(www.alanwsmith.com)
Here's to feeling better soon.
And here's to the randomness of weird connections, may it make the world a better place