SoundZam App

3 years ago

When I was watching a YouTube video I heard a song that was on SoundCloud and I wanted to know what the name of song was. So I started looking in the comment section for answers, to my disappointment nobody knew what the name of the song was. So than I thought maybe Shazam can recognize this song, but I found out that Shazam could only recognize Spotify, ITunes and YouTube.

Than I thought to myself if there is no solution for this problem, why not make it myself! So I started researching how I could solve this problem. There were 2 options. The first was to use the SoundCloud api to get all the fragments of the most popular songs of each day with a cron job. Or data mine the site every day with a cron job and a python script. The first option was eliminated when I found out that SoundCloud was not giving new access to the SoundCloud API, because the were rethinking the process of giving access to the API. So than I was only left with the second option data mining, so I started developing a python script that would go on the homepage, than would redirect to every hitlist and here would data mine every song in the hitlist.

After developing this python script, I started with a prototype of the app. So that I would have more leverage at asking for a partnership or cooperation with SoundCloud. In the video below you can see the flow of the app.

After sending the prototype and idea to SoundCloud support, they notified me that the could not give me access to the API nor would they allow me to data mine there website. Because it was against their policy.

After this I made a simple Node.js API, that used an Audd API to recognize songs so that I for now could finish the project.

I may revisited this project, when SoundCloud reopens access to their API. The project is open source so can be found on this repository.