10 years ago two friends and I attended SF Music Hack day and we created a hack in under 24 hours that allowed users to browse music by color via the predominant colors of the cover art. It was meant to be a bad joke, like judging a book by its cover. We failed to create a joke, but inadvertently created something really fun.
It was originally created for Rdio, which of course died soon thereafter. Then I moved it to a Spotify app, and then Spotify apps were shut down shortly thereafter. Then it languished for years.
About two weeks ago on a random bank holiday, I resurrected the project. With the help of @mr_monkey, @lucifer and @akshaaatt we spent the next few days hacking on this project and tidying up the various ends. Thanks for helping!
And here it is: HueSound – pick a color on the color wheel and wait for the art to appear. Pick a cover and start listening. Don’t like it? Pick another cover or another color!
This reminds me so much of a good friend whom I told that his unsorted LP and CD collection was a mess and I could not find anything there. One day he was very proud to tell me that he had finally sorted it, by album cover colors. I still couldn’t find anything, but he did and he keeps it sorted that way ever since.
there’s several albums that show up multiple times on a single page. perhaps there’s a couple that are deluxe editions or actually different albums (for instance, Anjunabeats and their very monochromatic album artworks), but it might be better to only pull one release from each release group?
the worst offender is Ed Sheeran below. one is his Deezer Session release, and the rest are slightly different versions of x.
I don’t know if these features are already planned, but I’d like to see different pages of the same hue, either with a refresh button of sorts or generating/pulling a new or different set each time you select a hue.
also, some way to make Spotify/ListenBrainz playlists using this might make for a cool feature too, either from a single hue or a selection of different hues.
but it might be better to only pull one release from each release group?
Yes, something to think about doing – though that will not take care of all the problems you see, since a lot of these duplicates can come from very similar releases released on a yearly basis with perhaps only a year change on the cover.
I don’t know if these features are already planned, but I’d like to see different pages of the same hue, either with a refresh button of sorts or generating/pulling a new or different set each time you select a hue.
We pondered doing that, but held off for now – right now the results are slightly different day to day. We generate a somewhat random set of releases for a given color, and cache that for 24h. People who come back the next day will get a bit different results to keep things interesting. But this isn’t a really good long term solution – pagination might be a good idea.
Future ideas that we are considering:
Filter by year (decades)
Filter by recent releases
Filter by genre
Each of these ought kick this up a few notches in usability.
I wonder if this could be used to sort listening history by color. Or to show all the colors in a MB collection. Maybe it could be used to recommend albums that you might like that would fill out the palette?
woah, i would love this! i’m weird and sort my bandcamp collection by hue so it’d be perfect for people who are the exact same type of weird person as me lol.
but seriously, awesome little project! i’ve had a lot of fun with it so far
