The human touch still matters for API platforms.
At ITP Camp this year, I’m really happy to have scratched the itch to build this.
I call it Collxn Pulse. It detects what you’re playing on your turntable and emits a listening history to the web.
While building, I tested a number of audio fingerprinting APIs. It turns out the one I went with won because of the simplest thing.
After I signed up and started making API calls, an actual human emailed me asking if I needed anything.
Well, actually I did.
See, music identification APIs make it pretty simple to get what you need if you’re playing a digital audio file.
Records and turntables are much more unpredictable environments. What sounds the same to you and me can have a ton of microimperfections: dust, warping, speed, gain issues, dirty needles, and so on. All of that makes a match harder.
I noted this to the human on the other end, and they hooked me up with an undocumented experimental flag to make the matches more forgiving.
This was the key unlock. There was still a lot to do on my side, but getting the API to even attempt matches was the difference between Collxn Pulse being a viably demoable project or not.
In other news, ITP Camp always goes by so fast. What an amazing month. I’m creatively recharged and so ready to make things and jam with other humans.