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bloodhound-radio

"Pandora for Soundcloud": lets you create radio stations + playlists using Soundcloud's wonderful 'related tracks' algorithm. Stations are called 'scents' and you can create one from any of your liked tracks easily, or search for a track to create a scent from.

The fun part: while listening to a station, you can press 'seed' on any track, and it'll blend in some related tracks into the list of tracks you have yet to hear. It's really fun--try it out.

Currently accessible here on Heroku; expect it to move if I start developing this project more seriously.

stack

Written in Rails and React using the fantastic reactjs/react-rails gem. Uses NPM inside the rails pipeline to hook into the ecosystem of NPM modules developed for React.

prerequisites

  • Make sure you have Ruby and bundler installed. If so, skip this step. If not, either install ruby through your system package manager (brew, apt-get, etc) or use rvm.io. Make sure ruby -v and bundler -v both return a version number. If ruby does but bundler doesn't, run sudo gem install bundler or follow instructions at bundler.io.

  • Make sure you have Node.js installed. This is so we can use NPM to hook into the extensive ecosystem around React--no node server is used in this project.

I strongly suggest using RubyMine as an IDE; all frontend code is written in React with ES6 and JSX, which RubyMine supports strongly out of the box (as far as I know), and of course RubyMine supports Ruby on Rails nearly flawlessly. If you want to choose a different IDE or a non-IDE editor, bear in mind these things:

  • Most of the frontend Javascript code is written using JSX, which allows you to mix HTML directly into Javascript (in a nutshell) like var element = <p>Element</p>;.

  • The Javascript in this project is compiled at an ECMAScript 6 language level, which has a lot of syntactical departures from plain Javascript: lambdas (array.map(element => element.variable)), template literals, etc.

setup

  1. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/dennislysenko/bloodhound-radio

  2. Create a SoundCloud app using the SoundCloud developer dashboard.

  3. Create a .env file with the following contents:

    SOUNDCLOUD_CLIENT_ID=YOUR_APP_CLIENT_ID
SOUNDCLOUD_SECRET=YOUR_APP_SECRET
REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0

    Naturally, you must replace the YOUR_APP_* placeholders there with the client ID and app secret that you got in step 1.

  4. Install a redis server. Here is the official guide on how to get quickly set up with Redis. (The server uses redis to cache track metadata to avoid making unnecessary API calls to SoundCloud.)

  5. Run bundle install in the directory where you cloned the project to download all ruby dependencies.

  6. Run npm install in the directory where you cloned the project to download all javascript dependencies.

  7. Run bundle exec rails server to start the server and navigate to localhost:3000 in your browser.

contributing

Feel free to fork and make changes. After you make a change, run through your code once more and make sure it's well documented. Make a pull request. I'll ask you to clean up your code if necessary. (Of course, what I wrote so far isn't stellar code structure, but now that it's public I need to start keeping it clean going forward.)

Don't forget to use ES6 language features wherever appropriate, in line with the rest of the codebase.

As always, before making a huge change, please raise an issue so we can level about which files you should and shouldn't be touching and hopefully figure out a system where my development won't undercut yours. Significant contributions over time will of course make me consider making you a full-fledged collaborator.