Play music on Spotify by scanning and album cover with your webcam.
This project started as a personal pet project. It has been adopted by the if coding community as one of their hobby projects, and is currently actively being worked on.
When you place an album (cd, vinyl) cover in front (or underneath) the webcam, and press "scan", this program will take a photo, offer it to Google Vision API, and guestimate the corresponding Spotify URI, and tell Spotify to start playback.
Don't have the physical album? No worries! Print a QR code representing the album, and you're good to go.
There is a certain appeal to a physical music collection. Browsing through your personal collection, picking up the record that feels just right for the moment. Placing it on the record player, or shoving it in the cd player. Press play, sit back. Let the music roll over your.
How different with screens and Spotify. Sure, the collection is huge, and a recommender engine is also nice, but it misses the ritual of old.
This project aims to provide the middle ground between the two.
The current setup features a webcam, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.
Photorealistic rendering:
You can use this repository to host all new code and other related artifacts.
There are also two other repositories, where code is hosted that is already written.
- arduino-music-control: Hackish-but-working. Features Python code that reads the Arduino, controls the webcam (via fswebcam command), and Spotify code.
- qrgen: Want to make you own QR-code-album-labels? Now you can! Printer-ready.
Currently, the project is capable of scanning a QR code, and uses a manually constructed mapping (map.csv) to get the Spotify URI. It then plays the music.
Please see arduino-music-control for detailed instructions.
Brainstorm!
Some ideas:
- Google Vision API
- Automatically map search results to Spotify URI (via MusicBrainz? Discogs?)
- Hardware hacking (use an old record player as a base?)
- Soldering
- Add volume control via potmeter