We all encounter a range of everyday problems in our lives, both large and small. At Wunderdog we’re no different, but we do have the advantage of being excellent problem solvers with some pretty advanced technical skills — helping us to find innovative answers to some of life’s tricky problems. In this blog series, we introduce the solutions our employees crafted as part of our open-source program.
A repetitive problem
We all like listening to music, and Spotify is pretty handy for that, right? For instance, on Spotify you can save albums to “Your Music”, which is a good way to keep track of your favorites. But a problem arises when you start having loads of them (I have over 300) because Spotify doesn’t let you search within the list. That’s annoying since it’s always the same tunes that come to mind first, meaning you start to listen to the same albums over and over again. A lot of gems you have saved get no attention at all and you end up hearing certain songs to death!
A searchable solution
After getting annoyed by this serious problem, I decided that there has to be some sort of solution that I could craft. I found out that Spotify has an API that allows you to fetch user data, so I coded a search tool and made a website where you log in with your Spotify account information. The website fetches your user data and all your saved music from your Spotify account and allows you to search within your saved albums.
Being able to search for music by title or artist was great, but I decided to go even further. I added genre tags to albums by searching for data from last.fm. Now I can search for “atmospheric black metal” or whatever I feel like listening to, and the website filters my music accordingly.
Thinking back to the initial problem of listening to the same songs over and over again I decided to also add how many times I’ve listened to each album on the website. Now I can search for tunes I haven’t listened to that much and avoid getting tired of the ones I listen to the most.
Problem solved
This has made listening to music a lot easier and added much more variety.
If you share the same problem, go ahead and check out my solution here — then code a similar one yourself or just start using mine!
This solution to an everyday problem was crafted by Arttu, a music lover, a sailing enthusiast, and a senior software developer at Wunderdog.
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