#youtify

I think I might have one of the best jobs in the world, last weekend the Official.fm Labs team went to Music Hack Day: Amsterdam, and I must say, I had a most wonderful time.

If you have a chance to ever visit a MHD, you really should, the investment is only time and the rewards can be immense, for me, that reward was meeting some really nice people

I met some old and new friends, Per and Kalle from Youtify were there hacking and did some great progress adding profile pages and allowing you to follow other people's playlists. If you haven't been using Youtify for your Youtube music needs, you should try it, it is really nice.

The guys from Zvooq, who in addition to being awesome people, seem to have great ideas on how to improve the situation for artists and music consumers. I hope I'll be able to test their Zvooq soon, but for now it seems to only be available in Russia and a few other countries.

And a lot of other people, I unfortunately didn't get the name of most of them, but they were really nice and one of the most interesting things about Music Hack Day is that people of significantly different skill sets interact with each other. I learned a bit about music theory, and I think I gave some nice hints about what I know.

The location, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, was a fantastic venue, I didn't see all of the exhibits, but they seem to be doing some serious hacking even when we're not around so if you have the opportunity, visit them and take the tour.

The organizers, Roeland P. Landegent and his team, deserve credit as well. It was a well organized event, and all our hacker needs were fulfilled.

The only bad thing about the whole thing, I got stuck digging a deep rabbit-hole for myself, so I won't release my work yet (I plan to convert it into an XPCOM component as soon as I get some time away from schoolwork.) But it is essentially an implementation of the 'Simple Audio' API that I wrote earlier, but now it is renamed Mio (澪) because 'Simple Audio' didn't give the right vibe, the API isn't designed to be simple, it is designed to be flexible and powerful.

The rest of the Official.fm Labs team were working on a sort of voice controller for games, where through pitch and intensity you controlled your character. They were having some problems with the short-time Fourier transform, but otherwise I think they got most of it nailed down now, they managed to get a demo working at least.

I spent the weekend at the TBD 2012 Hackathon at Djäkne Kaffebar in Malmö.

It was a great event full of great people. And even though it was the first event in the series, it was a really well organized event in almost every way, the food was great, the location was good, the wifi was not too bad etc.

I really hope that it can become a regular event. From my perspective Malmö and Lund seems to be getting a lot hotter when it comes to software development, and these kinds of event are a really nice way to meet people and brings a lot of value for all developers in the region.

During the event I mostly worked on Youtify, a service for being able to consume music from the cloud in a more structured manner. I added an Official.fm backend for it, and fixed some small bugs.

Meeting the Youtify guys was a wonderful opportunity, both the service and the team are great, and it felt great to be able to help them a bit, and I am excited about being able to meet them again at Music Hack Day - Amsterdam.

During the time not spent coding I mostly talked to other people, and one of the most interesting conversations during the weekend was with filmmaker Simon Klose, who is currently finishing a documentary about the Pirate Bay called The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard, but at TBD he was instead trying to revolutionize the way documentaries are consumed.

The proof of concept that his group produced, called the 'Linkontrol' intended to improve the experience of the film by combining the film and hypermedia in a really slick way and was quite awesome to say the least. It used popcorn.js and you can read a bit about it at his blog.

A mere textual description does not really describe the concept, or demo, and if you meet any of them, do try to get a demo, it was quite exquisite, and took the audience award of course (they really deserved it.)

But there were two small things that were a bit odd, making the atmosphere a bit tense.

First, during the presentations, one team called 'Tunafish' forced us to take down the stream and 'sign' a verbal non-disclosure agreement since their idea was 'secret'. The other thing that annoyed me was that the big prize was money.

I do not really mind people working on commercial projects on hackathon, I do not even mind if they just move their work there. But I kind of expect people that work on secret stuff to keep any secret details secret by simply not telling anyone about them instead of holding a presentation about it, and then force people to not tell others.

About the money, I wish they had just converted it to some kind of token or luxury that you usually do not buy. A nice bottle of wine, chocolate, medals, t-shirts, or maybe some sort of experience for the winning team. When you do something for money, it feels a lot like work, and I am not at a hackathoon to work, I am there to have a good time.

Not enough of your kind of music on Spotify? Find searching and playlisting on Youtube clunky? 

Enter youtify, a Spotify-like skin for youtube that allows you to build playlists, search whilst playing a video etc.