A longer life for post-rock fans
I like to listen to post-rock. Unfortunately, post-rock bands tend to have very long names like 'Explosions in the Sky', 'God Speed you black emperor', and 'This will Destroy You'. I have a long commute and I will find that I am frequently risking my life trying to type a long band name into my music player. I wish Siri supported non-itunes players like Spotify, but until then I need a way to tell Spotify to play music by bands with long names. If I don't, I will die in a fiery crash on Route 3 in Lowell Mass. A horrible way to go. So this weekend at the Artists Hack I built something to solve this problem. It lets you play music in Spotify without having to type long artist names. Here's how it works.
I used Twilio to set up a phone number such that if you text it an artist name, it will respond with a spotify link to a song by that artist. You can add the phone number to your contacts as "music player", You can then use Siri in a dialog like so:
Me: Send a text to Music Player
Siri: What would you like it to say
Me: Explosion in the Sky
Siri: OK, I'll send it
A few seconds later I get a text message back with a link to a popular track by Explosions in the Sky. I tap the link and Spotify opens and plays the song. It is about as simple a hack as can be, but it solves a real problem for me. Here's the screenshot:
If you want to use it - send a text with the artist name (and nothing else) to 603 821 4328. The code is on github. Update ... much to my surprise this hack won two prizes at the hackathon - the Twilio 1st prize and the overall 3rd prize.