
Serendipity – When 2 people listen to the same song at the same time - gflandre
http://kylemcdonald.net/serendipity/
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eatitraw
Warning: it starts playing music automatically. Be careful to adjust your
volume so you don't bother anyone around you.

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parennoob
Cannot upvote this enough. If the creator of this is listening, for Cthulhu's
sake require some input from the user before blaring out sound at them. Was
interested, but closed as soon as a tab started making loud noises without me
asking it to.

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gherkin
It's really not that bad. Click the "mute" icon in the top-left of the screen
and go on with your life.

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lucaspiller
This is actually a pet peeve on mine, I feel it's akin to people playing music
loudly on their phones in public. I like people to respect my silence.

I'd appreciate it if web sites asked me before blurting out music - it seems
with HTML5 people have forgotten the annoyance of Flash banner ads.

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moskie
While this data is interesting enough on its own, the map animations are even
cooler. The transitions from one location pair to the next are mesmerizing,
and can provide some really cool perspectives of the globe. Great execution on
that.

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kcimc
thanks! all credit goes to the developers of d3.js though, i wouldn't have
considered these projections if not for the example here
[http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3763057](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3763057)

~~~
the_cat_kittles
i think all the stuff mike bostocks does is absolutely legendary- to the
(probably few) people who haven't seen his website, check out
[http://bost.ocks.org/mike/](http://bost.ocks.org/mike/)

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ahnberg
Pro-tip: press space whenever you hear something you like and the song will
continue playing, and you have a good chance to catch it. Also, clicking
anywhere on the screen (while paused or not) takes you to the active song in
Spotify.

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pimlottc
The song also keeps playing when the tab is in the background.

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johnchristopher
It stops playing after ~20 secondes for me. Then a ~5 seconds silence gap and
then it picks up something new.

When I select the active tab it cycles through locations every ~3-5 secondes.

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ZeroGravitas
Isn't this synchronicity, rather than serendipity?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity)

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owenversteeg
I wonder what you call it when two people listen to Synchronicity (by the
Police) at the same time :)

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bch
It might be ironic, but not Ironic.

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taeric
Neat and all.... but with the beauty of "radio" one could basically light up a
crapton of folks in any given area all listening to the same song.

I remember back when I delivered pizzas, it was not uncommon for most of us
drivers to all be humming the same song as we are getting stuff inside, since
we all listened to the same stations.

If it was a really good song ending as I got back to the store, it was not
uncommon to find that I waited it out in the parking lot along with at least
two other drivers. :)

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joshvm
Radio isn't selective though, you don't make the decision what to play. It's
more like the coincidence that you hit play on the same song exactly as the
radio DJ does.

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billmalarky
Kyle McDonald has a lot of cool projects. Check out this one
[http://vimeo.com/29348533](http://vimeo.com/29348533) using the open source
Facetracker library (built by Jason Saragih and maintained by Kyle).

Pretty friendly guy, helped me out via email with some questions I had when I
was playing around with facetracker.

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iLoch
I'm finding the pause button doesn't react in time for me to catch the song
most of the time. By the time I realize I like what I'm hearing it's already
too late to pause it. An adjustment for time per song would be great.

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CamperBob2
Yeah, the dwell time is ridiculously short. A way to slow it down would make
all the difference in the world.

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kcimc
usability isn't my strength, so this is all very helpful feedback. thanks!

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paul9290
Cool, how about 2 or more people listening to the same audio in sync on their
different Internet devices, Spotify?

Together creating a stereo system with friends & or those in the crowd around
them.

Anyone else interested in such a feature?

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driverdan
That's what Turntable.fm was for. It failed :(

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paul9290
huh Turntable.fm did not sync audio playback between multiple Internet devices
like i.e. SpeakerBlast does...

[http://vimeo.com/71647538](http://vimeo.com/71647538)

Turntable was definitely a slick site, yet there was a lot of interaction
needed and personally I got tired of having need to interact to listen to
music. Listening to music for me is more a passive past time.

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yincrash
Yes, audio was synced between listeners (devices). If you jumped in a room for
example, playback would start at the point everyone in the room is at, and
people would comment on various parts of the music at the same time.

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shalmanese
Every song selected was in English. I'm not sure if this is because it's built
so only English songs show up or because English has become the defacto global
language for music.

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simias
There's probably a selection bias because spotify is not equally popular
everywhere around the world. The majority of the matches seem to fall in the
USA and other english speaking countries as far as I can see.

But even beyond that, American are so good at exporting their cultural
products I'm pretty certain that american music is the most popular
international music. I mean, even in non-english speaking countries many
(most?) new bands sing in english to try and emulate them.

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cheshire137
Very annoying that it started playing music by itself.

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aparadja
Based on a few minutes of observation, Ed Sheeran is the most popular artist
in the world.

Is there any sophistication behind the sound clip selection? Just a certain
static point in each song, or some kind of algorithm to get to a recognisable
part?

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kcimc
the clips are spotify's preview mp3s, which are selected at random from the
song. i know at least one very clever person at spotify who is trying to
extract the 'hook' or 'recognisable part', and it worked really well last time
i listened.

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PaulJulius
As the music started to play I reached to pause the music I already had
playing, but then I realized that it was paused automatically by Spotify.
That's a pretty cool feature that they have - very well integrated.

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heydenberk
It's DRM, actually. I agree it's a useful feature sometimes — until you want
to leave music playing for your partner in your living room while you listen
to music and cook dinner in the kitchen.

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netvarun
Off-topic: Could the admins change the link to point to the final, redirected
url -
[https://www.spotify.com/us/arts/serendipity/](https://www.spotify.com/us/arts/serendipity/)
?

Anyways, fantastic execution! Great visualization. My only super-minor
complaint is the fade in/fade out could be a little less abrupt when the songs
change :)

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barbs
I'm in Australia, and the link took me to
[https://www.spotify.com/au/arts/serendipity/](https://www.spotify.com/au/arts/serendipity/).
Not sure what difference it makes, but if it's redirecting based on region, it
might be best to leave it as is.

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theworst
I've always thought this would be cool for e.g. a cross-country team, or
friends running together, to have.

Imagine incorporating a PA system so a coach could talk to and track his
athletes on all their training runs...

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owenversteeg
If you want to keep a track playing, just hit ctrl-page up to switch to
another tab. It'll play for the track's full 30 seconds.

Or you can click the background to listen to it on play.spotify.com.

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Trufa
A missing feature would be to be able to see a list of the songs that were
played, I missed a couple of songs I'd want to listen a little bit more.

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Grue3
That's nothing, last.fm would show who is listening to the same song _you_ are
listening to right now.

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madaxe_again
I call this phenomenon "radio".

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huuu
While listening to this it made me realize how much music is compressed
nowadays. I think this is a bad trend.

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cmstoken
Wow, what an awesome project. Would be cool to read how it was made.

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kcimc
it was built with storm for processing all the listening data in realtime,
node.js for relaying udp messages from storm to websockets, and d3.js for
rendering the map along with the spotify web api for grabbing all the artist
data, cover images, song previews.

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shangbang
Any chance Spotify will provide a realtime API for tracks you have listened
to?

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ris
Jesus, people have an awful taste in music.

