Music Radar
From Mugshot Developer Wiki
| Music Radar | |
 | |
| Design Process | |
| Current Phase: | Implement |
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| People | |
| Engineers: | Colin Walters, Havoc Pennington, Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Owen Taylor |
| Ethnographers: | Nobody |
| Designers: | Bryan Clark, Mike Langlie |
| Multi-Disciplinary: | Donald Fischer |
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| Blog: | |
| Bugzilla: | new, search |
| SVN: | /dumbhippo/trunk/server svn web |
Contents |
Define
Music Radar is centered around the idea of making it easy for users to share their music tastes and listening history, and to see what their friends are listening to, in new and interesting ways.
Ultimately we decided that we wanted the music sharing experience to have a few attributes:
- Playlists should be automatically tracked in the course of listening to music, instead of requiring users to resort to manual data entry
- Music sharing should have a live aspect to it; among other benefits there's a nice effect in that what someone is currently listening to can tell you a lot about their current frame of mind
- We should enable music sharing across service providers and in new contexts
Research
In looking at ways we could help people discover their friends' musical tastes, we learned a lot about streaming and peer to peer possibilities. Need to add links to those areas In the end, we found the only viable route to be sharing the information about music and not sharing the music itself.
Much of our observation for the final implementation was internal. We looked around at the way we listen to music, mostly at work while on our PCs.
During a session talking to some college students, we learned a lot about how poor college students are struggling to gain music and find new tunes to listen to. Well they aren't really struggling... but most students, even the computer illiterate, knew how to find other peoples music on the internal campus network.
Some of these students said that they never get a chance to listen to the radio, so they're out of touch with the pop culture of music. Many of them found new songs through TV shows that advertise the music they play during the show (almost every show on the WB does this).
When asked about streaming music to each other or DJing for each other, the students responded that they'd rather choose their own music and mostly wanted a larger library to choose from with a better way to find new songs they like in that library.
Ideate
With all this research under our belt, we set to figuring out some new ideas for music sharing:
- DJ for your friends at work
- Attrition of the DJ, vote in a new DJ when your friends' music choices are poorly rated
- Stream music over the local net (often limited but allowed by iTunes and other apps)
- Stream over the internet, where ever your friends are
- Allow friends to "borrow" songs, lock them down locally while friends listen to them
- Show off the genre's and bands people listen to
- Show off when someone buys new songs from iTunes
- Show off when someone adds new songs to their library (from any means)
- Help people browse their friends music collection and play songs from it
Prototype
We developed several rough wireframe prototypes and mockups to test out many of the interactions of our ideas.
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Choose
In the end, the only feasible solution we could work with was showing off genre and song information for friends to see and navigate. While some of our other prototypes are technically possible, we either didn't have all the resources needed to take them on or they would require us to only attack those problems and nothing else.
We decided to call this Music Radar as our intention was to give a subtle sense or others listening to music around you similar to the way radar gives proximity.
Implement
Implement is the current phase in this activity's design process
The code for Music Radar is split into two parts. One is the server system, and the other is the Mugshot Client. Take a look at our subversion documentation for details describing how to get the latest version of both.
When coding on this project please take a look at these style guides
