Ressette

Today, sentimental value is lost in the music-sharing process. Ressette revives the classic cassette mixtape by tying a playlist to an NFC card, enabling friends to share music authentically.

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Inspiration

With modern streaming platforms and the dissolution of physical media for music, much of the sentimental value of creating your very own mixtape for someone special to you has been lost. We hope to make music sharing more personal and authentic by pulling heavily from the technology and aesthetics of a long gone era of Sony Walkman Cassette Players, to revive the special relationships that can be made with tangible, sharible music.

What it does

Ressette connects people to each other musically through a retro feel by allowing us to gift each other physical “cassettes”—powered with NFC cards—with a handpicked playlist that can be streamed on another device with a simple tap. Combining the classic cassette controls of fast forward and rewind with an intentionally grainy sound filter, Ressette enables us to once again look forward to the pleasant surprise of discovering the songs waiting for us on a physical mixtape from friends and loved ones.

How we built it

Working from a basic webdev template, we put together a visualization of what the final product would look like. We used Python scripting knowledge to create a YouTube Scraper, building on existing libraries to enable entire playlists to be downloaded as mp3 files. We undertook exhaustive research into Firebase APIs which would serve as our media backend for our webservice.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into difficulties trying to integrate the various aspects of our software spanning the full stack, as reconciling the various frameworks from the Python YouTube scraper, to the Firebase media repository, to the HTML/CSS/JavaScript live webpage, proved to be an task beyond the scope of this hackathon. We had some issues working with the audio files and getting them to flow from YouTube playlist to Ressette.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of four main features that make Ressette unique and innovative. First is that instead of using YouTube playlist, which interrupts with ads, we developed a program that automatically downloads videos in a YouTube playlist into mp3 on a local device. Second accomplishment is that we transferred these local mp3 into the server using firebase as a backend so that users can share their mixtape with significant others. Thirdly, our retro cassette design of web GUI enhances the retro sentiment. Lastly, we are proud to think of using NFC card as a physical medium to share digital mixtape.

What we learned

We learned the beauty of the retro products, which bring sentimentals that do not exist in the modern digital world. By having a physical presence of a music mixtape that connects to your phone, friends, couples, or any people can share an unforgettable memory. As it was our first Hackathon, we learned how it is like to design and develop a product in a timed condition, while communicating in a team setting.

What's next for Ressette

Integrating the three aspects of the software into one seamless, server-hosted solution accessible by mobile app. Creating a system for users to buy custom NFC cards with links to their own playlists.

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