It's a web app that finds songs with a specific tempo expressed in BPM (beats per minute). I created it after noticing that every other solution I found on the web wouldn't work well for me.
My gripes about other websites with BPM-searching options, e.g. jog.fm:
- They depend on a very small subset of tracks--not the full discography of artists.
- Only popular artists are in their selection.
- Some are just set playlists that don't change.
There is also software that analyzes all the audio files on your computer to show the tempo of files in your own collection, which is cool. But this is not very good for discovering new music that you haven't purchased and downloaded yet.
My app is pretty simple and lets you find a ton of songs in your target BPM. You just put in the name of an artist you like, and a target BPM. (180 BPM is commonly used for runners.) And then the app shows songs by that artist that match or are close to the BPM you chose. The results are color-coded to show how close each song is to the target BPM. Half-tempo results are also considered close, e.g. 90bpm matches to every other beat of 180bpm.
The code has a reliance on somebody else's Heroku-hosted service that was basically letting me call Spotify without credentials. It was a great deal while it lasted, but now that service is gone. So additional work would be needed to allow a user to authneticate with their own Spotify credentials via OAuth or whatever is required. And the app would have a requirement that the user also had a Spotify account.
I'm not interested in writing this functionality. But if someone else is, I will consult on the change and work with you on accepting your merge request.
The song database comes from Spotify. They have a great selection of songs and a sweet API for accessing them.
This app is grabbing a huge amount of data from Spotify. When you ask for some artists with big discographies like "Prince" or "David Bowie", data for thousands of tracks is downloaded and processed. Popular artists that have been around for decades, get their songs onto compilations, and multiple versions of their songs are made, e.g. remixes, edits. There are request limits imposed by Spotify, and I've taken a lot of care in making the API requests efficient and reducing the need to call Spotify APIs.
Queries are cached in the browser's local storage, so if you enter an artist and BPM a second time, you'll notice the screen update with results near instantly. Cached results go stale after a week, and a new query will be made at that point.
I've put this out into the world under the oh-so-permissive MIT license. Feel free to use the code for your own projects. I would appreciate bug reports and source code contributions.
The project isn't open to contributions at this point, other than the one I described under "Broken Call to Authenticate" above.
You can reach me on LinkedIn. I'll accept connections if you will just mention this project or some other shared interest in your connection request.