Wavenique

You may skip the boring first half until you see the Wavenique logo, but why would you?

Story telling

When I started listening to music again back in 2010, I made use of YouTube playlists. If you read my Spotify application critique, you would know that I like to listen to other renders of songs I love: I am a sucker for piano instrumentals, I love hearing how others cover the songs, I adore live performances, and best of all - hearing my favourite songs in a medley.

For those who listen to mandarin songs, let me introduce you to this medley produced by a local:

Initially, I ripped music off my friends' albums, then listened on FM radio, and also used KKBox and Spotify for a while. These were only good for discovery of new songs, and offered next to nothing of what I described above.

During National Service (NS), I realized I could probably develop a web service that does what I want, especially since I did a little bit of game modding and tinkering in PHP, so I have the necessary skill set to do so. Time was limited in NS, as such development only really began a few months before university. The project then can be viewed on my Github, and it should be pretty obvious from the readme that that was when I first made use of Vagrant. Ruby on Rails was awesome to use, though writing tests was a (fun) chore. I suck at finishing things I start... naturally I was not even close to completing it when I stopped after matriculation.

Still, what was it about?

Simply put, I wanted to be able to properly categorize the music available for streaming on the web. The tagging of artists, music and type would be powered by people, a.k.a. crowdsourced. The ability to convert your playlist from one containing just normal songs to one that contains only covers, or one that contains only instrumentals was the original main selling point of the webapp. In fact, in almost all my academic interviews, I brought this idea up, sharing it shamelessly despite knowing that I would likely never implement it.

Another possible aim of Wavenique is to blur the distinction between original artists and cover artists. And if all goes well, the capability to display and watch a live performance recorded in many different angles simultaneously... woah.

Fast forward to CS3216

Again, if you read Brace yourself, you would know I worked on an idea I wanted to develop during Assignment 3. In fact, I was considering whether to pitch "Wavenique" or the idea behind Feedeorite during my application to CS3216. I will take this chance to mention that I am very thankful to have been accepted into the course, or both ideas may never have seen the light of day.

Lovely logo by Shixian and Wudi

Try Wavenique

If you are reading this, our team has already released the "minimum viable product (MVP)" for Wavenique on www.wavenique.com. Go ahead and try it, and let us know your comments, opinions and suggestions.

Progress

I would say that the progress of our final project is both fast and slow... Xuanyi has managed to mine and extract data that consists of more than 150k artists and over 3 million music tracks: an amazing feat. Otherwise, development speed is not ideal - we kept delaying our MVP dates, haha - as, like Feedeorite, there is a huge reliance on data on external sources, plus the structure of the data relationships requires a lot of thought and careful planning.

STePS and beyond

We are going to showcase Wavenique on 19 November in COM1 during 5th STePS!

I suppose, regardless of the results, now that Wavenique is a product of its own, we are likely going to continue development even after CS3216. I sure am looking forward to testing, continuous integration and code refactoring on this beautiful mess of hacked out code.

Wavenique would have simply remained as an ambitious dream without this opportunity, so once more, I would like to thank CS3216, and especially Shixian, Xuanyi and Wudi for being willing to work on this idea together!