airwaves

Starting screen of Android app
Play queue, filled with dummy data. It's supposed to be synced with the web clients too.
List of local files
Main screen of the Electron app

Inspiration

Whenever we are at a party and want to play music, we always find that no one person's phone/laptop is loud enough to fill the room. We wanted to make a service that can help us fill the room with sound through people's devices.

What it does

The service detects music stored locally on each device, and has a shared synchronized playlist between devices. Every device can add and remove songs from the playlist (even those not available locally on other devices), and control the music. This allows many devices to be synced together and play the same music at the same time, effectively creating a distributed speaker network in the room.

How we build it

Airwaves consists of 2 parts, the client and the server. The server manages the synchronization of playback and files. The client runs locally in a native app and reads local music files and communicates with the server to handle playback. We also made an Android client app.

Main tech used:

node.js - evented I/O for the backend
electron - framework for building desktop GUI applications
jQuery - javascript library for ease of development
handlebars - templating engine
howler - javascript audio library
Socket.IO - real-time communication framework
Minio - files storage DB
Redis - synchronization of groups

Challenges we ran into

Browsers on mobile devices only allow audio to be played as a result of an user interaction like a touch gesture. Thus, a purely web client is not feasible and an android app had to be built. Furthermore, timing is sensitive to even the littlest of prior processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figured out how to use electron to create native desktop apps, which will definitely be useful in the future. We overcame most of the difficulty in multi-device synchronization and managed to implement syncing.