Trip Music Planner

Front page
Example of generated songs
Example of generated songs 2

Inspiration 🚌

Our inspiration came from our experience as students regularly riding on NJ Transit's buses and rails throughout New York and New Jersey. We wanted to make the travel experience more enjoyable and convenient while taking away the hassle of creating playlists - by combining travel planning and music curation into a single seamless experience!

What it does

The Trip Music Planner combines your NJ Transit bus journey with generated music curation. It helps you plan your route, estimates travel time, and creates a tailored music playlist for your ride. No more wasting time searching up songs for the next ride – every trip becomes an opportunity to enjoy new music!

How we built it

We leveraged React, JavaScript, HTML, and Material UI (MUI) to create our front-end, with Express and Prisma acting as our back-end for user registration/login. We used NJ Transit's Bus Routes & Stop ID's and Bus Schedules data sets to create a dynamic bus trip planner that estimates travel time. Using Python, we were able to extract different values from our data, such as route ID, trip ID, and travel time, that would ideally be integrated in our app and be able to fetch songs from a curated Spotify playlist that fits within the duration.

Challenges we ran into

While developing the Trip Music Planner, we faced many challenges in integrating and synchronizing data from both NJ Transit and Spotify APIs, and implementing it with our React app. We also had difficulties with collaborating through Github in the beginning and cloning our repositories and making edits into the same repository, but we eventually made it work. We planned to integrate MongoDB to store our data, and then fetch it with our back-end to display it on our web app through different algorithms that can personalize the songs, as well as plan them to fit within the trip. However, we were unable to finish within the time constraint and could not fully integrate the data into our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😄

We're proud to have successfully created a user-friendly platform that can create a randomized song playlist. We were also able to gain exposure to technologies we haven't previously used before, such as back-end development, data fetching, Pandas, MongoDB, and React.

What we learned

During development, we got insight into how long it takes to create and integrate back-end with front-end, along with data. This was our first Hackathon, and we underestimated the short time we had. We learned about the importance of planning ahead what components we want to create to be able to efficiently match them up with back-end schemas and routes. We also learned how to interpret data with Python and Pandas, which was something we were unfamiliar with.

What's next for Trip Music Planner

The future of the Trip Music Planner entails extending support to other transit systems like Rail and Light Rail. We will also focus on refining our integration of NJ Transit data within our web app by storing it in MongoDB rather than in local storage, and hosting/deploying our back-end and front-end possibly through AWS or other hosting services to offer real-time trip planning with accurate estimated travel times.