Rdio Blog

Rdio engineering recently embarked on their fourth quarterly Hack Day. This is a great opportunity for the team to cook up some cool product ideas and build something fun directly into the product or outside of it using the Rdio API. We’re really excited to share a few of these great accomplishments. Think you’ve got an awesome idea for next Hack Day as well as the engineering chops to build it? Rdio is hiring!

WEB AND DESKTOP APP

Let’s start with some hacks on the core product set. Rdio is available on your web browser or downloadable as a Windows or Mac application.

Buddy System
Julia Chaves built tracking features so that you receive a free month of Rdio whenever a certain number of friends you’ve invited to join Rdio become subscribers.

OSX Rdio Notifications
Jimmy O'Neill added functionality to the Mac desktop application. When someone shares an item with you, it now shows up in the OSX Mountain Lion notification center.

Employee Directory
Jason Norris continued work on his employee directory features from the last Hack Day. An employee info section to profile pages on Rdio was added — and, as a bonus, so was a much desired feature to www.bwaaamp.net so that it can now be installed to your OSX command line.

Heavy Rotation Hatin’
Ryan Nordman added a remove function to Heavy Rotation to eliminate albums you don’t like without unfollowing people. Manually purge certain albums from your Heavy Rotation by clicking an X button on the album art. Special thanks to Bri Hunziker who provided the icon design.

MOBILE

Rdio lets you take your music with you everywhere. Here are some hacks that were done on Rdio’s suite of mobile apps.

Offline Search
Raul Agrait added the ability to search your synced Collection while your phone is in offline mode on the mobile app.

Location Tracking
R. Kevin Nelson added an optional setting into the iOS app that, when enabled, shares your location when you play a song by using your phone’s GPS. This data would be used by Rdio’s evil data lords for nefarious purposes — or, it would be aggregated into interesting stats on what’s popular in a specific neighborhood of your city.

Remote Player Push
Brett Duncavage worked on functionality to push the master player to another app — including web, desktop, and mobile — from any device that is logged into your Rdio account. No more running into the other room if you want Rdio to play on your stereo!

Better Android Notification Tray Controls
Taylor Perkins improved the Android notification system so that controls remain visible when the music is paused. Larger notifications are implemented on Android devices that support it.

DEVELOPER TOOLS

Some of the team looked inwards and created these hacks to make our engineering team’s day to day lives easier.

Code Review Activity Graphs
Craig Kimerer built a stats dashboard pulling from our code review and bug tracking tool, Phabricator. The dashboard shows stats on who has commented, accepted, and requested changes on patches. It includes a Wall of Shame that features engineers who have not reviewed a patch in the past week.

Rdiobot 2.0
Leslie Chong improved Rdiobot (our Skype bot) by adding the ability to interact with the Skype bot and query it for information. You can now ask Rdiobot for build status or about a specific test to see whether it has failed in the past or not.

Slow Queries Graph
Matt Erkkila created a reporting graph that shows an automated summary of errors and slow queries for all Rdio’s postgres databases. This helps us quickly determine which database queries need the most improvement.

ANALYTICS

Some of the engineers delved into Rdio’s data stores and mined the information for some interesting, new insights.

Zip Code Top Charts
Jonathan Klobucar and Mike Smith teamed up to sift through our play data in order to show popular music by region based on subscribers’ billing zip codes.

Predictive Taste Profiling
Matt Crocker gathered data together to predict the kind of music people like based on their age, gender, and location. He presented a new onboarding flow that suggests music to users when they first join Rdio by using this data to create a predictive profile.

Radio Smoothing
Rob Ferguson tweaked the Collection radio station to better select songs that were similar in genre or mood. He also created an analysis tool that shows you other users who have similar Collections. Lasty, he implemented a feature that lets you save a recent playthrough of a station on Rdio into a playlist to capture the music you just heard.

Influencer Graph
Jim Fleming made an influencer graph which shows a user’s influence score with their followers. Users received a higher score if they played music shortly before another person in their network.

Annual Retrospective
Brian Ferrell created a page of stats and graphs which showcases a user’s listening habits over the course of the last year such as your favorite artists and songs as well as the amount you listened to each over the course of the year.

API

The Rdio API enables you and other clever people to invent great new ways for listeners to discover, collect, share, and play music. These hacks generally don’t require any privileged insider information about the Rdio service. You can get more info about the Rdio API here.

Showd.io
Anthony Taranto and Netta Marshall worked on improvements to show data for Showd.io, their project from the last Hack Day. This web app displays nearby concerts in a grid based on your Collection data.

Discoversong
Eugene Efremov further refined his Discoversong service. It now works on Windows Phone, and integrates with Soundhound through Twitter. Discoversong allows you to quickly add a song from Shazam, Soundhound, and other services to an Rdio playlist. Test it out for yourself here.

Collection Tags
Ian Gilman combined Rdio’s Collection data with Last.fm data to show Last.fm tags on albums from your Collection. This allows you to browse your Collection by tags. You can try it here.

Multiple 2D Collections
Scott Merritt created a web app that gives a more detailed view by album that focuses on the playlists which use the album and the album’s listeners. It also features the ability to have multiple Collections and these Collections allow you to use a 2D grid view where you can layout the album art spatially on the grid.

Rdio Firehose
Alex Gaynor and Jimmy Krehl worked together to create a new API method that would output every song play on Rdio in a constant stream. They built in a few filters demonstrating the feature’s usefulness such as displaying the most popular song in the last few minutes, hours, or days.

It's been quite some time since Rdio's first and second Hack Days but the engineering team gathered again to create some wild and wonderful hacks using the Rdio API. This third Hack Day produced some awesome results — ranging from social features like compatibility scores to handy hacks like playlist cleanup. Here’s a brief summary from the team of some of the projects they created.

API HACKS

The Rdio API enables music enthusiasts to invent great, new ways for listeners to discover, collect, share and play music. These hacks generally don’t require any privileged insider information about Rdio. Find more info about the Rdio API here.

iOS Collection Browser
Ian Gilman created an alternative Collection browsing view that works on the iOS web browser. It displays album art for the items in your Collection and provides a means to sort them. Selecting an album launches the Rdio app and plays the album. Try it for yourself here.

Weather Generated Playlist
Chris Beale made a playlist integration with the Rdio API and The Echo Nest data to create mood-based playlists derived from the current weather and temperature.

Filtrotron
Ryan Nordman wrote a playlist control application. The app helps you manage a large playlist of new music by providing buttons that allow you to move tracks into a favorites playlist or delete them. The app is accessible here.

Discoversong
Eugene Efremov added new features for his Discoversong Rdio app built with the API. Discoversong works by integrating Shazam, SoundHound, MusiXmatch, VCast SongID, or Sony Ericsson TrackID to identify a song and connect with Rdio to add the track to a playlist. The hack was built by sending a digestible email that would then use Rdio’s API to search for an Rdio library match and add it to your playlist. Try it now.

Recently Played Artists Graph
Alex Gaynor's app graphs the relative amount of time you spent listening to each played artist in the past few days. Enter your username and check it out for yourself.

Playlist Cleanup
Raul Agrait created a cleanup tool that will scour your playlists for Rdio tracks that may be unavailable in your region, and quickly provide a search method that lets you find other versions of the track to replace it.

Concert Listings
Netta Marshall from Rdio’s design team and Anthony Taranto from the mobile team collaborated on a feature that displays concert listings based on artists in your Collection and Heavy Rotation.

SOCIAL FEATURES

Rdio is better with friends so here are some hacks that were created by Rdio engineers to add functionality into the social aspects of our service.

Sharing Users
Julia Chavez created a feature that allows you to share user profiles in a similar way you share songs and albums with your friends on Rdio. This lets you suggest influential people that you think your friends would enjoy following.

Employee Section
Jason Norris added an employee section to the user profile data in Rdio accounts so that Rdio could double as an internal employee directory.

Last.fm and Compatibility Scores
Last.fm stores your listening history which can be computed into a music taste compatibility score. Joshua Uziel created an integration with Last.fm to display compatibility scores between you and users you follow, as well as a way to recommend new users to follow based on Collection similarities.

Who to Follow Using Heavy Rotation
Rdio is even better if you follow people with similar taste in music. Drew Bazan wrote a code to look through all the albums in your Heavy Rotation and suggest the albums' top listeners for you to follow.

Heavy Rotation Groups
Craig Kimerer added a new feature to group users you follow into separate Heavy Rotation views. You can put people who are inclined to certain genres of music together. — for example, create a jazz group or bucket all your angsty emo friends together to stop polluting your Heavy Rotation!

MOBILE HACKS

Rdio lets you take your music anywhere by using our mobile apps. The following hacks were created for our mobile applications.

Sending Remote Control
Brett Duncavage and Adam Lickel utilized the remote control feature, which allows you to control the Rdio app on a computer with a mobile device, and vice versa. They tweaked the feature so that you can send the music playing from the device in your hand to another device without having to move an inch.

Reordering Playlist Contents on Mobile
Taylor Perkins added a feature to Rdio for Android that allows you to reorder the contents of your playlists from the mobile app.

MISCELLANEOUS HACKS

The creations below are some handy hacks that make for a slick Rdio experience.

Log Viewer With Sentry
James Cline worked on a practical hack for Rdio's engineering team. He integrated Rdio into Sentry's log in, a tool that allows you to group, sort, and filter log messages for easy viewing.

Lyrics Display
No more misheard song lyrics: Adam Polselli, from Rdio’s design team, mashed up a song lyrics display into the Rdio web app.

Notification Toast
Matt Carroll added notification pop-ups to the Rdio web player so that you get a confirmation message which slowly fades out whenever you add an item to a playlist or your Collection.

Rdio Links in Web Reviews
Leslie Chong wrote a Greasemonkey script to insert Rdio links into web articles. When looking at music reviews on an external site, you can click on any of the conveniently placed links to listen to the artist or album in Rdio at the same time.