Last week I was invited by Oli Wood, and the guys from Codeworks, to give a day workshop on making Spotify apps at DIBI, the two track conference in Newcastle / Gateshead.

After a panicking hour to begin with where the college (the venue for the workshops) had blocked Spotify on their local network, we finally moved to the Codeworks office.

I’m mainly using this post to add some extra links for other people interested in making Spotify apps.

To begin with, I ran through the principles of Spotify apps and their API. The code used for this can be found here: https://github.com/sydlawrence/DIBI-Conf-Workshop

Spotify developer account login here: https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/apps/#developer-account

Spotify apps tutorial by @mager is here: https://github.com/mager/spotify-apps-tutorial

Spotify app concept submission is here: https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/apps/app-concept/

We also used The Echo Nest API which gives us all kinds of information about songs, including danceability and artist radios, as well as other recommendations based on artists / songs. API docs available here: http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/

I created Suggestify, which you can read yourself about how to make here: http://www.12devsofxmas.co.uk/2012/01/get-musical-by-building-a-spotify-application/

I really want to see what interesting ways people come up with to discover new music. I love finding new songs, and reckon there are some awesome things people can do to help music discovery. So why not mash together danceability into a spotify radio player. I want to see what you can do.

Tweet me (@sydlawrence) with what you end up making.

Last weekend saw Music Hack Day take over London’s Barbican Centre. While we couldn’t send anyone along from Ubelly, Syd Lawrence went along and was kind enough to do a writeup on the event…

This past weekend saw developers from all over the world flock to London for the third London Music Hack Day. Music Hack Day is  an event organised by the guys at Six Two Productions for developers to get together for 24 hours and make something awesome.

It’s where music based companies come to show off their latest developer tools and APIs to get developers excited and make stuff. The event is a sponsored event with all food and drink supplied to keep the developers topped up with caffeine and sugar to keep some of them going throughout the night before they collapse at the end of the demo party.

The demo party was held at the end of the weekend where a whopping 61 hacks were presented to an audience of attendees, sponsors and press invites. This time around it was right after Spotify announced their new app platform. So no surprise there were many hacks involving Spotify apps and there was a team from Spotify on hand to answer any questions developers might have while trying to create their first Spotify apps.

My top 2 hacks were:

• Notorious Siri was a iPhone 4S hack using Siri to rap the lyrics of a song.
• CTRL is an interactive music installation allowing you to add effects and synthesizers to any piece of music. By tilting two mobile devices (in this case, iPhones) the user can manipulate the audio easily, intuitively and without the need for prior musical knowledge.

For a list of all the hacks check out the wiki.

On a side note, many people often ask me what the point of a hack day is. It’s quite simple really. It’s all about making something cool. It’s a time to learn something new and be creative. Together I and Paul King created a Kinect controlled HTML5 game: Kinect Virtual Disco Deathmatch (Check out the video at the bottom). I had never hacked with a kinect before the weekend. But in less than 24 hours we had managed to create a pretty sweet kinect game and had loads of fun making it.

It is also the perfect time to speak to the developers behind the APIs when you find a bug or come across some poor documentation. You can literally work side by side with the guys making the tools you are trying to use.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr8pi0knapY&feature=plcp&context=C25d36UDOEgsToPDskLfTTsFxFZVhmOF2W1spTLs[/youtube]