This Christmas holiday, the musical party game Hitster broke through as a real hype. At the time of writing, the game is sold out everywhere, even bol.com can’t supply it. A very fun game it is, where players have to guess songs and place them in time. A 90’s hit soon proves to be quite distinct from an evergreen from the seventies. This is just one version of a broad category of music games. For example, I myself also created a music bingo a few years ago.
The principle is simple. We hear a song and guess the title, artist and/or year of publication. To do this, an app is used that scans a QR code and plays the corresponding song without giving it away. In addition to the game modes offered in the commercial versions, there are countless other variations that can be invented. For example, creating a timeline, crossing off a bingo card or earning points. Unfortunately, the game from the store does not allow you to use your own selections of music, even though Spotify’s colossal music library is used in the background to play the songs. For these reasons, in addition to the current scarcity, it would be very nice if there was an open source variant.
An open source music game
There have certainly already been attempts. Reddit user BrickwallBudapest built guessmyplaylist.com that allows cards to be generated as a PDF from a Spotify playlist. It does not include a scanning app, but instructions for alternatives are provided. Unfortunately, this service charges the steep fee of €14.95 per playlist.
There are also true open source projects. For example, there is songseeker, including QR code generator as well as scanner. However, this uses YouTube and the songs have to be supplied in a spreadsheet. Also, the PDF generator is unfortunately provided only as a Python script. As is often the case, the ease of use of this open source solution is suboptimal. On forflutna.se/createqr the possibility is offered online to create cards for Spotify songs, but I have not been able to find an open source repository of this website.
So what is missing is a fully open source implementation based on Spotify playlists, including handy (web) applications to print and scan the QR codes, which can also be used by less technical users.
So: Let’s get to work then?
Update 16/01: This post has been continued in An open source song QR scanner.