[link] http://soundscape.online/
Soundscape is a full-stack web application inspired by popular online music applications such as Bandcamp, Last.fm, and Soundcloud. However, instead of playing popular music, Soundscape serves as an online platform to explore, upload, and share ambient and natural sounds. It utilizes Ruby on Rails on the backend, a PostgreSQL database, and React.js with a Flux architectural framework on the frontend.
All Soundscape content is rendered on the same static page. Components mount and unmount as necessary all through user interaction. This design allows the audio player to remain active and unaffected even while navigating through the site.
Soundscape supports an audio player built on-top of React-Player. The player supports play, pause, stop, mute, and draggable seeking. In conjunction with a playlist component, is also keeps a record of tracks in the queue that allow responsive next and back capability. Playlists are able to be built up through ease of use one-press buttons that add 5 randomized sample tracks from one of the eight soundscape categories or, for the more detail focused, manually by utilizing search, sort, and filter functionality to create the perfect, curated, playlist.
Soundscape boasts powerful filtering and search functionality to find the perfect track. Through a combination of soundscapes, tags, and artists, users are able to filter through the database through a chain of Activerecord relations on the backend. On top of this, Soundscape allows the ability to search within these results with an input field that matches Title and Description columns in the Tracks database. This flexibility allows searches ranging from all tracks tagged as calm under the ocean, rain, wind, and forest soundscapes or as specific as looking for a city track by a known artist that has tags of 'busy', 'loud', 'sharp', 'voices', and 'rumbling' that contains the string "recording of a carnival in Morocco" in the description.
Often, you don't know what the title of the sound you're looking for will be -- but you know how to /describe/ it. Soundscape implements a tagging system to tackle and streamline the searching process. A Tagging join table works as the mediator linking Tracks and Tags. Tags are able to be added and edited through during Track creation and editing.
More than just providing a clean interface to listen to ambient sounds, Soundscape is built around the concept of sharing. Utilizing Cloudinary, users can easily upload their own sounds and efficiently add them to the database. Users can also download any track hosted for their own personal use. Think of Soundscape as a sharing platform that lets you interact with the world at an aural level.
Soundscape has a roster of features -- but there is always room to build. I intend to continue to iterate on Soundscape turning it into a truly comprehensive application.
Currently, users have a user page that displays the tracks they have uploaded. I want to build upon this, adding multitude of user stats utilizing backend database queries. Provide users with incentive to find and upload new sounds, and serve as a platform for the sound-enthusiast community. Beefed up profiles, Likes, Friends, and models for discovering similar Artists are intended steps in this direction.
Users should be able to rate tracks, and this feature could be added to the search system. Other improvements to filtering to be implemented include sorting by downloads, uploads, and new additions.