RAMA - Relational Artist MAps

RAMA is a Spotify Application for visualizing and interacting with networks of music artists. For the original RAMA web application see rama.inescporto.pt

RAMA for Spotify has been developed as part of the Media, Arts & Technologies research program coordinated by INESC TEC.

The Media Arts and Technologies project (MAT), NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000061, is financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 – O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and by national funds, through the Portuguese funding agency, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

Here are some previews of what this app does:

For now, we do not intend to make this application available on the Spotify App Store, so to run it you need to set it up first.

To open a downloaded app you need to Activate Spotify Developer account here: https://devaccount.spotify.com/my-account (no premium account needed).

The app has been tested in mac, windows and linux. Please report any issues you encounter.

Installation

Automagic installer (mac and linux only)

Execute the installer script.

$ curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/carsy/rama-spotify/master/install.sh | bash

You should now be in the app and seeing a graph thingy. If not, restart Spotify and then open the app by typing spotify:app:rama in the search bar.

Manual installer (windows, mac and linux)

These are the contents of the script:

$ mkdir ~/Spotify ; cd ~/Spotify
$ rm -rf rama
$ rm rama_v1.0.1.tar.gz
$ curl -L -O https://github.com/carsy/rama-spotify/releases/download/v1.0.1/rama_v1.0.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf rama_v1.0.1.tar.gz

You should now be in the app and seeing a graph thingy.

If not, restart Spotify (open the app by typing spotify:app:rama in the search bar).

Alternatively:

1. download the latest version of the app from here
2. extract the folder
3. create the Spotify folder if it doesn't exist already: "~/Spotify" (Mac OS X) or "My Documents\Spotify" (Windows).
4. copy the extracted folder to the Spotify folder.

Now open Spotify and type in the search bar:

spotify:app:rama

You should now be in the app and seeing a graph thingy.

If not, restart Spotify and then open the app by typing spotify:app:rama in the search bar.

Thank you for testing!

Releases

v1.0.1 - "Equalizer" bar hidden

• bugfixes: #61 and #48
• added checkbox for hidding/showing the "equalizer" bar - it causes Spotify to crash.

v1.0 - 1.0

• feedback button added
• echonest "powered by" logo added
• bugfix #47

v0.11 - Drop and draw

• Spotify items can now be dropped into the application to update the graph (closes #38)
• tags can now be selected (closes #40)
• bug fix on graph creation: some nodes where not being added.

v0.10.6 - GraphController bug fixes

• handling metadata errors

v0.10.5 - GraphController bug fixes

• when data is updated, the graph does not re-render

v0.10.2 - Tags menu bug fixes

• nodes inserted by expanding node were not being highlighted by tags

v0.10 - Tags menu

• Tags menu added
• Clicking on tags highlights the artists that have that tag
• Tags are retrieved from echonest (as well as for the artist menu)

v0.9.1 - Expand button bugfix

• expand button shown after expand.

v0.9 - Exploring the graph

• Expand control button added.

v0.8 - UX update

• Look and feel of nodes and buttons updated
• [bugfix] on double click node does not refresh graph
• new map button added to artist menu

v0.6 - Artist menu

• Artist menu added
• Click on an artist node to view its info on the menu

v0.5 - Artist track list

• Track list of current playing artist added.
• App name changed to only "rama"

v0.3 - Equalizer graph

• Equalizer added using spotify's buffer analyzer api

v0.2 - UI redesign

• UI updated to darker theme
• settings are kept when playing artist changes

v0.1.3 - Play tracks from artist node

• look and feel of the nodes updated
• on double click a node in the graph, top tracks of the artist are played

v0.1.2 - Settings Menu added

• settings menu added: depth, branching and treemode settings available
• title attributes on the options' labels give information as to what do the options do.

v0.1.1 - Graph creation updated

• graph depth and branchin factor now dynamic
• nodes are now black
• root node is highlighted from the others
• loading throbber added while graph is being created.

v0.1.0 - First Release

• graph depth 1 displayed on app load.

Authors

José Bateira (primary developer) Matthew Davies (INESC TEC) Marcelo Caetano (INESC TEC) Fabien Gouyon (INESC TEC)