eric-carlton / name-that-song

A game requiring players to guess the song name and artist of the song being played

Name That Song

An automated version of a drinking game that my friends and I play. The rules are fairly simple:

• One person, called the moderator, chooses an artist for the game.
• Create a playlist based on the artist - manually, we would use Spotify radio.
• A song is randomly chosen from the playlist and played for a length of time decided on by the moderator.
• The players get to "buzz in" by hitting the table. Once a player has buzzed in, he or she must answer.
• The first player to buzz in answers first and is given a length of time decided on by the moderator to give the song name and artist of the song that has just been played.
• The player must match the song name and artist exactly with a few exceptions:
  • If a song name has a parenthetical, e.g. You Spin Me Right Round ( Like a Record ), a player may exclude the parenthetical portion of the title without penalty.
  • If a song has several artists, e.g. Walk This Way by Aerosmith ( feat. Run DMC ), a player may exclude or include any featured artists, so long as he or she names the first artist.
• If the player correctly names the song or artist before the moderator calls time, he or she is awarded 1 point.
• If the player incorrectly names the song or artist, or the moderator calls time, he or she loses 1 point.
  • Players may have a negative score.
• Players continue guessing in the order that they buzzed in until someone is awarded a point or no one else has buzzed in.
• The game continues in this manner until someone reaches five points, with the additional condition that the winner must be two points ahead of the player in second place.
  • If a player reaches 5 points without being ahead of the second place player, play continues until 1 player has more than 5 points and is 2 points ahead of the player in second place.

In order to automate this process, some rules are modified:

• The moderator may play. His or her only role is to pick an artist used to generate a playlist.
• A song is played by looking it up using the Spotify API. The preview track returned is used, so a song will only be played for the duration of the preview track - typically 30 seconds.
• Players must guess while the song is playing. After a song has ended, guessing stops.
• Buzzing in is not required, so buzz order is not respected. Any player guessing correctly in the allowed time slot will be awarded a point and any player guessing incorrectly will lose a point. Players may abstain from guessing and neither lose nor gain points.

Installing

1. Install NodeJS

2. Install global dependencies from NPM by running the following commands in a terminal

   npm install -g babel
   

   npm install -g browserify
   

   npm install -g bunyan
   

   npm install -g gulp
   

3. Navigate to the project root and run

   npm install
   

   to install project dependencies

4. Obtain an Echo Nest API key and place it in the privateProperties.js file

   • Register for an Echo Nest account
   • After you have registered and activated your account, log in to the Echo Nest website and obtain your API key
   • Create a file in <project_root>/app/config named privateProperties.js with the following contents:

   module.exports = {
       echonestApiKey: '<your_api_key>'
   };
   

5. Download and install MongoDB

   • Create a database to store the data for this application.
   • Remember that privateProperties.js files from step 4? It's time to add a new property to it

   mongoUrl: 'mongodb://<url_of_mongo_server>/<database_name>'
   

   • Make sure mongod is running when you start the application! Otherwise, you're going to be seeing database errors everywhere.

6. Add properties for sending emails

   • This app includes functionality to send an email to a user with a new password if the user forgets his/her password. You will need to add credentials to an email account that you own for this to work.

   • Note about Gmail accounts: If you would like to send emails from a Gmail account, you'll need to allow the account to be accessed by less secure apps.

   • Add the following properties to the privateProperties.js file:

   emailService: <email_service_to_use>,
   emailUsername: <username_of_email_account_to_use>,
   emailPassword: <password_to_email_account>
   

Building/Running Web App

Navigate to <project_root>/webapp and use a terminal to run

gulp

This will run the default gulp task, which builds the web app and moves the built files into the <project_root>/webapp/public folder. Once this process is complete, deploy the webapp/public folder to your favorite http server. An easy to use, lightweight http server is http-server. It can be installed by using the following command in a terminal

npm install -g http-server

Afterwards, navigate to the <project_root>/webapp folder and use a terminal to run

http-server

http-server will automatically deploy index.html from the public folder to http://localhost:8080

Running Server App

In order for the webapp to work, the server side component needs to be running To start the server app, navigate to <project_root>/app and use a terminal to run

node index.js

To prettify logging statements in the terminal, you can pipe the output through the bunyan CLI installed in step 2 of the installation instructions like so:

node index.js | bunyan

The server app will deploy to localhost on the port specified by the port property of app/config/appProperties.js ( this is defaulted to port 8008 )

Known Issues

• Source maps are not generating correctly