Spotify has some great music recommendation systems, and its search is comprehensive too. But sometimes an album you've seen out might not have an obvious name on its cover – or you're just too lazy to get typing.
A new experimental app called Record Player allows you to take a photo of a record sleeve, have it be scanned and analyzed, and then automatically searched for within the Spotify library.
It uses the Google Vision API to guess the source image, and was built using Glitch, a platform designed to allow for collaborative app design.
You can check it out in action below:
Newest experiment made with @glitch, @Spotify and @googlecloud, a record player with computer vision: https://t.co/fhQsEruCoF pic.twitter.com/z54s9GIbYcMay 2, 2018
Record store battlegrounds
There's fun to be had with the app too – with its upload image function, you can essentially feed any picture you like into the system and see what album it returns as most similar.
Of course, for the lover of physical media, this may seem a bit of a worrying development – how long will record stores last if you can so easily just walk into one, take a photo of their wares and walk away with all the tunes without spending a penny? It'd be as though you're stealing the experience and knowledge of the curating staff.
But take heart as vinyl is still undergoing something of a resurgence at the moment, particularly in the UK where sales increases year-on-year in 2017 to hit 4.1 million units shifted. Might be time still to invest in one of our picks of the best turntables.
- Fluance RT81 turntable review: convenient features for vinyl newbies
