Forever.fm Plays Music That Never Stops
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Forever.fm was designed to do one thing and one thing only: Play music that never stops, for any “DJ chatter,” advertisement, or lack of musical ideas.
This impressive-looking, open-source web app features both circular and linear waveform animations. For music, it pulls the top 200 tracks from SoundCloud, then beatmatches the the transitions between each song automatically, so that they fade into each other smoothly the way a good DJ makes them do at your favorite nightclub. Don’t have a favorite nightclub? Well, that’s what DJs generally do there.
If you’re still listening 200 tracks in to this beat-matched set, Forever.fm (direct link) grabs the next 200 “hottest” tracks from SoundCloud, and so on, ad infinitum.
Developer Peter Sobot, who also built The Wub Machine, told Evolver.fm that he created Forever.fm in part because he realized the domain name was still open, and that it only took about a month to build. His mission became to “write a cool music app that never stops,” and from what we can tell, he has succeeded. (We say “from what we can tell” because we literally don’t have forever.)
In part, he managed to build this in a month due to the fact that Forever.fm is “based heavily off of Tristan [Jehan]‘s example code for the ‘Capsule’ library in the Echo Nest [publisher of Evolver.fm] API,” which it uses to identify beats for beatmatching, along with a host of other technologies. He also reused code from The Wub Machine.
The resulting app skews heavily towards dance music (SoundCloud is a popular place to upload remixes). It runs on standard computer web browsers, as well as iOS and Android browsers.
looks like the novice music DJs need to get more creative or computer programs such as this are eventually going to catch up with their level of work. On the other hand, someone could potentially stream forever.fm and make it look like they’re mixing.