12 Music Apps From The 2013 Rails Rumble

Rails Rumble is a 48-hour hackathon for folks all over the world using Ruby on Rails and related frameworks to create web applications. 500 teams participate and, over a course of 48 hours, code their way to a web app. I was invited to be a judge and helped pick out the top apps among a somewhat overwhelming array of interesting entries at least 12 of which were directly related to music.

Nick Mango of Limited Run invited me to be a judge. By way of disclosure, I have written about Limited Run and periodically exchange lighthearted banter with Nick and his brother Tom via Twitter.

Rails Rumble is limited to 500 teams and last year included participants from 40 countries. Here's how it works:

"Rails Rumble is a distributed programming competition where teams of up to 4 people, from all over the world, will have 48 hours to build an innovative web application with Ruby on Rails, or another Rack-based Ruby web framework. After the 48 hours are over (and a brief interim to review submissions), a panel of expert judges will each pick his or her 10 favorite entries. All of the expert picks will be combined to find the top 10 Overall Winners, ranked 1 through 10. In addition, voting will be opened to the public for a special, separate, Public Favorite award."

You can check out who was involved including organizers, experts (judges) and participants.

1st Place winner was Rumbler, a "voicemail analysis service that records, extracts and analyzes what your customers are saying. We provide keywords, sentiment analysis, heat maps, customer call history and much more."

I somehow missed that entry or would have included it in my top 10. It sounds like a potentially powerful tool that the creators say they're going to continue developing.

Itemize was the "Best Solo" entry with a team of one. RubyScore took "Public Favorite" honors with votes from the crowd.

2013 Rails Rumble Music Apps

There were numerous music entries though none of them made it into the top 10. Most but not all are listed in the Music category. Here are the 12 most focused on music in alphabetical order:

Ambience – "Makes it easy for venues to play background music [and give you a say] – you simply register with a venue name and email, and we take care of the rest."

Crowdly Sound – "Creating music around the world."

Encore! – "A personal journal system for live events."

Garage – "A community for musicians, bands and music lovers to get together and share their love."

List Me – "Create and share lists of your top five music albums."

Mind Peace – "This is an effort to allow people to spend few minutes and relax their mind and body by using power of classical music."

MMGC – "Find movie, game and music covers."

Musical Battle – "A game where you can create a playlist and challenge your opponents, two playlists will battle for votes in a limited time, the most voted is the winner!"

Songabilly – "Songabilly is our version of…a TV show where people have just a fixed amount of time to listen to a number of tracks and guess as many songs as they can."

timeTune – "Music timeline. Albums visualization. Search your favourite bands easily."

Trackcha – "Takes any YouTube or Vimeo video and magically finds out what songs are playing in it. Then it suggests to follow iTunes store to buy them."

WhereToSing – "A tailored search engine for nearest Karaoke places around you or a cheapest one."

Like most products of hackathons, these apps are at various stages from a description and splash page to a working prototype. But an event like Rails Rumble is more about building community and sharing ideas than creating viable products for general release. Nevertheless, we'll eventually start to see more web apps like those created during Rails Rumble being developed for public use.

More:

• Spotify #NYC Music Education Hackathon Responds To Real Issues
• Hackeroo: Bonnaroo Throws A Weekend Hackathon
• Is It Time To Hold Your Own Music Hackathon?

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.