6 ms·

Show HN: I built color search for iTunes

51 points by mbarrett 13y ago

duggieawesome 13y ago
Fantastic job. The darkest of albums. http://colorhits.com/album/407270/This+Is+Spinal+Tap http://colorhits.com/album/407270/This+Is+Spinal+Tap
jfb 13y ago
This is great.
c54 13y ago
Very cool toy/tool, good implementation too
mbarrett 13y ago
OP here, Thanks for the comments. It was a very interesting project to build. To add a little background, ColorHits is using the iTunes EPF data with about 3.6 million albums available to search.
- aardvark179 13y ago
  it's very good fun, but I think it needs some tweaking. I tried finding albums by the colours I remember of their covers and failed miserably. So then tried checking the album covers on iTunes and picking the closest matching colours I could and still failed. For example Stereolab's Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements has a nice simple cover with very limited colours, but I couldn't get it to show up.
rsgong 13y ago
Great work. I'm working on palette determination on a project, so I'm curious- which algorithm/library did you use to parse the album covers?
- dhotson 13y ago
  There are a few approaches for extracting colors from an image. Shameless plug: I helped write a library called colorific to do it: https://github.com/99designs/colorific https://github.com/99designs/colorific More about how it works here: http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/05/11/color-analysis/ http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/05/11/color-analysi... Clustering techniques can also work quite well: http://charlesleifer.com/blog/using-python-and-k-means-to-find-the-dominant-colors-in-images/ http://charlesleifer.com/blog/using-python-and-k-means-to-fi...
  - rsgong 13y ago
    Nice. The last point in your blog post on emphasizing saturated colors- that's the business.
dhotson 13y ago
Very cool! :-) I built a similar search by color tool at 99designs and wrote a bit about how it works here: http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-explorer/ http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-explore... TL;DR I'm using R-trees to do fast perceptual nearest neighbour color search. OP, how are you doing it in this?
- mbarrett 13y ago
  Nice walk through on your side. The color search mechanism is one that I am wanting to rehash. When the album update script is started, each album's color info is parsed and stored in the database. During the update, they are also assigned a color group which aligns with the color selection in the UI. In my implementation the nearest neighbor was trying to be determined when each album is parsed. Its an area that needs improved upon but that's basically how its setup. During the research phase, I referenced a php class for the color parsing, but ultimately modified it heavily for my use. http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5577-PHP-Get-the-most-used-colors-in-an-image.html http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5577-PHP-Get-the-most-used...
- sigil 13y ago
  Nice. Have you considered putting the extracted (H,S,V) color space points into a postgis database? Querying and ordering with a KNN gist index may be even faster than bare R-Trees. http://workshops.opengeo.org/postgis-intro/knn.html http://workshops.opengeo.org/postgis-intro/knn.html
carpe171 13y ago
very cool could you up the amount of albums that show up per page? or have an endless page option?
- mbarrett 13y ago
  Definitely, endless scrolling will probably be added in an upcoming release.
jmduke 13y ago
This thing is just begging for a rainbow where you hover over various points of the rainbow and it pops up with a relevant album. If you want to take this one step further, I'd love to see a Chrome plugin version of this: detect the primary colors of a given page and suggest a similarly-colored album.
- dhotson 13y ago
  Semi offtopic, have you ever noticed on Chrome's new tab page.. the "most visited" section uses the dominant color of each page as a highlight?
  - skeoh 13y ago
    I believe it actually uses the dominant color of the favicon.
- mbarrett 13y ago
  I've built a quick demo as a spotify app to explore other areas, never thought of bridging webpage colors to album colors.
tehaaron 13y ago
It makes me happy when this sort of fun, simple app gets voted up to the front page of HN. It reminds me that my apps don't need to do a million different things but that only a couple fun/awesome functions can be elegant and useful.
lalos 13y ago
Very cool tool! reminds me of this flickr color search http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr/#colors=e73843,6abbd3,e84b6e;weights=33,34,33; http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr/#colors=e73843,6abbd3,e84b6...

51 points by mbarrett 13y ago

Fantastic job. The darkest of albums. http://colorhits.com/album/407270/This+Is+Spinal+Tap http://colorhits.com/album/407270/This+Is+Spinal+Tap

jfb 13y ago

This is great.

c54 13y ago

Very cool toy/tool, good implementation too

mbarrett 13y ago

OP here, Thanks for the comments. It was a very interesting project to build. To add a little background, ColorHits is using the iTunes EPF data with about 3.6 million albums available to search.

aardvark179 13y ago
it's very good fun, but I think it needs some tweaking. I tried finding albums by the colours I remember of their covers and failed miserably. So then tried checking the album covers on iTunes and picking the closest matching colours I could and still failed. For example Stereolab's Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements has a nice simple cover with very limited colours, but I couldn't get it to show up.

rsgong 13y ago

Great work. I'm working on palette determination on a project, so I'm curious- which algorithm/library did you use to parse the album covers?

dhotson 13y ago
There are a few approaches for extracting colors from an image. Shameless plug: I helped write a library called colorific to do it: https://github.com/99designs/colorific https://github.com/99designs/colorific More about how it works here: http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/05/11/color-analysis/ http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/05/11/color-analysi... Clustering techniques can also work quite well: http://charlesleifer.com/blog/using-python-and-k-means-to-find-the-dominant-colors-in-images/ http://charlesleifer.com/blog/using-python-and-k-means-to-fi...
- rsgong 13y ago
  Nice. The last point in your blog post on emphasizing saturated colors- that's the business.

dhotson 13y ago

Very cool! :-) I built a similar search by color tool at 99designs and wrote a bit about how it works here: http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-explorer/ http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-explore... TL;DR I'm using R-trees to do fast perceptual nearest neighbour color search. OP, how are you doing it in this?

mbarrett 13y ago
Nice walk through on your side. The color search mechanism is one that I am wanting to rehash. When the album update script is started, each album's color info is parsed and stored in the database. During the update, they are also assigned a color group which aligns with the color selection in the UI. In my implementation the nearest neighbor was trying to be determined when each album is parsed. Its an area that needs improved upon but that's basically how its setup. During the research phase, I referenced a php class for the color parsing, but ultimately modified it heavily for my use. http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5577-PHP-Get-the-most-used-colors-in-an-image.html http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5577-PHP-Get-the-most-used...
sigil 13y ago
Nice. Have you considered putting the extracted (H,S,V) color space points into a postgis database? Querying and ordering with a KNN gist index may be even faster than bare R-Trees. http://workshops.opengeo.org/postgis-intro/knn.html http://workshops.opengeo.org/postgis-intro/knn.html

carpe171 13y ago

very cool could you up the amount of albums that show up per page? or have an endless page option?

mbarrett 13y ago
Definitely, endless scrolling will probably be added in an upcoming release.

jmduke 13y ago

This thing is just begging for a rainbow where you hover over various points of the rainbow and it pops up with a relevant album. If you want to take this one step further, I'd love to see a Chrome plugin version of this: detect the primary colors of a given page and suggest a similarly-colored album.

dhotson 13y ago
Semi offtopic, have you ever noticed on Chrome's new tab page.. the "most visited" section uses the dominant color of each page as a highlight?
- skeoh 13y ago
  I believe it actually uses the dominant color of the favicon.
mbarrett 13y ago
I've built a quick demo as a spotify app to explore other areas, never thought of bridging webpage colors to album colors.

tehaaron 13y ago

It makes me happy when this sort of fun, simple app gets voted up to the front page of HN. It reminds me that my apps don't need to do a million different things but that only a couple fun/awesome functions can be elegant and useful.

lalos 13y ago

Very cool tool! reminds me of this flickr color search http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr/#colors=e73843,6abbd3,e84b6e;weights=33,34,33; http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr/#colors=e73843,6abbd3,e84b6...