As I've mentioned before, the Coachella web site helpfully provides one or two tracks for most of the 100+ artists at the festival so you can hear samples of the bands you don't know to help determine if you want to go see them or not. They even have a scheduler page where you can select the bands you want to see and hide the ones you know you don't. The user experience is poor though. While listening to the provided tracks you can't easily make note of which ones you like or not, and there is no real link between the schedule page and the listening page. Plus in the end, how are they going to handle it when you select two artists scheduled at different stages at the same time?
My project for this week is a remix of the coachella web site to help make the exploration experience little better: Coachella Explorer. Here you can listen to the tracks from the official website, but as you listen you can also rate each artist on a scale of 1-5. When the official schedule is released, the site will be able to take your ratings and calculate a schedule for you. If there is a conflict it can perhaps be resolved by the relative rating you gave between bands in the same time slot.
This took a bit longer than I thought to complete. Partly because TextDrive sucks (I don't feel like going into details on this now - too annoyed), and partly because I never have time to work on these things anymore it seems. There are certainly features that would make it nicer, from little things like Netflix-like stars for rating instead of a select drop down to major features like sharing your picks with your friends and then producing an optimized schedule that keeps you at the same shows as much as possible. Maybe next year. As it is, the festival is less than a week away and probably no one is going to use this thing except me. Which is probably for the best since I was forced to host it on my decade+ old linux server that's slow as a turtle dragging a cinderblock. Any significant traffic would likely slaughter the server.
By the way, I call it a remix because all of the media (music and images) are still being served from the Coachella web site. I'm just sort of putting a new interface on top of it.
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