Girl, Put Your Records On, Let Google Find the Songs

You’ve spent years lovingly building your record collection. You’ve sifted through all the racks at the one record shop left in town, and maybe even scored a couple of obscure albums online. It almost seems like a shame to tarnish the vinyl by actually putting it on a turntable every time you want to listen to it. That’s why Record Player lets you play your albums without even pulling the vinyl from the sleeve.

Using Record Player is as simple as placing an album on a stand in front of a camera. The system identifies what album it is, and then starts playing it through Spotify. When you’re done listening to an album, just take it off the stand and playback stops. Obviously, you could just play the album directly through Spotify if you wanted to. But, this gives you that satisfying feeling of browsing through your record collection to find the perfect album, without the risk of damaging your cherished vinyl.

The system runs on a Raspberry Pi, and uses the Google Cloud Vision and Spotify APIs to work its magic. A camera connected to the Raspberry Pi takes a photo of the stand every few seconds, and then the Pi determines if there is an album on the stand. If there is, the photo is sent to Google Cloud Vision, which guesses what album it is. That guess is then entered into the Spotify search, and the closest match is played. The practicality of Record Player is certainly debatable, but it’s fun at the very least.