During the past year, we’ve all found it difficult to connect socially and recapture that culture which makes working in an office a unique experience from company to company. So we had a thought… what could we do that would reconnect our colleagues during this period of isolation? And so we created IGOOFM.
This is something more than a simple Spotify playlist. We wanted everyone to have a simultaneous experience – after all, you can listen to Spotify on your own whenever you like, so we needed something that would work in the same way a jukebox does. Each member of staff could log in and hit play, then we could all listen to the radio as requests came through.
But how does this all work?
IGOOFM is built using a few programmes talking to each other:
– Spotify node api
– Slack
– Icecast2
– AudioHijack
Slack handles the requests; using a simple slash command, users can send their request to the queue, for example “`/add Stevie Wonder – Superstition“`
We run Spotify as normal – this would be playing with no interruption, then we access the users’ queue. As a request comes in from Slack, it is added to the queue.
In order to get this to broadcast, we used a raspberry pi which is running Icecast2 – this allows you to create an internet radio station. The raspberry pi is connected to the internet using ddclient and ip go.
And the rest is history! Friday afternoons now sound better than they have before and there’s only a few eye roll emojis at some of the song requests…
