Long before Spotify delivered algorithmic “Discovery” playlists to your inbox or Shazam could magically identify tracks on the fly, there was crate digging. As in: you went to a record store, you plucked albums out of boxes, you waited in line for the only vinyl player in the joint to open up, and then you painstakingly sampled them, one by one.
Truth be told, plenty of people still find new music like that. But that doesn’t mean they’d refuse a shortcut.
Record Player, recently released by app-incubator Glitch, pulls information from Google Cloud Vision and Spotify’s APIs to immediately identify and stream an album using one simple input: a photo of the cover, as taken and uploaded by you.
That you could just as easily type in the album’s name to achieve that is beside the point. Vinyl’s triumphant comeback was getting a little tired, and this is an effective — if slightly frivolous — new way to deep-dive at your neighborhood record store over the weekend. Happy listening.
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