TuneVote

TuneVote is a music voting platform: a room votes on what plays next, in real time, and the platform suggests songs to add.

The moving parts#

• Real-time voting over Socket.io, so every participant sees the queue update as votes come in rather than on a refresh.
• AI song suggestions through the OpenAI API, to seed and extend a queue when the room runs dry.
• YouTube integration via yt-dlp for resolving tracks.
• Sign-in with Google and Facebook.

It runs in Docker on a VPS, with database schema changes handled through Knex migrations rather than by hand. It's open-source, with a Discord community for feature requests and bug reports, and around 30 active users.

The sub-project that made it work: a YouTube scraping funnel#

TuneVote only feels good if the songs are already there — if a user has to paste a YouTube link every time they want to add a track, the voting loop dies. So a second, separate project grew up alongside it, purely to fill the database in bulk.

It's a Python funnel built on yt-dlp. You feed it a list of artists — one channel after another — and for each one it walks the channel and pulls every video's link. Take Taylor Swift: point the funnel at the channel and it scrapes all of her video URLs, writes them to a text file, and then that text file is matched up and turned into an SQL file that loads straight into TuneVote's database.

The payoff is on the user's side. Because the catalogue is pre-populated this way, when someone searches for a Taylor Swift song it is already in the database and gets recommended and shown — no hunting for the right YouTube link, no pasting. The scraper is invisible to the end user, but it is the reason search actually returns something.

Sub-project stack: Python · yt-dlp · SQL generation → TuneVote database.