Weefeen — Music Practice App

Weefeen is a platform for musicians to practice their performance skills. The main feature is the music score synchronizing with the media file of a professional performing of the piece. It allows musicians to listen deeply to experienced musicians on any specific passage. Users also can record their performance, share it, and track their own progress.

This project is an example of an efficient long-term collaboration and continuous improvement of the product.

The client came to us with a WordPress website, working only in Firefox browser. The initial task was to redevelop it in Symfony.

Back then, we developed a web app and mobile iOS app allowing users to upload the audio or video file and a jpeg with music score, divide the score on measures and link them with the media timeline. When the user clicks on a measure, the media time location jumps to this exact moment, the selected measure stays highlighted. Playing every measure separately, musicians get trained. We optimized project loading and deployed the site on the client’s server.

During the next phases we redesigned some parts of the app and updated all the technologies for the backend and iOS part. We added a new payment scheme — Stripe subscriptions.

The main challenge was to make the app load faster. So, the video downloading was moved to PHP in order to speed up the process. We also implemented converting .mov video files to .mp4, as .mp4 takes less space on the server.

We added score editing actions – moving measures, sticking them side to side, aligning vertically with keyboard keys. We integrated a measure edge detection algorithm that’s written by the client. The algorithm refines measure position in relation to a vertical black line in a music score.

The client also changed the format to store a reference audio file. In the first version of the script, it was an .mp3 audio file, while in the second version it’s a frequency chroma spectrum of the audio file (.npy format). The same technique is used in the Shazam application, for example.

On personal consideration, the client deleted the iOS app from AppStore. There is a possibility that we are going to redevelop it.