Cratr won the Cloudinary Award at the first Abbey Road Red Hackathon in London, in November 2018.
In November 2018, I had the wonderful opportunity to join a legion of crazy music and code lovers at the historic Abbey Road Studios in London, for the very first hackathon organized by Abbey Road Red. We had a little over 24 hours to brainstorm ideas and code them into proof-of-concept prototypes. I was joined by my BMAT colleagues Enric Calabuig, Aleix Claramunt and Francesc Lluís, and we soon recruited the help of Kristian Ruud and Aritad Choicharoon from Universal Music.
Cratr is a mobile app that helps human DJs pack their bag. After brainstorming a few ideas about AI DJs, we realized we’d rather build a product that enhances human creativity, rather than trying to imitate or replace it. And creativity thrives on limitations, as weird at that may sound at first. DJs become easily overwhelmed by the amount of music they can carry with them in a thumb drive—could we help them choose what to play next by actually taking away some of those options? Cue in Cratr. Cratr helps a DJ choose a subset of their vinyl collection as they prepare for a gig. An intuitive workflow brings together advanced library software and cutting edge recommendation technology so that packing a gig bag is a fun an new experience every time. And once the bag is packed, it's out of the DJ's way, so that they can do what they do best.