NextUp Karaoke
I've turned over this idea in my head for about 2 years before finally deciding to sit down and do it. All I wanted was a simple karaoke app that would let people queue up karaoke videos on youtube and play them in a sort of queue. The idea is to have a free version of what we see when we go to sing karaoke at Voicebox in Portland. I always thought their interface was pretty slick and easy to use, and I just wanted that at home basically.
We had a party coming up with a lot of people and I knew we would want to host karaoke in the living room, but having someone manage that would be kind of a full time thing. I mean, its not a bad party job, you get to watch everyone do karaoke and you probably get to sing a lot yourself, but I thought it would be great to have an app manage this for us.
And side note, as someone at the party also pointed this out to me, the KaraFun app already does this and is professionally made. I'm pretty sure they make their own karaoke tracks too, but its a paid service. I figured I could make this myself.
So I threw this idea at Claude Code to create in the same day. I probably had 3 hours or so of free time before we had our party, which was enough time to build the prototype, test it out, and then deploy it out to a service we could use during the party. I spent a lot of time up-front on the prompt, and then let Claude rip (insert that draw the fucking owl meme, because with how quickly this got made I think its appropriate). About an hour later I had the early version of what would be NextUp Karaoke.
So now I have a working Karaoke youtube app! It is free and it uses a more rudimentary way of searching than the official youtube API. That API limits usage pretty heavily unfortunately, so I haven't gotten around to jumping through all the hoops to do that, but I figure this is just a fun side project for now and I'm not monetizing anything, so its fine.
And it works! We have used NextUp Karaoke at about a dozen parties and I know some of my friends even fire it up from time to time to use it personally. For my semi-frequent karaoke habit I think its great and fits a great niche. If we hosted karaoke parties regularly I might consider a more professional app or put way more time into fleshing this thing out.
I now know that you can configure some skills to help with a lot of upfront design. I now use Superpowers and the /grill-me skill a lot from Matt Pocock to ideate and really flesh out an idea or code base. But at the time I wasn't really sure where to integrate skills into my workflow.
Another big thing I learned going through this is the power of good feedback. When something would go wrong with the app I would jot it down in my notes. When someone had a moment of "how do you do X?" I would jot that down too as feedback. Through that I added some QoL features like speeding up or slowing down tracks, pausing/skipping, favoriting songs, and putting a short wait between songs being played.
Please feel free to use my app and drop me feedback through GitHub or my email.