SetTheMood
Turns your listening history into a color aura and a photo moodboard.
The app reads your recent tracks, maps their genres to moods, and builds an animated color aura and a moodboard of matching photos. You can save snapshots over time and blend your aura with a friend’s.
What broke
It was built on Spotify’s Web API. In 2026 Spotify locked down developer access: apps in development mode are capped at five users, the app owner needs a Premium subscription or the whole app is blocked, and the endpoint used to look up artist genres was removed. Wider access now requires a registered business with 250,000 monthly users. The Spotify version stopped working for everyone.
How I rebuilt it
- Last.fm instead of Spotify sign-in. Enter a Last.fm username and the app works with no login. Spotify listeners link Last.fm once in Spotify’s settings.
- Photo sources that fall back. Unsplash’s free tier allows 50 requests an hour, so the moodboard falls back to Pexels, then Openverse.
- AI-generated moodboard tiles from your moods and aura colors, running on Cloudflare Workers AI.
- All API calls moved server-side, so no keys or tokens reach the browser.
Built with Next.js and TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers, with 241 unit tests and a live test suite in pytest.