Play Packs
Mix four parts American Honey with one part sweaty beat supremos ‘What So Not’. Take some of Host Sydney then add a good slug of Adapptor. Shake vigorously.
The PlayPacks App served up sixteen musical loops, produced by What So Not (at the time composed of Flume & Emoh Instead) for you to mix, record and share. Fresh beats were dropped into the app every week but scanning American Honey product let fans jump the queue. The best mixes, as decided by What So Not, were then featured over at PlayPacks.com.au.
Mix up the way you play music. Simply scan, mix and share your track.
PlayPacks, a project developed in partnership with HOST and What So Not, as an app for Android and iOS. It combines augmented reality technology with multiple sample-accurate audio stream playback, all connected to a web sharing backend. Making this work smoothly across both platforms proved to be a real technical challenge. In this post we’ll share some of the techniques we used to get it running across two very different operating systems.
In developing the app for both Android and iOS, Adapptor’s crack team of developers wrote the core features of the app in native code, but used portable native libraries to enable the reuse of the exact same codebase across both platforms. Within this core set, features are written once, bugs are fixed once, and the changes propagate to both platforms.
Xcode provides direct support for C and C++ code natively. On Android, the Native Development Kit (NDK) provides toolchains to build shared libraries from C or C++. The libraries are packaged with the Java parts of the app and interoperate through the Java Native Interface (JNI), a way to call native code from Java and vice versa.
We wrote more about this in a blog post at the time: How We Built American Honey PlayPacks.
The campaign, run by Campari in 2014 for the launch of their American Honey drinks, included barcodes on each bottle of the premix range. Anyone who downloaded the app could scan the barcode and unlock one of sixteen musical loops. Once each was unlocked the user could add the loop to an in-built OpenGL midi player to create their own remix. once they were happy with their remix they could upload it to share it with friends and enter into a draw to be judged by What So Not.
