AnimeCoverpedia.com

Accomplished lots of things since last milestone, and the most important is gathering nearly 9000 cover videos from 100 cover artists! Now I'm nearly ready to promote animesongcovers.com by sharing it on online forums :)

The last thing to do is to contact cover artists and get their permission for sharing their videos thru YouTube embedded player. And also make the site multi lingual (i18n).

So far so good!

In these months, my crawler discovered over 1000 cover videos, and labelled the video's anime title, song title.

I also built a prettier web app using semantic-ui + Gatsby.js, and deployed it on Netlify. In addition to searching anime cover videos, now users can also see individual pages for animes and artists. And I created a player UI, so users can create their own playlist and listen to it while browsing the website.

Although the website is still in construction and more videos are yet to be extracted, it is a big step from the simple, crude "school-project" I had. As this website goes more "serious", I start to learn things like analytics, advertising, affiliate marketing.

Now I'm one step closer to my MVP!

At this time I was a university student, and I turned this project into final project of a class.

Starting from scratch with no data in hand, I first developed a crawler to collect anime song data from wikipedia. This was a great chance to try out all natural language processing knowledge I learned!

After collecting and cleaning anime song data, I then use Youtube Data API to retrieve videos on Youtube. I developed another module to perform information extraction on video titles, this module helped me to find out what anime and what song title are in the video title.

Lastly, I built a minimal web app to display the videos and provided a search function. Users could search for videos base on anime, song title, artist name, and whether it's a vocal or instrument cover, and what language or instrument it is.

Proof of concept was successful! As winter break is coming, I'm gonna first enjoy my vacation, and soon I will push this project to the next stage!

I love anime cover videos, and would spend hours exploring new ones on Youtube. Discovering new artists who sing in different languages or play with cool instruments always amazes me.

But searching on Youtube is not easy. It takes a long scroll if I want to find older videos, and there is no option to filter the results. And if I save cover videos in playlists, usually this list grows too big and becomes hard to maintain and to retrieve videos from it.

This is why I want to develop AnimeSongCovers.com. I hope every anime lover like me could explore anime cover videos more easily!