Vitra Radio – the sound of design

For Vitra's flagship stores the german audio branding agency HearDis! created Vitra Radio. A handpicked selection of music highlights the customer experience at the store. The music profile was exclusively created for Vitra to convey the brand’s values in the audible domain.
„In-store music that matches the brand demonstrably affects customer’s contentment, their perception of the brand and their length of stay.“

Vitra Radio is an online radio published via PlayerMaker, a tool that PANDA developed for HearDis! and showcases the theming possibilities PlayerMaker offers. In addition, PANDA took also care of the visual appearance of the web application for mobile devices as well at the desktop version.
About PlayerMaker
PlayerMaker is a tool for publishing music to the web with the possibility to adjust the player-design to the target-customers needs. It features a single-player-mode, where a playlist with accompanying comments can be provided to the public and a radio mode, where a continuous music-stream is published.
Technologies used
The technical base in this project is Grails 2 (a Groovy/Spring/Hibernate based Web-Framework for the JVM) in the backend and Backbone.js/jQuery in the frontend. ActiveMQ is used as a message queue to handle synchronization-related information.
Architectural specificities
All tracks from the large music library (curated by HearDis! and kept in their intranet) have to be available for the players published via PlayerMaker. A secure synchronization between the HearDis! intranet and a remote system deployed in the AWS-cloud continuously tracks file-changes and makes them available in the PlayerMaker backend. Encoding to target audio-formats in different quality-levels is done on demand when players are published.
Further mentions: MySQL, Resilio Sync, ActiveMQ, Git, S3FS