Hitster - Custom YouTube Cards

I love playing Hitster with my family or friends. For those of you who don’t know the game, it’s a party game where you have to listen to different songs and try to order them in a chronological timeline based on the year they were released in. It’s especially fun playing it together with people from different generations, as typically each of them has knowledge about different periods of music.

However, one thing that always bugged me about Hitster is the fact that you need a Spotify Premium account in order to play the game fully. The companion app that is used to scan the QR codes printed on the cards only supports Spotify for playback, and without a subscription you can only play 30-second excerpts and not the whole songs. Other streaming services such as YouTube aren’t supported.

Songseeker #

Thankfully the GitHub user andygruber created the songseeker project which alleviates this problem. It’s basically a webpage that allows the user to scan QR codes from the game, but plays the music from YouTube, thus making the game playable without the need to spend money on a Spotify Premium account. While the website can be self-hosted if wanted, the creator also provides a public instance under https://songseeker.grub3r.io.

If you are interested in the mapping between the official QR codes and the corresponding YouTube video link, you can take a look at the songseeker-hitster-playlists repository. It also gives a good overview of the supported versions and add-ons. At least for the German edition most versions are supported.

Creating custom cards #

Another interesting feature of the songseeker project is that it allows you to generate your own cards, thus extending the game with your own favorite music. To do this, take a look at the songseeker-card-generator repository.

Please note that this link leads to my fork of the original repository from andygruber. The original project had some issues that I wanted to fix as well as some features I considered missing, hence I decided to create my own fork.

To make your own custom cards create either an Excel document and save it to a CSV file or directly create a CSV file with an editor of your choice. The general table format must look like the following example table and contain all the relevant information about a track. This includes its title, the name of the artist, the year in which the song was released as well as a link to the YouTube video that should be played when scanning this card:

The backcol column is optional and allows you to specify the background color that should be used for the corresponding card. If filled out, it must contain three values separated by a comma, which correspond to the RGB values of the desired color. Be aware that each value must be between 0 and 1. If the value is left empty a random background color is chosen for the card.

Additionally, as seen in the second entry of the table the ?t=48s parameter can be used with YouTube links to specify the second from which playback should start. This is helpful to automatically skip intros that contain no audio.

Once you have finished your table and saved it as a CSV file follow the instructions in the repository’s README file and use the generatePlayCards.py script to generate the cards as a PDF file:

$ python generatePlayCards.py example-youtube-songs.csv output.pdf

The first positional argument is the path to the CSV file while the second one specifies where the PDF file should be saved. Once done you can print the PDF file and scan the cards with any songseeker website.

I hope this info is helpful to some people out there who also struggle with not having a Spotify Premium account.

Happy guessing and until next time 👋