Drive-By

What it does

A small box with a microphone sits in a window over a busy street, on home Wi-Fi and a wall plug. When a car goes by with its music up, a tap names the song, adds it to a playlist, and puts the album cover on an e-paper frame across the room, labelled like a museum piece.

• Tap to listen from the box, from a phone page, or from an iPhone Shortcut. It checks the sixty seconds before the tap and the twenty after.
• Auto listen for two hours, then it turns itself off.
• Two playlists. Spotify gets the songs heard from the window or the phone page; Apple Music gets everything.
• The frame shows the cover, the artist, the song and its year, and a QR code opens the phone page.
• Heard a song and it named nothing? A deep listen searches three minutes of the recording harder, and keeps the clip if it still finds nothing.
• The service keys live in one Cloudflare Worker, never on the box. The recording lives at home and is deleted after a day.