Origin Story
Sometimes it’d be nice to go back. Maybe to 2006 or so. Before the internet poisoned our politics and stranded our culture in ever-narrowing rabbit holes made by black box algorithms. So I decided to build an altar for the holy format of the MP3.
Renting music from Spotify is foolish and iTunes has become a sluggish beast. Other music players don’t work how I want. I craved a dead-simple widget that:
- Allows me to share a library with C so we can passive-aggressively delete songs from each other's playlists
- Displays nice album artwork and doesn’t feel like managing a spreadsheet
- Automatically sends playlists to my telephone before I go for a drive or a run and requires as little management as possible
- Runs on bulletproof XML rather than proprietary mysteries in the ether
I asked some friends if they’d like to help me build this. They wished me luck. “To hell with them,” I told C. “I’ll build it anyway and destroy Spotify and Apple.” C smiled and said spite was an interesting reason to make something.
Features & Conditions
- Apple only. Requires iCloud for telephone sync.
- Supports all the good extensions: mp3, aac, m4a, wav, aiff, and flac.
- A streamlined interface that keeps artwork big and playlists central.
- Add custom artwork for your playlists and dig the harmonious accent colors.
- Everything you like is fantastic, so there's no need for hearts or stars—just a delete button to ruthlessly clear out the cruft.
- XML is the way. No cords. No hidden clouds. Playlists live in a folder you can see.
- Think of the iOS app as a portable version of the playlists you lovingly assembled at home. I want to spend as little time as possible looking at my telephone. Playlists ambiently download whenever iCloud syncs.
- Deepen your relationships (or ruin them) by sharing your music folder. Everything the other person adds or deletes will affect you and vice versa. It's a good conversation starter.
- No subscriptions, ads, creepy data harvesting, accounts, or passwords. Ever.
