The pitch.
I used to read liner notes. I’d buy a Wayne Shorter record because Herbie Hancock was on it, then track down everything Herbie ever sat in on. The web version of that habit doesn’t exist: streaming services index by artist-on-the-cover, not by personnel. iTunes does the same thing. Foobar2000 will let you sort by a custom tag if you set one up. Nobody sets one up.
This app is a music player that treats the people inside the album as first-class citizens. Type “ron carter” and you don’t get one Ron Carter solo album. You get every track he played on, every album that lists him, every session in your library where he picked up the bass. The cover art still matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
What it isn’t.
- Not a streamer. Nothing leaves your machine. There’s no cloud account, no library upload, no telemetry. The app reads files off your disk.
- Not a tag editor. You can edit per-track and per-album metadata when the file’s tags are wrong, but the app expects ID3 (or FLAC/M4A equivalents) to already be in reasonable shape. We respect what’s in the file; we don’t try to reach the internet to fix it.
- Not a social network. No likes, no follows, no recommendations engine learning from your behavior. Your listening history exists locally if you want it; nobody else sees it.
What it is.
- A liner-notes reader. Personnel weighted above titles. Search by player, composer, or session. Click a sideman’s name on an album page and you’re on their page, looking at every other appearance they made in your library.
- A native desktop app. Electron under the hood, but it behaves like a desktop app: gapless playback straight from disk, no streaming, no re-encoding, no DRM in or out.
- Local by default, sync-curious. The library is yours and lives on your laptop. A Subsonic server mode is on the roadmap so you can reach the same library from your phone, over your own Tailscale, not someone else’s cloud.
Who it’s for.
People who keep their music as files. People who care about the names below the album title. People who got tired of “Various Artists” eating an album they’ve loved for fifteen years. If that’s you, the app is for you. If you’re happy with Spotify’s algorithm, you’ll be happy with Spotify.