nzoschke

I’m putting personal attention and tokens towards replacing Pioneer / Alpha Theta Rekordbox (music management for DJs).

The software is old and clunky, has a ton of features I don’t use, and can’t customize what I do use. And it’s enshittified with ads and popups and an expensive monthly subscription.

One big motivation for me is that it is FUN to rebuilt it with a coding agent. I’m learning a ton and the custom tools actually work.

I know I’m not alone.

Recently me and a bunch of DJs reinvented how we manage metadata for our collections.

The TL;DR is use SQLite for everything. Both a local central database describing the entire catalog, and one “sidecar” database for every song representing its individual metadata.

The huge advantage is it stores metadata that ID3 tags never imagined like beat grids and phrases and cue points.

The other advantage is agents crush manipulating data that is in SQLite. Chatting with my music collection feels better than any music library app did.

Of course tools also import and export to native audio file tags and use the musicbrainz API.

Looking for feedback and other music nerds that want to collaborate on this approach.

Storage is Hetzner Storage Box which so far feels great. Cheap and supports SSH SFTP WebDAV, so you can use rsync or restic and browse artifacts over www.

It feels a little slow hosting in Germany but using from US. But I haven’t found a provider with the same cost / features.

Any alternatives folks use for backups?

> Like ChatGPT in 2022 was exciting because it was a general-purpose chat model that could generate all kinds of texts, one of the reasons the tech community is excited about Jev is that it is the ChatGPT moment for classification, where it can cheaply classify all kinds of text inputs without having to fine-tune a custom classifier for each task.

I just added an agent / coding agent into an email app, and doing it through `codex` and its Codex App Server couldn't have been easier, and the results are very compelling.

The open source harness, API around it, and friendliness for connecting a subscription puts Claude to shame right now.

Large parts of the JavaScript application space too.

Language consistency, ergonomics, standard library and performance matters, and JS has major warts here. I bet when these languages are 30+ years old like JS is, the software landscape isn't dominated nearly as much by JS.

These days I intentionally start all projects with as little JS as possible, opting for Go and HTMX instead. Removing the layers of JS inconsistency and build tools makes my and my agents lives better.

It gives me a glimmer of hope that openness will win. I don't trust Meta as a corp, but they've been doing the a lot of good things with open source, open models, and developer friendly agents.

And in this case I hope its true. I've been classifying a lot of email and while OpenAI `text-embedding-3-small` has been very helpful for fast and cheap embeddings, initial tests with Jev are very promising and much more ergonomic.

Im finding a lot of success embedding metadata and data in SQLite files for music management.

Having a spec for a single file with a schema, version, metadata and binary blobs is super easy to shuffle around.

Agents crush reading and writing the data and writing tools around the spec.

All of a sudden things like backup, sharing and dedupe are snapping into place for my music library.