Case study · 2025 – present
Archive
A local-first macOS app for re-discovering large music libraries — turning a collection you play into one you can actually explore.
Overview
A tool for re-discovering your own music
Archive is a personal, local-first audio tool for macOS. It scans a large music library and helps you re-encounter what's in it — play a random slice to jog your memory, loop a region, or layer up to five tracks into a collage. I own the product, the UX, and the TypeScript/Electron build. It's inspired by the archive-review tool Peter Chilvers built for Brian Eno.
Draft note — add the outcome: what re-surfaced when you used it on your own decades of material, and whether it changed how you work.
The problem
Every player plays. None help you rediscover.
Streaming made libraries feel infinite and made your own collection invisible. If you've made or collected music for years, you have decades of material you've forgotten you have — and every music player is built to play what you already know, not to help you find what you don't. I kept my own music in folders by stage — seed, experimentation, crafting, complete — and most of it had gone quiet. Archive is built for the opposite of a player: discovery.
The reframe
A library isn't a list to play — it's an archive to explore
That single shift drives every feature. The guiding line, borrowed from how Eno works: stay embodied while moving fast — re-encounter your own material by shuffling the whole archive, hearing short slices, and layering pieces to find combinations you'd never have planned.
The core interactions
Three ways back into the material
Random Review is the heart of it — pull a random track, or a random five-second slice from a random track, to break the habit of searching for what you already know. A-B loop loops any region, at variable speed, forwards or reversed — for study, or for turning a fragment into a texture. Multi-Track collage layers up to five tracks at once, each with its own loop, speed, and direction, saved as a Scene you can recall — where discovery becomes composition.
Draft note — which interaction surprised you most in use? A concrete moment (a forgotten track, an accidental layering) makes this land.
Product decisions
Local-first, and keyboard-first
Local-first, on purpose. No accounts, no uploads — your music never leaves your Mac. For an archive of personal, often unreleased work, ownership and privacy aren't features; they're the premise.
Keyboard-first, for flow. Tag the playing track with a keystroke without leaving what you're doing; set loop points, reverse, and shuffle from the keys. The tool should disappear into the listening.
The build
A real, shipping desktop app
Archive is a genuine macOS desktop application — TypeScript, Electron, Vite, and the Web Audio API — with recursive library scanning, ID3 and embedded-artwork parsing, macOS Finder colour-tag pickup, a tagging system, and Smart Playlists: saved queries that re-evaluate live (“tracks rated 4+ tagged seed, in WAV or AIFF”). It's the project where I've gone deepest on engineering, built with AI-assisted development.
Draft note — the learning story is a strength here: a sentence in your voice on building a real desktop app with AI-assisted development, and what you can now do that you couldn't a year ago.
Where it is · what's next
Toward v0.1
In active development toward a first release — a signed, notarized .dmg.
The roadmap deliberately keeps the larger vision separate from what ships, so the
build stays small, real, and out the door.
Reflection
What I'd carry forward
Draft note — 2–4 sentences in your voice: designing a tool for yourself vs. for others, the hardest scoping call (what you cut to ship), what building it taught you.