The only solution is hardening from the bottom, and the only way is through self hosting.
Since January, with AI helping push it forward, I've finally had time to finalise a product I've had in mind for years. I'm a DJ and I've always thought music software is a pain in the ass. Specifically for DJing, you need a local, downloaded library of high quality music, normally 320 kbps and/or a lossless format if you're playing through serious sound systems professionally.
If you're serious, you have a lot of music, hundreds of gigabytes, and you have to organise folders. Yes, folders. The problem is that music is a graph, not a tree shaped filing system, so any scheme you use to organise those folders forces brutal trade offs.
- year > album > artist > track
- label > album > artist > track
- artist > year > album > track
- artist > album > track
Oops, an artist does a collaboration: where does it go?
Oops, an artist releases on two labels: where does it go?
This model doesn't work. Ask any SoulSeek power user what they do with their life. >.<
So for me the goal was to borrow ideas from other apps and concepts. You can't really "organise" music in folders without collapsing metadata, album, artist(s), label, date, genres, collabs, etc., into a single rigid path.
Ingestion isn't where you organise; that's been solved for years with MusicBrainz Picard and similar tools.
What matters is usability that matches the real incentives for keeping music local today. Either you're a DJ or a collector, or you're not. The average listener doesn't have a library to organise; they're tied to a streaming platform they'll never leave.
But that DJ/collector case is interesting enough, and painful enough, that I want to solve it. It's actually fun now, because volume of code isn't the bottleneck anymore; the bottleneck is the idea of how to solve it.
For me it's clear: the playlist. Rekordbox knows it; Pioneer owns DJing, and people use playlists to escape rigid folder trees and map whatever they plan to play: genres, moods, BPMs, styles, artists, albums. Playlists accept all of it and don't ask you to choose one hierarchy. Don't worry about duplicates, it's handled under the hood. Don't worry about how many copies, it serves your own workflow. Tag them, arrange them, add notes, whatever. The catch is it's mostly a desktop workflow. Music follows you everywhere, especially as a DJ: you're always listening, taking notes, dropping links in WhatsApp groups, catching sets on SoundCloud, Mixcloud, YouTube, chasing IDs, hitting Bandcamp, buying and downloading from the artist, and then the files land on your computer.
I want to build playlists on my phone as easily as I build Spotify playlists, but with my local files, ready for gigs. No paid cloud lock in, just the library on my main machine, available wherever I need it.
That's Tape Music Hub.
And it's starting to have a lot of interesting meta to build on top :):)