Trellis

Trellis is a music library app specifically crafted for the live recording collector.

Trellis enables tapers, archivists, and collectors to maintain exacting detail on their recordings in a local database, while offering a seamless experience for importing, researching, listening to, and sharing their recordings.

It is available as a free Beta download for Mac Desktop. I am looking for testers and potential collaborators.

Download Beta GitHub

v0.2.4

  • The Top Shelf row above Browse My Library, with recordings listed by date, performer and venue
  • Instant search results showing a musician's membership across different acts in the collection.
  • A recording page showing the waveform, members, lineage, track list and the original info file
  • The Add Recording form with parsed metadata and the track flag menu open
  • Review and Ingest, with three recordings scanned and their proposed metadata shown
  • A performer page with a researched lineup, each person listed with instrument, tenure and source
  • The AI Assist panel reviewing a recording and proposing a corrected track title
More About the Project

What the app does today:

  • Point it at a directory of folders and stage a bulk ingestion. Preview with audio and metadata analysis, do AI-assisted show research (bring your own Anthropic key), and pull a collection into the database within minutes.
  • Listen to your shows and store quick edits to track names, comments, and songwriter info.
  • Flag tracks (e.g. "Tuning", "Introductions") and use "skip non-music" on playback.
  • Add personnel details, identifying members of the performing entity and any special guests.
  • Bring in FLAC and WAV. A folder of SHN or WAV can be converted to FLAC on the way in, with the originals kept. MP3 support is limited at this time.

An archivist with a bit more technical inclination can share their collection with friends. The friend installs Trellis, redeems an invite code, and they can access the host's shared collection. Making your library reachable from outside your own Mac currently takes a tunnel or VPN that you run yourself.

Behind it is a SQLite database and a properly-designed data model, which enables more interactivity with recordings than the community's traditional text-and-tag metadata techniques allow:

  • Dynamic collections of shows
  • Performer profiles, personnel tenures, venue profiles
  • Optimized search, streaming APIs that obfuscate the file location

The database is portable with clear documentation and could be incorporated into other personal projects. Adding fields to objects is simple to maintain and is anticipated as part of improvements.

Trellis also supports a custom implementation of FLAC Vorbis tags attuned to the live concert recording, including Venue, Performance Date, Location, Event/Festival, and Source.

Development Statement

I am building Trellis primarily for myself. I have been a live music collector since 2001, and have been hoping for this type of software to emerge for the entire time.

Over the same time, I have had a career building information systems and designing user-facing applications. I finally have been able to find the time and engineering support from Claude to build what I have wanted.

Claude Cowork did the coding work and built design prototypes. I did all database design, and designed the user experience and functionality.

If others find use in it, that will make this project more fun. I always welcome feedback. ryan@trellismusiclibrary.com