We Built the Music App That Can't Hold Our Notes Hostage
GRIEVANCE NO. 004. FILED AS: RESOLVED. RESPONDENT: EVERY MUSIC APP THAT EVER HELD OUR OWN NOTES FOR RANSOM.
Let the record show that we are a band, and bands take notes. "Bass comes in late at 2:41." "This is the good take." "Whatever the drummer is doing at 0:58, he is never allowed to do it again." These notes are how records get made.
And let the record further show what happened to every place we ever kept them. The app that shut down and took a year of session notes with it. The service that got acquired and turned our annotations into "a legacy feature." The one that still exists but now wants $9 a month for us to read our own opinions about our own songs. We wrote the notes. The notes are about our music. Somehow a server in Virginia owns them.
We are done filing this grievance against other people. So we resolved it ourselves.
Relief secured
AudioNote. A local-first audio catalog and annotation app. Your library, your timestamps, your notes, on your disk. It does the things we actually needed:
- Catalog your audio and mark it up — timestamp markers you can click to jump straight to the moment, and per-track notes for everything else.
- Export to CSV, because your notes should outlive any app, including ours. That is the whole point. That was always the whole point.
- Add from URL — point it at audio on the web and it pulls the track into your catalog, notes-ready.
No account. No subscription. No server in Virginia with opinions about your opinions.
The paperwork
It's open source under MIT — take it, fork it, read every line. The code lives at github.com/LIBCSYS/AudioNote, and there's a live copy running at audionote.je9.us if you want to poke it before you commit — try the sample clip and click a timestamp.
A TheRatsAsses / LIBCSystems release. Built out of spite, shipped out of principle.
Grievance no. 004 is hereby closed. The respondent may consider itself replaced.