Music Box
This page is a short honest summary of what it is and the key decisions, not a full case study. Source status: write-up only: the code stays private; this page is the public artifact. Withheld: The code indexes a personal licensed music library and stays private with it; the design is documented here.
A personal FLAC library, searchable and playable from a browser: full quality, no transcoding, no exceptions.
A search-first player over a personal FLAC library on an external drive: full-text search across artist, album, and track backed by SQLite FTS5, originals streamed byte-range direct, no transcoding, no quality lost in the middle.
The fun part is what it deliberately doesn’t do: it never leaves my own network (reachable on the house LAN, or away from home over Tailscale, but never past that boundary), and it never becomes a public station. The library includes commercially released music, and broadcasting that publicly isn’t licensed. Kept local, for exactly that reason.