Now Playing companion app

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

Hey folks

I’ve been chasing the perfect “now playing” experience for 20 years. Some of you might remember Salling Clicker — that was my starting point. I have vivid memories of sitting in the bathtub in my perfect new house, with music cued up and a glass of wine, only to climb out dripping wet every five minutes to reset the sallinc clicker server or the Sonos player or whatever crashed… When Roon came along, it felt like redemption — the holy grail. And for the core experience, it still is.

But I always wanted more context. I want to know who’s playing piano on track 3, what the critics said, whether there’s a great interview out there I haven’t read.So you know the drill, start roon then dig through Google for artist or album or track title, opening browser tabs, digging through my magazine archive, searching YouTube — all while the music was playing, by the time I found what I wanted we’re on to the next album in the playlist. So I built something to do all of that for me, automatically and nearly instantly.

It runs in a browser, knows what’s playing right now, and pulls together everything I’d normally go hunting for.

Here’s an initial look. Full record credits on the bottom left, scrollable — every musician, producer, art director, the lot. The default view takes you to Web results for whatever’s now playing. The web view is split into a general web search and genre-specific searches below. Right now I have a Downbeat section because I’m mostly into jazz, but this could just as easily be your favourite magazine — point the app at whatever folder of PDFs you have and it works the same way.

Then you have the Local tab. This is where your own content gets seen. That can be sourced from two places:

Artist-specific content you keep in the same local folder as your music —

OR

A local folder with your magazine archive in whatever form you have them. I have a folder of Downbeat PDFs, so here’s what the app shows when you play something that gets a hit (Flea’s recent jazz endeavour is on the cover of the last DB issue so the Local tab brings your attention to it:

Then you can Read in magazine the actual article:

YouTube results for whatever’s playing.

And tour dates.

A place to jot down your own thoughts — anything from “play this for Sarah” to liner-note-style reflections. Notes are tied to the artist, album, or individual track.

You probably noticed already the minimal transport controls and zone selection

Night mode too

That’s where it is today. I built this for myself but I’m curious whether other listeners would find it useful. Happy to answer any questions.

[basepi (Colton Myers)]

Very cool! I’m very interested.

[Morten_Valbjorn (MoVaMa70)]

Interested, Life time license

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

to be clear - everything in the screenshots works - content is pulled from web or local folders, these are not mock screens

[AllenS]

Could you provide an architecture view of the data flow and integrations datastore for the stored app user input content? Notes for example, where do you store the data?

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

Notes are stored locally in a simple JSON file right alongside the server. No database, no cloud — just a flat file that’s human-readable and easy to back up or move to another machine.
There are three tiers of notes — Artist, Album, and Track — so you can write something general about a musician that surfaces whenever they’re playing, or get as specific as a single track. When a track changes, the app fetches all three tiers in one call and displays them together. Writes flush to disk immediately, reads come from an in-memory cache so there’s no lag on track changes.
On the roadmap: a bulk import feature where you can dump an existing collection of notes (text files, markdown, etc.) into the app and have them automatically tagged and surfaced when the relevant music is playing. So if you’ve been keeping listening notes in a folder for years, you won’t have to re-enter them one by one.
For the commercial version, the plan is to keep notes local-first with optional encrypted sync across devices.
Other user-owned content is imported and indexed for retrieval when relevant music is playing. The app scans for new content in user defined folders.
Does this address your question?

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

Some questions about how you’d actually use personal notes:

The app lets you create notes tied to artists, albums, or individual tracks — things like “favorite live version,” “skip the last track,” “that’s the one with the great liner notes,” whatever.

First question: should notes be richer?

Would photos or larger files be useful in your notes? In other words, is this something you’d want to grow into a full music note-taking app, or would you rather keep using whatever note system you already have, and just have this app surface those notes when relevant music plays?

Second question: where do your existing notes live?

If your notes already sit organized next to your music folders (in your artist/album directories), that’s already covered — the app scans your music folders and returns that content automatically.

But some people keep bulk notes in separate folders — a “Music Research” folder, clippings, reviews, whatever. If that’s you, I could extend the scan to those folders too. The indexing engine is already built (it currently handles my Downbeat archive); it’s just a matter of adding other folders to the process.

What’s your setup?

[AllenS]

Ya, all good. Thanks for taking the time to detail.

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

the local notes feature in action - my Division Bell concert ticket from 1994 showing when playing the album in Roon

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

BTW the ticket jpg is NOT in some Pink Floyd folder, it is in a Notes Dump folder along with other stuff. The app recognizes it’s relevant to the Floyd album playing and brings it into the Local content tab

[steve_abbott (pologeezer)]

This looks funky!!!

[Syd_Schwartz]

Thanks for putting the work in on this. As a Roon Titan owner with 200K+ tracks, this is where I was hoping Roon would evolve. Like you, I’m a fellow jazz fanatic (I write liner notes for a lot of jazz records, most recently for the Miles Davis Plugged Nickel box and the John Coltrane mono reissues on Atlantic), and I’ve been wanting to tie some of those notes and highlights into the Roon experience. Furthermore, I’ve got all sorts of notes about my Billy Strings, Grateful Dead, and Phish recordings I’d like to reference.
I don’t know if this is designed to work with Roon hardware (the Titan/Nucleus/One don’t handle extension IIRC) but if so, very much looking forward to seeing where this is going. And if you’ve got a GoFundMe I’m happy to contribute!

[DanMtsn (Dan Matiesanu)]

Fantastic use case! The app is designed with that in mind. Your notes would be presented in the app when relevant music is playing - even if they are not named in a useful way. I’m using AI calls to read content that is not easily classifiable by file name. If you send me one of your articles (by private message) I can show you what it would look like in the app

And thanks for the encouraging words! I’m building this for myself but I opened this thread to gauge interest from other like-minded music fanatics I would need some market signal (number users interested) before I move into making this commercially available - that’s a different kind of effort compared with what I’ve done so far so I won’t embark on it if the signal is weak.

Regarding your question on what will this work with - the app simply listens to the Roon API which provides now playing info - artist, album, track, album cover. Then the app has logic that further identifies what’s missing there, for instance I’m now struggling with a Yuja Wang album where Roon for some reason doesn’t expose her name through the API - so I’m building an AI vision call to read the actual album cover.
This is roon only for now, because I’m also a heavy roon user but I’ll develop it for any music playing app. The limitation is how much does an app expose through an API, but there are workarounds even when apps don’t give much. The rest of the context discovery engine is independent on which app plays the music - should work with any app once I’m able to get its now playing details.

[MLJones]

I think this is great.

The idea of loading pictures of ticket stubs is great. Possibilities of things like photos and video you take at a concert?

Anyway - cool idea.

[sonic_fanatic]

You should see if you could work with Roon and help them build this within Roon. I think it’s very niche and only for nerds who, for example, have a bunch of lossless dead shows. I’m a heavy Apple music user but almost exclusively on mobile and because they have lossless DJ sets. I don’t see how this feature could integrate with them. Sadly their amazing library I suspect will always be walled off.

[Neil_down]

Yes, very interested in this, looks great on your sample shots. I can imagine this being very convenient for background research and finding more information. I love idea of the notes function, I’ve often found the need to do a follow up on a track, for example sometimes my original CD rip failed and the track “skipped”, and needed a re-rip the track - this would work perfect. If this works on say an iPhone/iPad, presumably you could dictate into the notes section rather than typing?

Questions: the background colour of the screen, can that be configured or say taken from the primary colour of the album/track playing? It would need to handle black artwork, and switch text from black of course!

Could you run this on say a TV screen type browser, with no mouse/keyboard controls, using say phone/tablet to control music?

[Michael_Schulz]

This is absolutely fantastic and I would be one of the first adopters who would spend money on a commercially developed app!

As a lifetimer I also thought roon would evolve in such a direction…

How can one support your way?

All the best!

[Matthew_Davis]

This is utterly spectacular.

Does it run a separate web server on the same box as Roon? Would I just bookmark a single page that would always know what’s playing in Roon?

[James_Nero]

I will add my name to the list of very interested consumers. I am a lifetime Roon user as well and mimic the thoughts above regarding my original and ongoing hopes that Roon itself would have evolved in this direction. This is the album cover art and information on steroids! Keep us posted on your progress.

[MarmiteSandwich]

Interested to see this concept developed for other apps, eg Qobuz, BubbleUPnP. Especially if users can add their own metadata.