The story of DiscoCat

In early 2021, well into the pandemic, Carl Sheppard, the founder of Antarian Logic, had an idea…

After years of frustration with the lack of non-mainstream artists and the often incomplete artist discography on the major music streaming services, he wanted to create an app that is independent of those commercial music databases. After a bit of brainstorming, he came up with the name DiscoCat, short for Discography Catalog.

The core textual and image data in DiscoCat would be driven by independent music database sites like MusicBrainz, Discogs, TheAudioDB, and others. DiscoCat would be centered around displaying the music metadata first and foremost. The experience would be similar to the IMDb app but for music instead of video.

But since MusicBrainz often has links to the major music streaming sites in its database when they exist, in many cases the app could still show streaming links to those sites. And for the sites with mobile SDKs, it would even be possible to stream them directly in the app!

Fast forward to over 4 years later in early summer 2025, amidst other projects and after several WWDCs and many minor and some not-so-minor rewrites due to developer improvements such as Swift Concurrency, SwiftData, new SwiftUI features, etc., as well as sticking with the goal of writing and testing mostly common SwiftUI code across several platforms including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, all the while working as the primary caregiver to his amazing 96-year-old mother, DiscoCat was finally in the App Store!

By the way, if you almost lost your mind’s breath reading that last run-on paragraph, you may have a small idea of just how long those 4 years have been for Carl! 😹