Photo by james chan on Unsplash (cropped from original)
The Story of DiscoCat
The idea for DiscoCat came about after years of frustration with the commercial music industry.
Desert of the Mainstream
I’ve had an eclectic mix of musical tastes over the years. As an early Gen-X kid, I was happily raised on my parents’ mostly classical vinyl record collection. In elementary and early high school, I was influenced by my friends’ ‘70s rock and my sister’s disco. I underwent a musical rebellion in my late high-school and college years, buying many cassettes and later CDs of punk, new wave, Britpop, and post-punk. And in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I often blissed out on shoegaze and dream pop. Much of that edgier music was not really played much on commercial radio, at least not in those days. College radio and some of my artsier friends were often where I discovered the music I loved.
Dream of the ’90s
With the arrival of the MP3 in the late ‘90s and services like Napster and iTunes in the 2000s, you had new ways to get music. But finding interesting new music was often hit or miss as those services were in the business of selling music downloads to a mainstream audience. Sadly, this is largely still true with streaming services today. Services like Pandora were helpful, but you had to pay to avoid ads. And it was more like a radio station that played a rather narrow selection of music, and that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I’ll admit, there were a few lesser-known services back in the day that had smaller but high-quality selections (shout-out to eMusic, which unbelievably is still alive!).
IMDb for Music
Another thing missing from many of those music services is complete and detailed information about the artists, releases, record labels, and works. I often would find myself scratching my head over missing albums or singles in an artist’s discography or not finding specific artists at all in their catalogs. What they had listed was only what they had available to download or stream. But I wanted to see all the releases available in the discography, independent of whether it was electronically playable or not. Also, it would be nice to find out who worked on a recording, find related artists such as tribute bands, list fan sites, etc. Basically, I wanted something similar to IMDb, but for music instead of video.
Thanks for the APIs
There are some great sites like MusicBrainz, Discogs, and AllMusic, that provide most of what I wanted. However, I prefer native apps (yes, Discogs has an app, but it requires an account), and I also wanted integrated streaming if the music is available on the streaming service I am subscribed to. As a Mac user, I also wanted a native macOS version, not just a website. So I decided to create a universal app for Apple platforms that leverages the best features of some of those music databases (via their APIs) but also adds streaming.
Enter DiscoCat (Discography Catalog)
DiscoCat pulls the data together from several databases and shows it on one detail screen. It does that for artists, releases, and release-versions, tracks, recordings, record labels, and creative works!
Focused on Music Discovery
It knows what genres your favorite artists fall into and will suggest ones you don’t already have saved that are in the same genres. This is a pretty straightforward algorithm that might get refined a bit in the future but it will never suggest artists based on popularity alone like some commercial services seem to do. You can also tap on any single genre tag in the artist details to find other artists in that particular genre. Want to find cover bands for an artist? Want to learn about the solo careers of the individual band members or show the other bands they were in? Or maybe you would like to look up contributing artists on a recording? DiscoCat has got your back. You can even keep up with new releases from your favorite artists in the Recent Releases section!
Streaming
The problem with being centered around an independent database such as MusicBrainz is: how does it find the corresponding Artist, release, or track in the external streaming catalogs in order to offer streaming? Looking up by artist name doesn’t always work. There may be other artists with the same name. Well, thanks to user curation, MusicBrainz often has direct links to the major music streaming sites in its database when they exist. So if those exist in the MusicBrainz data, the app will show the streaming links. And if you have a subscription to one of the supported streaming services and you indicated that in Settings, it will show a play button and a now-playing bar that will bring up a streaming sheet or window when tapped.
Artwork & Imagery
DiscoCat leverages the awesome release and release-version artwork curated by MusicBrainz via the Cover Art Archive. MusicBrainz doesn’t offer much in the way of artist imagery, however. This is where another API helps out a lot: TheAudioDB. Discogs and Wikimedia Commons also have artist imagery available via their APIs as well. The image quality from TheAudioDB is often the best, however (thanks to TheAudioDB users!). When streaming, DiscoCat uses the imagery from the associated streaming service for the now-playing bar and streaming sheet or window. In a future release, I am considering using streaming imagery, when present, to augment the detail screens as well.
Geeky Tech Notes
DiscoCat is a modern universal app written in Swift for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and even visionOS! It uses the latest Apple standards and frameworks, including SwiftUI, SwiftData, and Swift Concurrency.
Dedicated to Betty
I wrote DiscoCat in my free time for several years while working as a caregiver to Betty, my amazing 96-year-old mother. Betty is still an active piano teacher and a huge music lover, and she even helped me test the app! She particularly appreciates the vast information on classical artists, recordings, and works. 🩷
Carl Sheppard
Founder & Software Developer, Antarian Logic