Category Archives: Music

Hobby Project: djID

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I watch a lot of DJ sets on YouTube. Rarely are there track listings. I'm trying to make a hobby of DJing and learning what songs are being used is helpful to me, or at least that's what I'm telling myself. Manually hitting the Shazam button on Control Center was getting old, so I had Claude Code start a macOS app that would accept an audio file (mp3 or aac) and at a configurate timeslice use the ShazamKit API to identify what song is being played.

The opening window of my app imploring you to select and audio file to be processed.

My contribution to this project was paying for the Apple Developer Account, writing the prompts, and testing. I don't think this is an app that many (any?) people other than myself need or want. And that's okay! It's nothing more than a fancy ShazamKit wrapper with a couple of things that I want.

  1. Configurable time sampling window
  2. The ability to export to Apple Music as a playlist
  3. The ability to export to HTML for display on the web

That's it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Here's the app in action:

The app in-progress showing new tracks as they are identified or an "unknown" entry when Shazam can't identify a track.

Here's the final screen:

The final screen with all tracks show and buttons with the ability to export to an Apple Music playlist or an HTML file.

Welcome to My Post Mid-life Crisis

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Three boxes on the floor. A Pioneer DDJ-FLX4, headphones, and a pair of monitor speakers.

Yes, I finally took the plunge and bought some toys that I've been thinking about for much of 2025. I was a radio DJ in college and this is a very different kind of DJ gear...but thinking about how to move from one song to another is quite enjoyable to me and I want to do move of it and do it more like professionals.

Do I plan on making a career out of DJing? No. I can't stay up that late anymore. Do I plan on doing this publically? Eh, if it happens it happens, but it is not the goal. What is the goal? To learn something new and have fun. I'm pretty sure I can do that.

The Gear:

  • Pioneer DDJ-FLX4
  • Eris 3.5TB monitor speakers
  • Sennheiser HD 280 PRO headphones
  • rekordbox (software to control my deck)

This is all "bang for buck" gear, because this is just for fun.

Music in 2024

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Here's the 2024 musical brain dump. This is very much inspired by jwz's music wrap-up. I know there's still a couple of days left in 2024, but I doubt anything will get added. This is just in order from oldest to newest and I'm not including any commentary other than I'm going to see The Vaccines in Portland and K.Flay in Sacramento. Bands link to the best guess at their website and the ablum links to a service that will link to whatever your streaming service of choice.

Please enjoy...

The Black Keys – Ohio Players

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I'm not the biggest Black Keys fan in the world, but I'm really digging their new album, Ohio Players. The first track is constantly in my head.

I can't tell if this is a Miller High Life commercial or a family vacation from one of my friends. While you're on YouTube, do not miss this hilarious video from the same album. Be sure to watch all the way to the end for the amazing cameo.

Music in 2023

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Here’s the brain dump of what I added to my collection this year. Please note that not everything was released in 2023, it’s just the year I got it.

Vinyl

Digital

Some of these are still pre-release, but they show up in my list, so…

I also highly recommend jwz's 2023 music wrap-up.