Long-form writing on music technology, product design, and AI creative tools.
May 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Every XML export erases a little more of your prep work. Here's why the lossy serialization problem has only one real fix — direct database access — and what Bonk does differently.
March 10, 2026 · 11 min read
Spotify optimizes for engagement. DJs optimize for a feeling. What happens when you build a music recommendation system that takes BPM, key, energy, and spectral density seriously as structural constraints?
April 15, 2026 · 9 min read
When a DJ playlist moves from Spotify to rekordbox, key disagreements, BPM drift, genre collapse, and missing cue data make it unusable. Here's why the metadata pipeline breaks.
June 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Spotify calls it 'Deep House.' Beatport calls it 'Microhouse.' rekordbox calls it whatever the DJ typed. These three taxonomies were built for different purposes and they don't map to each other.
June 7, 2026 · 10 min read
Rekordbox, Mixed In Key, Spotify, and keyfinder-cli often disagree on the same track. Here's how chroma-based key detection actually works — and why harmonic mixing requires verification, not trust.
May 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Every XML export erases a little more of your prep work. Here's why the lossy serialization problem has only one real fix — direct database access — and what Bonk does differently.
June 7, 2026 · 8 min read
A 128 BPM track in A minor can sound like two completely different records. Here's why spectral profile — not BPM or key — is the axis most DJ recommendation tools are ignoring.
June 8, 2026 · 9 min read
Your track is 140 BPM but rekordbox says 70. That's not a rounding error — it's an octave problem in onset detection. Here's how tempo estimators fail on half-time, double-time, and live drums.
May 10, 2026 · 14 min read
Music metadata is the unglamorous infrastructure underneath every stream. Here's what actually happens to a song between upload and play — and why BPM, key, and mood never survive the pipeline.
June 2026 · 13 min read
The Camelot Wheel tells you which keys are numerically adjacent. It doesn't tell you why two tracks in the same key can still clash, or why a tritone jump sometimes works. Here's what the music theory actually says.
June 7, 2026 · 6 min read
A=440Hz is a convention, not a physical law. A significant portion of recorded music was tuned to something else — and every chroma-based key detection tool fails on exactly these recordings.