Crate

Music between friends, with memory.

A private channel for passing tracks between two to five people. Paste a link from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Beatport, Tidal or Deezer; Crate resolves it to one canonical track with artwork, a 30-second preview, links on every platform, an accent color, and (in the browser) BPM, key and energy. The other person catches up on the stage at the top of their playlist and keeps what lands.

Set up where you already listen and the sends mostly stop being something you do: what you play lands in your log and, by each crew's rule, in its playlist. Plays reach Crate three ways. The Mac helper asks the Music, Spotify and SoundCloud apps on a Mac what is on, as it plays. The Chrome extension does the same for SoundCloud, YouTube and most music sites in Chrome on a computer. Connected accounts sync on their own: Spotify's recently-played history brings plays from any device a few minutes behind (so a phone-only person who connects Spotify is covered); YouTube, SoundCloud and TIDAL accounts bring likes, not plays; Last.fm scrobbles count as plays. Apple Music has no now-playing API, so Music app plays come in through the Mac helper. A second helper on a Mac turns music links texted to you in iMessage into cards at the top of your playlist.

Web first: one Next.js codebase, installable on iOS, Android and desktop as a PWA. On a phone the navigation moves to a bottom bar (Playlist, Live, Log, Send) and every panel becomes a bottom sheet; on a desktop it is a wide stage with a queue beside it. Dark is the default; the sun and moon in the top bar flip it, and Settings → Appearance can pin Auto, Light or Dark.

The words

One word per thing, everywhere in the app:

• The playlist is the crew's shared stream for today, under the name of the moment ("Monday afternoon"). It fills itself from what everyone plays and sends. The Playlist tab is this.
• Days are the same stream, earlier: one line per day on the Playlist page under "Earlier", every day by month on /days, and each day on its own page.
• Playlists (plural, the shelf on the Playlist page) are the lists people put together by hand, track by track. They can be shared by link and saved to Spotify or Apple Music.
• Your log is personal: everything you played, liked, kept or sent, across every crew. Nobody else sees it.
• Live is what the crew has on right now.

There is no "reel" in the product's copy; the catch-up stage at the top of the playlist is where a send lands.

Run it locally

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local     # everything in it is optional for local dev
npm run dev                    # http://localhost:3000

Start a crew, copy the invite link, open it in a private window as the second person, send a link both ways.

Deploy (about 15 minutes)

1. Database: create a free Turso database and copy its libsql:// URL and auth token. (Any libsql/SQLite host works; locally it is a file.)
2. Host: deploy to Vercel (or anything that runs Next.js 15). Set these environment variables:

Variable	Required	What it does
DATABASE_URL	yes	libsql://...turso.io in production; file:./data/crate.db locally
DATABASE_AUTH_TOKEN	prod	Turso token
SESSION_SECRET	yes	long random string; signs the session cookie
NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL	yes	public URL, used in invite links and the iOS Shortcut recipe
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	no	agent-written notes and playlist names; templated fallback without it
AGENT_MODEL	no	defaults to claude-sonnet-4-5
LASTFM_API_KEY	no	lets members add a Last.fm username; scrobbling is the bridge for platforms with no API (Pandora, Amazon Music, Deezer)
CRON_SECRET	prod	protects /api/cron/sync (Vercel sends it on its own) and /api/admin/import

Turso's Vercel Marketplace integration sets TURSO_DATABASE_URL and TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN instead; both spellings work. vercel.json schedules /api/cron/sync once a day, the most a Hobby plan allows (on Pro, */5 * * * * is fine); the open app still syncs itself every two minutes, and the Mac helper and the Chrome extension report plays as they happen. A Dockerfile and fly.toml are there too for a single always-on machine with the SQLite file on a disk; with CRATE_SYNC_LOOP=1 that server runs the sync loop itself.

3. Open the URL on your phone, add it to the home screen, and share the invite link.

Moving an existing Crate: POST /api/admin/import with the old SQLite file as the body and Authorization: Bearer $CRON_SECRET copies every table over (rows replaced by id) and answers with a one-day sign-in link per person, since cookies from the old address do not carry. Platforms need the new address added as a redirect: Spotify, Google, SoundCloud and TIDAL each in their own dashboard.

The schema is created on first request; there are no migrations to run.

How a link becomes a card

link ──► detectSource()           which platform, any ids in the URL
     ──► platform hints           oEmbed (YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify), page meta, Apple/Deezer lookups
     ──► cleanVideoTitle()        "Artist - Title (Official Video) [HQ]" → artist + title
     ──► matchApple()             iTunes Search: canonical track, artwork, preview, Apple link
     ──► matchDeezer()            preview fallback (MP3) when Apple has none
     ──► buildLinks()             direct links where known, search links everywhere else
     ──► accentFromImage()        one color sampled from the artwork (sharp)
     ──► upsertTrack()            one Track per recording; the same song from two platforms is one row
     ──► suggestNote()            the agent's one-liner (Claude API, or a templated voice)

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗