The Kapell journal

Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums, Part 1

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I am making Kapell to be more connected to music. Being a a hip-hop “head” means I’m also well versed in the jazz, soul, and gospel contributions to that genre. I largely stay in the rap, r&b, and neo-soul genres but I want to be well versed. I’ve decided to listen to Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, bottom to top. In fact, it’s kinda why I’ve been making Kapell. I learn about every album and track along the way.

I’ll start by explaining how I use Kapell to listen. First, the rules!

Rules

To hold myself accountable I follow a few rules:

Give the album a shot, even if it’s wildly out of genre
Read about the album and tracks to connect to the people/time
Listen to at least the first 3 songs before getting too judgey
Background listening is fine, and sometimes, preferred
Use the session as an opportunity to improve Kapell’s enrichment soures so others benefit.

Make a Crate

Step one is to make a Crate. Why a Crate? Because Crates default to not being added to your recent listening history. This doesn’t cause Apple Music to ignore it, but it does improve your more common “throw something on” sessions by not thinking you want to start from a ’50s doo-wop album on your next drive to the gym.

10 albums in the crate is arbitrary, but feels tractable so that when I’m in the middle of an album I don’t care for the task still feels surmountable.

I hope to make this process automated in the future with pre-made crates for notable “lists”.

Listen!

Open the crate and click “Play”. Kapell hides the nav sidebar to avoid distractions and off we go. I commonly do other tasks, occasionally flipping to Kapell to read or pull a thread. It’s not uncommon for me to end up full-fat Wikipedia, YouTube or Discogs as I listen. I’d love for Kapell to bring me everything but then again if I’m actively listening what’s the harm?

So workflow out of the way, what did my first 50 albums say?

The Notes

It’s easy to think that the bottom of a list of 500 would be poor, but this is the best 500 of all albums so while they all had their high points I’ve selected some special ones for notes:

499: Chaka Khan & Rufus’ Ask Rufus (on Kapell) was great from end to end and revealed a sample in J. Cole’s St Tropez (on Kapell) I’d never known.
493: Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear (on Kapell) started off with a bang when I learned that his divorce settlement with his ex-wife required him to make two albums and per her the royalties. It never stopped being great.
489: Apple does not have Phil Spector’s Back to Mono
488: I was “who are The Stooges (on Kapell)” and after a few songs realized this was Iggy Pop and had a fun time.
487: Black Flag’s Damaged (on Kapell) was… interesting but I really wish I could delete it from Apple’s history so they never suggest anything like it again.
480: Miranda Lambert’s The Weight of These Wings (on Kapell) starting of surprisingly good, but I got bored halfway through.
475: At some point I binned Sheryl Crow into the not-worth-my-time column but her self-titled album Sheryl Crow (on Kapell) was a reminder she’s good at what she does.
468: My experience listening to The Rolling Stone’s Some Girls (on Kapell) is proof that this project was worthwhile, as it was fantastic.
464: I was looking forward to The Isley Brother’s 3+3 (on Kapell) and was not disappointed.
460: I couldn’t have told you anything about Lorde outside of Royals, but fuck me if Melodrama (on Kapell) wasn’t a ride. Hats off to Jack Antonoff (on Kapell).
456: Do I have to say anything about Al Green’s Greatest Hits (on Kapell)? Well, I will: Magic.
450: Paul and Linda McCartney’s RAM (on Kapell) was really lighthearted and eclectic. I’m not from the era of the Beatles and have never really listened them aside from the hits. I tend to find Beatles fans insufferable, so maybe I’ve avoided it for the wrong reasons.

Conclusions

My experience with these 50 albums was exactly what’d I’d hoped for when starting this project. I highly recommend it!

Liner notes for what's playing. Kapell is a deeper way to play the Apple Music® library you already have — the credits, samples, and history, surfaced as the music plays. Buy it once, own the whole thing. No subscription. kapell.fm

v1.1.0 released

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Version 1.1.0 of Kapell has just been released on the App Store.

The release combined b1455, b1532, and b1611 if you’re interested in minute details.

Kapell now supports sharing from albums, tracks, and artists. There’s a web-based landing page (e.g. A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders (on Kapell)). For opening the links on non-Apple devices or by those who don’t own Kappel. For these philistines we’ve politely included an “Open in Apple Music” link.

For those with Kappel, opening the kapell:// link now “deep links” into the application, down to even selecting the shared song.

Track Cursor

To make that deep linking work, Kapell now has a cursor inside the track list that can be moved with the mouse or keyboard. Selected, hover, and playing are the states that now exist. Pressing enter plays.

Improved Enrichment

Kapell’s API now materializes into large, GraphQL-served API calls will be integrated into the client over time, but we’ve started with the album page and made the credited artists clickable.

Links shown from Kapell’s improved album enrichment.

Clicking an artist name such as Large Professor (on Kapell) yields a revamped Artist page that works even for artists Apple doesn’t have like recording engineers!

Kapell’s revamped artists page which works even for artists not in Apple Music, like recording engineers and mixers.

Improved Playback

A bunch of other bugfixes landed here, but the most notable is hardening playback against eccentricities in Apple’s macOS MusicKit. Play crates that happen to have songs in your own Library are improved.

Build b1611 (v1.1.0-b1611)

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Clicking a track selects rather than playing. Sharing lets youlink to an album, an artist, or track. Public URLs allow posting to socials, etc. Oh, and bugfixes!

Added

Track lists have a cursor — Clicking a track selects it; it doesn't start playing. Play from the hover affordance, a double-click, or ⏎ on the selected row.
The keyboard walks the list — Arrow keys move the cursor and keep moving while held, ⏎ plays, and modifier-held arrows still reach the app's other shortcuts instead of being swallowed by the list.
Share an album, an artist, or a track — The share sheet is on album and artist pages, on any track row's ⋯ menu, and in the chin for whatever's playing. Share to Messages, Mail, or socials.
Shared track links open cued and revealed — Follow a link to a song and Kapell opens the album, scrolls that song into view and puts the cursor on it, rather than dropping you at the top of the record to hunt. Both kapell:// and ordinary web links land the same place.
Kapell tells you when enrichment can't run — With the credential missing, every credit, sleeve and graph lookup used to fail quietly. Settings now names the state and offers the repair, and the chin's lip distinguishes "no credential" from "nothing written about this track."

Changed

Selected and playing are no longer the same pixels: a selected row wears a quiet frame, the playing row keeps the wash, accent border and level meter.
The cursor follows what you play, so the keyboard picks up from where the music is rather than from where you last clicked.
The album action row is three buttons again — Play album, Favorite, Add to crate — with Start a station and Share moved into a ⋯ beside them, also reachable by right-clicking the header.
Favorite's label no longer flips to "Favorited" and nudges the whole action row sideways on every toggle.
A long album title sets tighter, holding together as one title instead of reading as two.
The album cue and the sleeve no longer assert a MusicBrainz lookup that never ran.

Fixed

Opening an album from search lands on the song you clicked, not the top of the record.
Clicking a row you'd already selected re-arms the keyboard instead of going dead.
Fix some races in clicks and loads.
A song that appears twice in a playlist behaves as two rows, not one.
An artist's library top tracks respect disc order.
Fixed some "not built yet" screens I mkissed.

Find another service like me

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I want Kapell to have really interesting capabilities. What about finding all the songs recorded at Electric Lady Studios in the 90’s by artists who’s names start with the latter J or top-charting songs for artists who’s birthdays are this month? That’s the dream!

To help realize this dream Kapell’s API is migrating to GraphQL. Musicbrainz is linked to Wikipedia by way of Wikidata, which (until now) was resolved at query/enrichment time. This added latency but was offset by L2 caching. To reach our goals we needed to bring that data into Kapell’s database. That work is now complete, lowering latency and improving enrichment hit rates.

But there’s more.

We want our future GraphQL work to be speedy and rich. To accomplish this we can “materialize” the underlying data which is rife with joins and rules. First, we can exclude any songs or albums that aren’t in Apple’s streaming catalog since Kapell is an Apple Music client. We’ll also go farther than Apple’s catalog by including information on the other artists credited in music: engineers, producers, etc. While we’re here let’s also grab information like recording and mastering studios.

Credits

666,081 artists appear in Kapell’s credit edges, meaning they contributed to the music. Of those only 111,760 or ~10% have an entry in Apple’s database. With this effort, Kapell gains the ability to relate those artists to their work.

Songs

27% (~5.3M) of the song IDs in Apple’s catalog are duplicate pointers to existing recordings: editions, deluxes, regional variants, etc.

Other Things

Over 300k record labels and more than 32,000 places are available for linking. This being openly available, volunteer-led data there are also gaps. Almost 420k artists have no credit links, leaving them informationally stranded.

Final Thoughts

Over 30 million edges now connect Kapell’s datasets — about six per node, counting artists, albums, labels, places, and series as nodes. Songs live on the edges themselves. This creates some really fascinating opportunities for deep, focused listening.

This doesn’t buy us a bigger catalog — we’re limited to Apple’s after all — but to bigger questions. What else came out of this room? What else did this person touch? What is this sample?

My goal, soon, is to listen to a single recording engineer. Not a rapper or a genre or an algorithmic playlist but a back-of-the-record, small-type artist who’s name is on music I love, and who otherwise I’d have no way to follow.

Happy enriching!

Build b1532 (v1.0.0-b1532)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kapell is now approved for App Store release and even allows 30-second previews of tracks if you don't have an Apple Music™ subscription. Artist pages are now surface where we have data and they cover everyone from rappers to engineers. We also fixed some bugs.

Added

Previews, without a subscription — No Apple Music sub? No problem. Click an album or a song and get 30 seconds.
Credits on artist pages — An artist page now carries a Credits block, gathered from Kapell's own enrichment graph — what a person actually did across the records Kapell knows, folded by role. This is going to keep growing!
Sleeve credits are links — The producer, engineer, or featured player listed on an album sleeve is tappable now, and opens that person's artist page. A credit is a way into the catalogue, not just a line of text.

Changed

Crate playback has been improved. An acknowledged bug in macOS (`FB23707746`) caused mixed catalog and library queues to silentry drop songs. We've now got an overly complicated, segmented queue abstraction to handle that until a fix comes.
Preview playback no longer pauses between tracks — the whole tail is queued up front, so one preview runs straight into the next.
Your content-rating preference governs previews too.
Fixed some style differences in the Crate view, as it uses a different component.

Fixed

Sometimes now-playing art would jump a few pixels. De-janked that by allocating fixed space for the now-playing icons.
The Crate playhead no longer stutters as it moves down the list.

Build b1455 (v1.0.0-b1455)

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kapell is in App Store review, so this contains a mix of mandated fixes as well as the filing of some rough edges from sitting with the same version locally for a week.

Added

First-launch no Apple Music sub accommodation — Don't have an Apple Music sub? No problem. Added in Apple's own subscription sheet and verified Kapell doesn't crash or give an opaque error. Thanks App Store reviewer!
Search finds what you actually typed — Library search matches *across* fields. Previously we were only matching on single field searches.
Library albums now show a chip. — Where the same album exists both in your library and in the Apple Music® catalogue, the one you own is now marked with a little chip.

Changed

An empty library is no longer treated as a problem. Kapell plays the catalogue, stations, and radio without a library at all, so an empty one is simply an account that hasn't collected anything yet. Home says nothing about it, and search, stations, and radio all stay open.
The trial now lives in the sidebar, and escalates in its final four days rather than sitting at a constant murmur.
Playback starts faster. Library information is cached between plays rather than rebuilt each time.
The library / catalogue toggle in search is less fiddly to click.
Fresh installs now default to the auto/cool color base.

Fixed

Library search was broken. It works now!
After a lot of debugging and a bug filed with apple, mixed queues containing both catalog and library tracks show now play correctly rather than silently dropping non-library tradcks.
Resuming a Crate picks up on the playhead rather than at the top of the stack.
A single-song queue keeps its now-playing details, and a failed seek no longer strands the scrubber.
The playing row lights on the right track, on artist pages and in playlists — including a playlist that lists the same track twice.
Albums with no MusicBrainz match still show their Apple Music® ID, instead of an empty field.
Crate sleeves no longer bleed hover state, and the track row lines up with the album's.
Enrichment prose reads more evenly — tighter leading, a wider gap between paragraphs.

Luther Vandross

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Luther Vandross (on Kapell) released fourteen albums. 13 were RIAA Platinum — including eleven consecutive albums from 1981 to 1996. Five were multi-platinum.

Insane.

Never Too Much (on Kapell) was my personal introduction to Vandross in the ’80s. He’s reentered the chat through Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA (on Kapell). Unfortunately, Luther passed in 2005.

Vandross’ career started in ’60s ensemble groups and as a session vocalist in the ’70s. He began an illustrious solo career in 1981 with the aforementioned Never Too Much single.

Here are some delightful parts of Luther’s career:

Luther started the first Patti LaBelle (on Kapell) fan club, of course.
Before he went solo he’d already sung background with Chaka Khan (on Kapell), Diana Ross (on Kapell), Bette Midler (on Kapell), and Barbra Streisand (on Kapell).
Rolling Stone ranked him 31st in the Top 100 singers of all time.
He was the lead vocalist for Change’s (on Kapell) Gold-certified The Glow of Love (on Kapell). Add that to his tally.
His music was a fixture of quiet storm radio.
His early group Listen My Brother included appearing on the pilot episode and first season of Sesame Street. Catch him on the stairs teaching counting or in the back row (leftmost) teaching the alphabet.
His final album, Dance With My Father (on Kapell), was his first to ever top the Billboard 200. It also won basically all the awards: two AMAs, 4 Grammys, 4 NAACP Image awards, and Soul Train Music award.
Finally, this absolutely wild performance opener of A House Is Not A Home (on Kapell) that I won’t spoil. The audacity.

Enjoy Luther’s amazing work:

Artist · KapellLuther VandrossFourteen albums, thirteen of them Platinum Apple Music · PlaylistLuther Vandross Essentials

You don't know nann

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s going to get old that I repeatedly say Kapell’s API pulls together many sources, but it will continue to be true. In today’s news I was following up on the API’s failure to recognize Trick Daddy’s 5th most popular album and found a peculiar problem: Apple’s data for www.thug.com contained a denormalized artist name of トリック・ダディ which is evidently katakana for Trick Daddy?

Regardless, this caused issue in matching and further investigation yielded this errant denormizalition causes ~5.5% (3,422,292) of Apple’s albums to “mis-flatten” in this way, which affects our internal mapping of Apple to MusicBrainz to fail for some of that subset. Adding code for this yielded ~55,000 positive album matches and ~500,000 tracks rescued as a result.

Happy enriching!

There's levels to this

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kapell’s enrichment pulls together many sources. Each one takes time to fetch. This latency cost has been offset with a per-process, in-memory least recently used (LRU) cache which is lovely if a lot of people are listening to the same things, or if you never restart the API!

I expect, however, that folks will listen to a lot of different music. This will put pressure on the backend to spend a lot of time fetching data from the likes of Wikipedia over and over again. To improve performance the API now includes hierarchy of caches with the inclusion of a new Postgres-based second level (L2) cache. This cache aggressively holds slow-moving data like album intro text, avoiding a need to refetch. Caching this data both improves performance by huge margins and makes us a more polite client that consumes fewer of our sources… resources. Query durations to Wikipedia have a lot of variability, but the addition of this cache seems to shave a few hundreds of milliseconds — sometimes muliple seconds! — off enrichment queries. One of my test albums shows consistent responses in the 150ms range with network latency.

The downside is stale articles, but they don’t change much! We also use negative caching to avoid re-fetching a missing resource, with a shorter TTL so we can retry sooner than we would for a positive response.

Happy enriching!

Build b1420 (v0.1.0-b1420)

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Enrichment and the trial countdown now appear on their own, even on a cold first launch. The sleeve never dead-ends, and the Help menu finally reaches the rest of Kapell out on the web.

Added

Help reaches the rest of Kapell — The Help menu now offers Colophon, Visit Kapell's Website, and Subscribe to Kapell's Newsletter alongside Kapell Help — each opening the matching page at kapell.fm.

Changed

The enrichment lip no longer dead-ends when a track has no liner note. Instead of reading "No liner note on file" and stopping, it points you to the album — where the notes and credits live — and the button simply reads "Read the sleeve."

Fixed

Now-playing enrichment and the trial marker appear reliably on installed builds. Kapell now fetches its App Store receipt at startup when it isn't already cached, so the sleeve fills in and the trial countdown shows up on their own instead of staying blank on a cold first launch.

Build b1413 (v1.0.0-b1413)

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wiring up purchasing was the largest feature here. A Purchase pane in Settings lets you buy or restore any time, and a quiet sidebar countdown keeps the trial in view without nagging. Also added a real Help menu and enrichment that needs no setup once you've bought.

Added

Buy Kapell any time — A new Purchase pane in Settings shows where your trial stands and lets you buy — or restore a prior purchase — whenever you're ready, instead of only meeting the decision at the paywall on day fourteen.
A quiet trial countdown — A small TRIAL · N DAYS marker rides in the sidebar while the trial runs. Click it to open Settings → Purchase. It states the fact and stays out of the way.
A clear welcome on day one — A short home-screen note explains the deal up front — free for fourteen days, everything unlocked, no account or card — and points to where you buy whenever you decide.
A real Help menu — The Help menu now offers a single Kapell Help item (⌘?) that opens the documentation at kapell.fm/docs, replacing the empty macOS Help search panel that opened onto nothing.

Changed

Enrichment just works once you own the app: MusicBrainz now authenticates on your App Store receipt alone, so there's nothing to configure and nothing to expire.
Kapell steps up to version 1.0.0 as it heads for public release.

Fixed

Your scrobbler sign-ins stick — ListenBrainz and Last.fm credentials now persist in the keychain, so a connected service stays connected across relaunches and reboots.
The Help menu no longer inflates the window; reworking it removed a min-size side effect.
The unlock now spells out what you get — the in-app purchase description names Enrichment as included.

Build b1386 (v0.1.0-b1386)

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Your plays can now be scrobbled — or not. This build adds scrobbling to ListenBrainz and Last.fm, a one-switch Private Mode for listening off the record.

Added

Scrobble to ListenBrainz and Last.fm — A new Scrobbling pane in Settings connects either service — a pasted user token for ListenBrainz, an OAuth browser sign-in for Last.fm, with credentials held in the macOS Keychain and sent straight from your Mac, never through Kapell. A play qualifies once it's run four minutes or half its length, whichever comes first; skips don't count, and there's no "now playing" ping — only finished listens go out.
A durable, capped scrobble outbox — Scrobbles are written to an on-device outbox first and flushed to the service when the network returns, so a dropped connection never costs you a play. The queue is bounded on both age and count, so a long offline stretch can't let the backlog grow without bound.
MusicBrainz recording IDs on every scrobble — Where Kapell can resolve one, each scrobble to ListenBrainz carries a MusicBrainz recording MBID rather than plain artist-and-title text — so your history lands on the exact recording, not a same-named live cut or remaster.
Private Mode — One switch from the View menu (⌘⇧P) takes a session off the record — your plays stop feeding Apple Music's recommendations, your Listen Log, and any connected scrobblers for as long as it's on. A red PRIVATE chip in the chin means there's never a doubt about whether you're being recorded.
Private Mode flips clean mid-song — Toggling Private Mode while something's playing rebuilds the queue quietly in place — playback holds its position and your play/pause state — and a confirmation spells out exactly what the switch will and won't record.

Changed

Outgoing scrobbles ride their own pillar in the rack telemetry, with their own tape color, so you can watch them go.
A final icon for the App store!
Revamp of the settings window.

Fixed

Tapping a track deep in a live crate now plays exactly that track instead of a nearby one from the loaded window.
The rack's Bus no longer gets cut off at the smallest window height.

Build b1289 (v0.1.0-b1289)

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kapell introduces itself once, with dimissable liner-note style, dismissable tips. Under the hood are style and Create improvements .

Added

First-run tips — Small tips now appear across Kapell introducing features. These are dismissable!

Changed

The Settings window now carries the theme instead of the system default.
The Listen Log and Home headers now line up with the other main screens.

Fixed

Large crates now start at your playhead instead of dropping you into the middle of the list.
Jumping to a track further down a playing crate plays straight away instead of killing playback until you leave and resume.
After a big skip, the tracklist re-centers on the playhead instead of leaving it off-screen.
A crate set not to affect recommendations no longer feeds its plays into your Apple Music listening history.
Leaving a crate unloads it cleanly instead of freezing the transport on the last track's frame.
Track rows no longer light up under your cursor on a window that isn't focused.
Not-yet-started crates match the height of in-progress ones, so the browse grid stops jumping.

And I remember and

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s inevitable that my own musical tastes will color improvements to Kapell’s enrichment, since it’s the stuff I play most often. Today it was Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings’ 100 Days, 100 Nights giving not just a lack of enrichment, but a full-on MusicBrainz match failure.

Turns out, when implementing matching, I handled connector symbols but I neglected to properly include connector words like “and”. Oops. Adding support for this yielded 6,087 Apple to MusicBrainz album matches.

Excitingly (?!) this yielded another bug! 100 Days, 100 Nights was also a single. This resulted in a release-group collision — singles and albums are release groups in MusicBrainz. The code bailed when this happened, since it’s unclear what to do. Now, we use Apple’s “type” to break the tie, preferring a match between Apple and MusicBrain’s album types. This tie unjammed 10,272 lonely albums.

Build b1259 (v0.1.0-b1259)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This build is about crate cleanup. Crate "doneness" is now a user decision. The radio station panel gets a single clean hero, the album tracklist stops jumping as credits load, and that's b1259.

Added

Finishing a crate is your call — Playing a crate to the end no longer auto-marks it done — it rests in In progress until you say so. Mark it done from Crate settings. Changed your mind? Clear done, any time.
Crate settings, rebuilt — A more flesh-out, sectioned surface for the controls that shape a crate: a Mark crate done switch, the Affect Apple recommendations toggle, and Reset playhead — now a deliberate read-then-act control instead of an easy-to-hit on-screen button.

Changed

Making a crate now drops you straight into the new crate so you can add records — an empty crate stays honest, with just an add-records prompt and no progress meter.
The burn-down gauge is gone, replaced by a quieter two-tier progress block — the played count over a PLAYED · time-left caption — with a stronger playhead divider marking exactly where you are.
Earlier tracks now fold into the list itself, behind a chevron hairline row, instead of floating in a pill.
The crate action bar is leaner — Play/Resume, Crate settings, Edit — and Home now hides completed crates, which live in the browse Completed group.
The now-playing radio station panel is rebuilt as a single hero: one big cover shown once, the station name as context, and a flat On now → Up next column instead of a doubled cover and a stack of hairlines.

Fixed

The album tracklist no longer reflows as enrichment lands — rows reserve the credits line, so credits fade in place instead of shoving the whole list down on arrival.
Album rows clear the scroller gutter, so the trailing duration and ⋯ menu no longer sit under the scrollbar until you scroll.
The playing-row highlight stays a contained pill at the top and bottom of the tracklist instead of kissing the rules and reading as broken.
The album enrichment cue is decluttered — one rule instead of two, and the "read the album sleeve" jump is now a quiet inline link.
The TRACK | ALBUM toggle in the now-playing sleeve uses the whole button as the click target, so it's no longer fiddly.

Build b1243 (v0.1.0-b1243)

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This build is about staying put while you read. The open now-playing sleeve now flips between the track and its album in place, and every review or other external link gets its own headed section with a glyph and a destination. Finally, some improvements to reading order and visuals round things out.

Added

TRACK | ALBUM toggle in the sleeve — Listening from a crate or playlist, you can now flip to the album's enrichment right in the open now-playing sleeve — no jumping out to the album screen. It opens on the track every time, and the album tab is one click away. You can also still just scroll down from the album's tracklisting. It's in two places to accomodate that what's in playing might not match what you are browsing.
"Find it on" is a real section — Link-outs now sit in their own headed nav section with an entry in the index rail track and album sleeves. Each link is underlined with a per-source glyph, a brand name, and a trailing arrow, and reviews cap at three with a "+N more" that expands in place.

Changed

The read comes first: charts now render **below** the editorial prose instead of above it, the album title uses the serif-italic album face, and fact-cell icons sit on their eyebrow line.
The album headline names a producer only when there's a single distinct one, instead of picking one of many. If there are many, we don't leave it to the per-track listing to show production credits.
The redundant MusicBrainz link-out is gone — it's where the data comes from, not a place to go.

Fixed

Album action buttons no longer wrap mid-label at narrow widths. They flow onto a second row when tight.
The rack Event log now tails live entries, tracking to the bottom instead of only setting the initial scroll position.
Artist Members pills wrap instead of overflowing.
The sleeve no longer draws a stray leading hairline when a track has no editorial sources, so the track and album rails line up.

Build b1230 (v0.1.0-b1230)

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This build is about staying in the listen. I've been using the crate feature more and learning how to stay in the zone. Didn't stop me getting distracted on a few other things, though.

Added

Played tracks fold away — While listening through a crate, tracks more than a couple behind the playhead collapse behind a "Show N earlier tracks" disclosure, so what's playing stays near the top — no jump-to-playhead needed. The unfocused and edit views still show every track.
Suggest less also skips — Marking the current track Suggest less now stops playback immediately — it advances to the next track, or ends playback if it was the last. Un-disliking or rating a track that isn't playing leaves playback alone.

Changed

Crates are supposed to be calm. The title-bar Leave button now opens the app's own compact confirmation card instead of a native dialog that ballooned to fill the window.
Inside a crate, the now-playing artist name is plain text rather than a link, so a stray tap can't drop you out of the crate onto the artist screen. Outside a crate it's a link as before.
Track, album, and artist profile enrichment lookups run concurrently instead of one after another, so the now-playing enrichment fills in faster. Yay, faster!

Fixed

A play that paused before its first sound could get stuck "preparing" forever — an animated meter and dimmed chin on a track that wasn't playing. It now settles to a static, idle meter.
The enrichment lip text is optically centered — it had been sitting a _hair_ low.

Introducing Kapell

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I love music. More than that, I love learning about the music I’m enjoying. I’m a hip-hop nerd in particular, and the genre has a deep history of sampling, production, and remixing — there’s always a story behind the song, and I want to know that story.

I grew up reading album notes: who featured, who produced, who wrote the hook. Not just to know, but to find more music. A single session musician, background vocalist, sample, or producer could become a thread to pull — and following it pulled me into whole eras and genres I wasn’t alive for.

The notes didn’t disappear. They got unbundled.

I’ve lived through the whole arc — CDs, MP3s, streaming. I love how available music is now. But somewhere along the way the story got consolidated behind platforms and quietly left out of the box. So I went back to doing it by hand: digging through Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and Genius to catch a slippery lyric or figure out who produced a track.

Recently it hit me that the digging didn’t have to be so manual. Volunteers at MusicBrainz have spent two decades cataloguing exactly who did what on millions of recordings, down to the breaks one song borrowed from another. Wikipedia holds the history. Wikidata and Genius fill in around the edges.

Kapell’s whole job is to gather them back into the one place you’re already looking: the song playing right now.

The liner notes were never destroyed — they were just scattered across a dozen tabs.

Meet Kapell

So I built the thing I wanted. Kapell rides on the Apple Music subscription you already have and surrounds it with the context — made by a music lover, for the love of it. It adds things like Crates and the Listen Log to go deeper than a play button ever will: the kind of features a service built for everyone will probably never bother to ship.

Why now

Because the tools to do this well finally exist — the open data is there, the catalog is in your pocket — and because the alternative is a small, quiet loss that adds up: a whole generation of listeners who never learn the name of the person who played the part they love.

Press play. Meet the band.

Build b1220 (v0.1.0-b1220)

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This build is about reacting to what's playing. Songs go tri-state — love one, or tell Kapell to suggest less — and the choice you just made always wins the race against a slower read. Add a faster Home card and a fistful of fixes, and that's b1220.

Added

Songs are tri-state now — Beyond a favorite, you can tell Kapell to suggest less of a track — a real dislike, not just the absence of a like.
Track-actions menus — On the album sleeve and on every track row. Play next drops a song in right after what's playing, and Suggest less is one click away.
Suggest less, from the chin — A Suggest less button now sits in the now-playing chin, so you can react to the current track without leaving where you are.
Favorited at a glance — Album track rows show a favorited indicator, so you can see what you've already starred without opening a thing.

Changed

The "Just play something" card resolves faster and more gracefully: its station is cached, a skeleton placeholder holds the space while it loads, and the cover art plays on hover.
That card is lifted off the gradient and its corners rounded a notch, for a cleaner read.
Enrichment and MusicBrainz probes now live behind a Diagnostics preference instead of running all the time — quieter by default, still there on the readout when you want to watch.

Fixed

Favorites no longer get wiped by a stale rating read arriving after a fresh one.
The now-playing row lights correctly for station-sourced songs.
⌘← / ⌘→ line navigation stays inside the search box instead of jumping away.
Side-scroll chevrons are stable, and now appear on the discography shelf too.
A standardized Presets header, and crate cards that hold equal height.