I asked Claude to build a music player while I cleaned my basement

I have a large local music library. Folders organized the way I want them, cover art in the right places, everything on local storage.

The problem is music players. I only searched for about 10 minutes, but nothing fit... The app I wanted didn't exist: native, fast, no web runtime, and somewhere to write notes about what I was hearing.

I listen to a lot of records where I want to write something down: what I think about an album, what this song reminds me of, something about the recording I want to remember. I'd been keeping these in Obsidian or similar, but having the notes right with the music is better.

After those ten minutes of searching, I thought: I could probably just vibe code this. So I described what I wanted to Claude Code and asked it to build one while I cleaned my basement.

What I asked for

A player that:

Runs natively on Linux (GTK4, not Electron)
Loads fast and scans local folders
Shows albums as a grid with cover art
Has real search
Has per-album and per-track notes
Never touches your music files

My folders are organized the way I want them. No tag writing, no renaming, no moving things around.

How it organizes music

The app groups albums by folder, not by tag. A folder is an album. Every file in that folder belongs to that album, regardless of what any tagger has decided. This matches how my library is organized and keeps the display stable even when tags are inconsistent across rips.

Tags are still read for track titles, artists, genre, and track order. Just not used to group albums.

The notes

Click the notes icon in the header and a panel opens on the right side. There's an album note and a track note, separate. They autosave as plain `.md` files in `~/.local/share/openreel/notes/`, one per album and one per track.

No database, no proprietary format. They're just text files that open in any editor, work with grep, and will still be readable ten years from now.

To find the folder on your computer, open Open Reel's Settings and click "open folder" in the Notes section.

The mascot

I thought it would be friendly and fun to have an animated reel-to-reel deck mascot. And it is! It tracks your cursor, blinks, glances around when idle, and spins when music plays, with stereo meters for teeth.

What Claude built, what I directed

I described the logic and what features I wanted and Claude wrote the code. I tested, said what wasn't right, described what I wanted instead and we iterated over the 45 minutes or so then few more changes over a couple days.

This is the same dynamic as the photo-sorting script I wrote about in April: I described what I wanted, Claude generated the backbone, I adjusted for my specific setup. This one was larger: the app has gapless playback, MPRIS2 support for media keys and the GNOME lock screen, a right-click context menu on tracks, eight themes with live switching, a system font picker.

The credit line from that post still applies: I described the logic, Claude generated the code, and after some manual adjustments for my specific setup and preferences, it works!

What it doesn't do

No tag editing. No renaming or moving files. No streaming account or login, no discovery algorithm, no subscription. It plays the music in your folders and stays out of everything else. Also...no playlists. Hmm. Maybe I will decide to try that later.