Your music is everywhere... now you don't have to be.
After a long history of promises, last week I basically got the Parachord iOS app to feature parity with the Android and desktop apps. Multi-servcie content resoltuion, playback engine(s), catalog, scrobbling, the chat DJ, the social stuff, the Achordion integration and more. All of it working on my iPad (I...
Parachord is a one-person hobby project. I build all of it for fun and love: the desktop app, the Android app, the iOS app (I just started) and Achordion, the companion website to it all. All of it is open-source, none of it earns money, and I pay for all...
Two weeks ago I introduced Achordion — the web-and-community front door to the open music stack. A week later, the follow-up post was about how Parachord is quietly building a community-owned table of multi-service streaming links every time you play something.
The question that woke me up this morning:
For a while now, when I’ve talked about Parachord, I’ve described it as one half of something. The other half just shipped: it’s called Achordion, it lives at achordion.xyz, and it’s the user experience I’ve wanted on top of ListenBrainz data since the first time I logged in.
Back in 2014, my friend Alastair Porter and I built a thing called Spinbin. The idea was simple and, at the time, slightly ridiculous: if a radio station’s website showed the tracks it had just played, we should be able to turn that into a subscribable playlist. The tagline we...
It’s out. Parachord for Android v0.4.0-beta.2 is the first public beta of the mobile app, and anyone with an Android phone and a taste for music that lives in too many places at once can now install it.
A month ago I wrote about building the Parachord Android app in a few days. 146 commits, a full native app, Spotify and Apple Music playback, scrobbling, AI chat, the works. I was genuinely surprised it came together that fast.
So on Wednesday I woke up and thought, “I should start to scaffold out an Android app.” By Saturday, I had a full app. A real one. With Spotify and Apple Music playback, library sync, scrobbling, friend activity, search, artist pages, playlists, an AI music chat, a home screen widget,...
This is a big one. Parachord 0.9.0-beta.1 brings three headline features – dark mode, live concert discovery, and a much more reliable Fresh Drops experience – along with performance work, bug fixes, API resilience, and a pile of UI refinements across the board.
Here’s a scenario. You’re reading a glowing album review on your favorite music blog. The writer is describing a track as “the best indie rock album opener since Geese’s ‘Trinidad’.” You want to hear it. Right now. So you open a new tab, search for it on whatever streaming service...
To understate the obvious, there’s a big shift happening in how people think about software. After a decade of centralized platforms owning every layer of our digital lives, a growing number of developers and users are asking a simple question: what if I just ran this myself?
You found an incredible album. You want to share it with a friend. But they’re on Spotify and you found it on Bandcamp. Or maybe you’re texting a group chat where half the people use YouTube and the other half have Apple Music. So you either send a service-specific link...
Parachord is about removing friction between you and your music. Our (optional!) AI assistant Shuffleupagus - powered by any one of a number of AI plug-ins - takes that further… you can generate playlists, get recommendations, ask for details about what’s currently playing, see what your friends have been listening...
One of the best ways to support the artists you love is to actually buy the music you discover and stream in Parachord. Today, we extended the plug-in architecture to easily buy tracks and albums easily from within the app - no matter what source it is playing back from....
When you hit play on a song in Parachord, a lot happens behind the scenes. Today I want to pull back the curtain on how our content resolution system works—the part that makes playing “the same song” from a dozen different sources feel seamless.
When I decided I wanted to see if I could reimagine Tomahawk using new tools and technologies, I had no idea how quickly my “I’ll see what’s possible” would turn into a full-out heads down 2 week sprint out of the gates.
Streaming services have made music more accessible than ever, but somehow listening has become more isolated. We’re changing that with Parachord’s social features.
One of the most powerful features of Parachord is its plugin architecture. Today we’re pulling back the curtain on how it all works.
We’re thrilled to announce Parachord, a new kind of music player that unifies all your music sources into one seamless experience.