The Story Behind Coral

How I used to listen to music before Coral

I've got a sizable music collection that I bring with me everywhere I go. To be able to do so, I maintain a separate transcoded music library that is synced to my phone and laptop. When I get new music, I right-click the album in foobar2000, choose my AAC preset and wait a few seconds for it to complete before it's then mirrored via Syncthing. I initially wanted to write an application that could transcode parts of my collection on demand as I very often forget to create transcodes of the music I get.

If only you knew the amount of times I've logged into my computer via my phone and done the whole procedure on public transport over a sketchy LTE connection. It's an awful experience that I hope I won't need to do again.

An opportunity presents itself

In the autumn of 2022, I started my final year at university. The Computer Science BSc course has students do a year long development project, along with many other modules, like the one I'm writing this website for hello Graeme!.

You can essentially make whatever you want for your development project, granted that you're able to plan it out and have something to show by the end of the year. I spoke with my supervisor about what I could do for my project, which essentially boiled down to "make whatever you want, granted that you haven't made it before", and thus, Coral was born.

I initially wanted to make a simple audio transcoder frontend that I could trigger remotely, but that would be too simple, so I decided to make a streaming platform instead. I wanted to spend some time learning React anyway.

"Just use Plex or something"

It's a common opinion that the self-hosted music streaming platform space is a "solved problem", but I disagree. There are tons of things that can be improved upon. I tried using both Plex and Jellyfin as music players for a bit and I didn't really like the experience that much. I wanted to like the more specialized streaming platforms, like Navidrome, Ampache and Subsonic, but I dislike the way they look and behave.

I want to keep up to date with my favorite artists and labels

The thing that Spotify and other commercial streaming platform can provide is the ability to keep up-to-date with your favorite artist's discography and know when they've got new music out. I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp, but I tend to miss emails about music being released, so I'd like to have some sort of notification in the player that I'm using to let me know that there's new music to be heard. I tend to miss out on newer releases because of this and I end up having to play catch-up.

I want to use my audio transcoder of choice

I want to be able to listen to my music the way it's meant to be heard on even poor connections. Even if I can't stream it losslessly, I would like to use the best AAC encoder (Apple's encoder on MacOS/Windows and Fraunhofer's on Linux) I can use to ensure that the music still sounds good at a low (less than 160kbps) bitrate.

You might be wondering, why not Opus? I'd love to use Opus, but it's not exactly most web-friendly codec due to a lack of support for it in certain browsers. I wrote about this in my literature review, researching the feasiblity of Coral, which you can read if you're interested in knowing some of the design decisions I made while making Coral.

Note that Coral as an application has changed a lot since I wrote the document, but the research is still relevant.

It's important that playback is instant, and the audio is seekable from the moment playback has started, even if the audio is being transcoded. If you're able to implement Opus support in Coral with these constraints in mind I'd love to hear from you.

I want a replacement for my desktop player

I'm kinda over foobar2000. Don't get me wrong - I've been using it for over 8 years now and I don't have anything against it, but I want something new that doesn't require me to transfer my music everywhere. I want a single server that all my devices can connect to and manage. I want to be able to upload new music to my server from any of my devices.

I'm not a fan of their user interfaces

I want the user interface to be functional, with commonly used features placed in a way that doesn't require me to dive through tons of menus to do what I need to. I also want the user interface to be aesthetically pleasing, feel performant and have some sort of identity that's not just flat icons on bland backgrounds. I'm also tired seeing of low quality Spotify knock-offs. Spotify's user interface does some things right, but are awful at most.

The mobile apps aren't great

I tried Plexamp on my phone but it couldn't find my server for some reason. The Jellyfin Android app isn't amazing either, there are third-party apps such as Finamp, Symfonium, Shuttle2 and Fintunes that offer an improved experience over the main Jellyfin app. I tried out Fintunes for a bit and ended up deleting it after finding that it lacked simple features such as being able to go to the artist of the currently playing track and playlist browsing. Not to mention the countless other apps that have support for the ancient Subsonic protocol - that are also either outdated or not as aesthetically pleasing as I'd want them to be.

One could argue that a music player doesn't have to be the prettiest thing to look at, after all, once you've found the song you want to listen to, you go back to do whatever else you were doing. However, a pretty user interface can make you want to listen to music, want to interact with and explore more of what the application can do - and that's what I care about. There are also people who don't use certain applications unless they're visually pleasing.

The search experience leaves a lot to be desired

In my current music player, I can search for a song based on every single tag it has as well as the name of the folder it is in. Most times I tend to include the catalog number of the release in its folder name, which makes it very easy to find music from certain labels. Here are some examples.

• NQ for The North Quarter
• SHA for Shogun Audio
• CRIT for Critical Music

You get the idea. I can't search like this in Plex nor in Jellyfin. I try to include as much metadata as I need for discovery in my music collection. I make extensive use of custom tags such as CATALOGNUMBER, LABEL and ISRC to help aid discovery based on which country the music was released in. Take a look at the ISRC standard if you're interested.

Poor presentation of results

I don't want to scroll through a carousel of tracks to find the one I want to listen to. Spotify solves this problem by giving you the first 100 matches to the query and then creating artists and album results based on the metadata present on the tracks.

Notice the lack of grouping of artists in this query. These grouped artist should be split into Vacant, Sorrow, Asa and Trim. The next section goes in-depth about why.

Poor display of artists and their roles on various tracks

Commercial streaming platforms allow you to discover an artist's discography through more than just their main releases. Spotify's "Appears In" section includes releases where the artist either features as guest, contributor to a compilation or in certain cases remixed a track. However, their presentation of said information can be improved upon.

You'll often find that artists names are repeated twice on a track, both as title (feat. guest_artist) in the title tag as well as artist, guest_artist in the artist tag. Most people don't care, but I think it's hideous.

In Coral, I show the title tag as is, but allow users to click on the artist name within the title if it can be parsed. Plex and Jellyfin do not process your tags in any way, so you end up with tons of duplicate artists where they've done collaborations with other people - as seen previously. Plex doesn't present your metadata as-is by default, which is annoying.

I want users to be able re-discover their music collection without needing to result to searching for things. You should be able to click on an artist and know exactly what they did on what tracks (to a certain degree, I won't be supporting all the intricacies surrounding classical music).

Poor user experience

I dislike how Plex shows off my music collection. It uses data from MusicBrainz to change the names and tags of your audio. I want my data to be presented in the way that's stored, not how some third party service wants things to look. It's also extra annoying when the metadata matches are totally incorrect.

These all-in-one multimedia platforms excel at presenting videos, but leave a lot to be desired when it comes to music collections. Plex allows you to perform complex search queries on metadata acquired by them via third-party integrations with MusicBrainz and Last.fm, but you cannot perform any queries against your own metadata beyond standard tags.

It's also impossible for me to find playlists I've created in Plex without diving through tons of different menus, nor can I mark tracks, artists or albums as favorites, making it harder than necessary to find the music that I love. It's possible to create what Plex calls "collections", but they're only accessible through a sub-menu on the main music page.

Jellyfin allows you to both create and find your playlists. It can also show you your external playlists - but it doesn't make their contents within them playable, which kinda defeats their purpose.

I'm picky!

Which is why I am taking matters into my own hands to provide what I believe will be a superior experience. I will be fixing every issue I've faced using Plex and Jellyfin as music players. I briefly tried Navidrome's demo instance and I've also used Subsonic in the past - so I know that I'll have to make my own music player to get things just the way I want them to.

Current state of Coral

As of writing this article, a few months prior to open sourcing Coral, it's already solid enough for me to daily drive - but there still is a lot to do before I end up open sourcing the application. I've prioritized the music discovery experience and UI over user-friendly deployment, as I'm still its only user. I'm sure that by the time you read this article, Coral will be a more mature platform and that you'll be able to be up and running within a few minutes.

Notes about the future

I was introduced to the React Native framework tamagui by a friend of mine. It both looks a lot prettier than what I'm using today, and it also includes a React Native toolkit which allows me to share code between the web and Native codebase. I'm going to be prioritizing other features such as playlists and plugin integrations for now, but I'm excited to port the app to Tamagui and make a fun mobile app for Coral with it.

It's not just a university project

Coral's development will keep going for a long time as it's a platform that I'm heavily invested in myself. Coral will be receiving updates for as long as I'm able to use it, so you can feel safe knowing that the platform will be actively looked after by someone with a lot of passion for it. I won't let it die like my other projects and that's a promise.