Hello, world — Building Audiqa in public

I’m building a new project called Audiqa, and I want to share it openly as it grows.

Audiqa is a local-first audio library manager for people who genuinely care about their music files. Not cloud playlists or opaque recommendations, but real collections: folders full of FLACs, ALACs, MP3s, rare releases, personal rips, duplicates, and years — sometimes decades — of careful curation.

This project came out of very concrete frustration.

I’ve been a music fan and a DJ for decades, and over that time I’ve accumulated a very large library — tens of thousands of tracks. Along the way, I created multiple backups at different points in time. Disks changed, machines changed, formats evolved. Every time I had to rebuild or migrate a library, overlaps crept in: the same tracks in different qualities, different encodings, slightly different metadata — sometimes better audio, sometimes better tagging.

Some tracks were upgraded from lossy to lossless. Some metadata was refined slowly and deliberately over years. In other cases, the audio was identical but the surrounding information was not. None of this fits neatly into a single “duplicate” checkbox.

Existing tools are not bad—but they are fragmented. There is deduplication software. There are music taggers. There are players. And most players are increasingly shaped by streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, where local collections are an afterthought.

The real problem is scale and trust. Most tools force you into an impossible choice: manually approve every single decision, one file at a time, or trust automation that can silently discard the very data you spent years caring about.

There has to be a better option for people who have invested time and attention into building their own music libraries. A tool that understands trade-offs, surfaces them clearly, and helps you make informed decisions — without losing data, and without demanding constant micromanagement.

Audiqa started as me asking a simple question seriously: What would an audio manager look and feel like if I engineered it around music as content, extreme performance and outstanding UX?

Although Audiqa started as a very personal project, it was clear early on that it should be useful to more than just me. To validate that instinct, I reached out to people across a few relevant Reddit communities and asked a simple question: how do you actually manage large, long-lived music libraries, and where does it hurt? I was not prepared for the response.

The amount of feedback I received was overwhelming — in the best possible way. People took the time to answer thoughtfully, to explain their setups, their frustrations, and the trade-offs they are forced to make every day. Some responses were brief; others were detailed, carefully written descriptions of workflows that had evolved over many years. What stood out most was the level of trust: people were willing to share not just problems, but context and that feedback changed the direction of the project.

Rather than continuing to optimize purely for my own use case, I decided to step back and redesign Audiqa around a more refined set of goals — ones that reflect the common patterns, pain points, and priorities that emerged from those conversations. The aim is not to satisfy every edge case, but to give a well-reasoned, coherent answer to the needs shared by a large group of people who care deeply about their collections.

I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who took the time to respond. Their input is now part of the foundation of this project, and this blog will be one of the places where I try to do justice to that trust by being explicit about decisions, trade-offs, and progress.

In the next few posts, I’ll start outlining the core concepts behind Audiqa and how they’re being implemented. I’ll also be reaching out directly to those who agreed to be contacted, inviting them to try and test the app — so I can make sure this isn’t being built in a bubble.

I knew that once I made this announcement, there would be no hiding behind ideas anymore — I’d have to show up and do the work. That’s a little intimidating, but also energizing. I’m nervous, but at the same time I’m excited to finally give this the space and commitment it deserves.

If you care about local music collections, careful software, or simply enjoy watching a project take shape from first principles, you’re very welcome here.

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