I lost too many songs over the years, so I built a DAW with version control
Hey HN,
Somewhere on a dead hard drive from 2014 is the best thing I ever wrote. I don't remember exactly how it went. I just remember the feeling of it.
That's the moment I keep coming back to. Not when I decided to build this thing—that came later—but the reason underneath it. A decade of making music means a decade of scattered project files, dead drives, folders named "old stuff DO NOT DELETE" that eventually get deleted.
So I built ScratchTrack. A DAW where everything is versioned. Every edit, every take, every branch you went down before you changed your mind. I went deep on the architecture—event sourcing, content-addressable storage, proper commit history. I wanted it to be the thing I wished I'd had.
I launched last month. Posted in a few places. Told some people.
It was quiet. A handful of signups. No momentum.
I thought I'd feel devastated. I'd put so much into it. But I opened it this morning to work on something new and realized—I just like using it. My projects are safe. The history is there. The thing I built for myself actually works for me.
So I'll keep building it. If a few other people who've lost songs along the way find it useful, that's the dream. If not, it's still mine, and it'll still exist.
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