Kate

A music player I built so Kate's recordings had somewhere better to live than Voice Memos. It gives your own songs albums, playlists, looping and lyrics that follow along, and it's free on the App Store for anyone who wants it.

Kate, who I'm marrying, would sing songs and record them for me, and I'd end up listening to them in Voice Memos, which I hated. I looked around for something better and nothing really did what I wanted. I basically wanted them to sit in Apple Music like any other album, with playlists and looping and all of that. So I built an app that did that, just for the two of us, and named it Kate.

Then I kept adding stuff to it. Words that follow along with the song, a way to sing over them and record yourself, an editor for cleaning up a take. At some point it had turned into a pretty full music app, so I put it on the App Store. It's free, there's no subscription and nothing's locked away. There didn't seem to be much reason to charge for it.

Getting the lyrics to line up took the longest by far. Kate listens to the song on your phone and works out when each word is sung, which is a lot harder with a band underneath than with just a voice, so it pulls the vocal out first and listens to that. You can always tap along to sync a song by hand instead.

Your library lives in your own iCloud, and you can share it, so a family or a band can all add songs to the same one. I don't run a server for any of it and there's no account to make.

I did have live lyrics on the Lock Screen for a while, but they kept freezing a few lines in. iOS won't let an app that's only playing audio keep that card updated on its own, and the proper fix is running a push server, so I took it out before launch.