I'm not a software engineer. I'm a trader who moved into algorithmic trading when AI started changing the game. Building trading systems is how I got comfortable writing code. Sonic Oracle came from the same place: I had a problem, nothing solved it, so I built the solution myself.
The problem was simple. I love music. I've spent years and more money than I'll admit on hi-fi gear, vinyl, and streaming subscriptions. But the one thing none of my equipment could fix was the discovery problem. Every streaming platform I tried kept recommending variations of what I already listened to. Spotify's Discover Weekly felt like a slight remix of the previous week. Tidal's recommendations leaned on whatever they were promoting. Last.fm showed me similar artists but left me to do the rest of the work myself.
I wanted something to find artists I'd never heard of but would love. Something to look at my taste and follow it in directions I wouldn't think to go. And I wanted the result to land in my library as a playlist I could play immediately, not a list of names I had to search for one by one.
Nothing like this existed. So I started building.
The first version was rough. A script running on my laptop trying to make sense of listener patterns. The core idea was straightforward: instead of matching artists by how they sound, look at what real listeners play together. If thousands of people who love Artist X also keep coming back to Artist Y, the connection is real, even if the two artists have nothing in common sonically.
I ran it for myself for months. Seeded artists I knew well and checked the results against my own knowledge. Some results were obvious. Some were wrong. And some were connections I never would have found on my own, and they turned out to be brilliant. Those moments were the signal. The engine was finding something the streaming algorithms couldn't.
I refined the filtering. Added genre awareness so the results made sense instead of being random. Built track selection logic so each recommended artist was represented by their best work, not filler. Added depth controls so I could choose between staying close to the seed or going far out into cross-genre territory.
At some point, it stopped being a personal tool and started looking like a product.
The insight behind Sonic Oracle is not technical. It's human. The best music recommendations don't come from machines analyzing audio waveforms. They come from people. A friend who knows your taste and hands you a record. A DJ who reads the room and plays something unexpected. A record store employee who connects your purchase to something you've never heard of.
All of these are taste affinity. They work because the recommender shares or understands your listening habits and follows them somewhere new.
Sonic Oracle does the same thing at scale. Its proprietary recommendation engine maps artist connections through shared listener behavior. The result is recommendations feeling human because they're rooted in human behavior, not in audio fingerprinting or genre classification.
Your streaming app says "this sounds like that." Sonic Oracle says "people who love this also love that." The difference shows up in the results.
I launched Sonic Oracle in April 2026 with support for Tidal and Qobuz. No marketing team. No budget. No launch strategy beyond posting on Reddit and seeing if anyone cared.
People cared. The first post on r/Tidal got thousands of views. Users started dropping seed artists in the comments and I ran the engine live, posting results in real time. The reactions told me what the engine got right and where it needed tuning. Some artist connections were missing because of filtering issues. Some artist names caused matching issues. Every piece of feedback made the engine better.
The experience confirmed something I'd suspected: people are hungry for music discovery beyond the algorithmic. They want to be surprised. They want to find the artist they'll be obsessed with for the next six months, not another variation of their existing playlist.
YouTube Music support is coming. The backend is close to done. When it goes live, Sonic Oracle opens up to a much larger audience beyond the audiophile community where it started.
The engine keeps improving. Every seed, every playlist, every piece of feedback helps refine the connections. The roadmap includes features I'm not ready to announce yet, but the core will always be the same: find artists through real listening behavior, build a playlist, put it in your library. No separate app. No importing. No friction.
I built this because I needed it. Turns out other people needed it too.
Three playlists free. No credit card needed.
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