Show HN: Scratch Radio Ft Doctor Von Peel: An LLM / Cat-Based Apple Music Client

2 points by gabriel666smith 11 hours ago

This is an MacOS Apple Music client I built.

Instead of a library, or a list of songs, it's pretty much just a simple, beautiful chat UI.

You are chatting with the legendary Doctor Von Peel, who is a DJ, but also an adorable cat.

Doctor Von Peel (who is technically a triage of LLMs, using an OpenRouter backend) is able to control your Apple Music via tool calls.

You can either ask him to play something specific, or just a vibe, and refine as you go. It's quite a refreshing way to stream music, I think.

Having said that, Doctor Von Peel speaks in a combination of Cajun, German, and London slang, and I suppose some people might find this grating. Doctor Von Peel is inspired by Dr, John, John Peel, some other very charming but not-famous people I know, and the pleasant, fever-dream aesthetic I remember computers having when I was a child ("Who is this paperclip man, and what could he want?"). I also like when there are little animals on my computer.

I built it as a "for myself" project because I really like discovering new music.

I was using Roon for that, because of its excellent metadata. It's really cool to enjoy the sound of a certain bass guitar part on a track, find out who played it, and then listen to their other stuff. That's fun.

But paying for Roon + a Tidal subscription (the second subscription necessary for discovery) is, honestly, as a non-professional, terrible, hobbyist programmer, too expensive for me.

I'm also really sick of Spotify, etc, serving me weird content (podcasts? AI-generated music to pay artists even less?) that I don't want. I find it ugly.

Kind of at the same time, I realised I was increasingly giving ChatGPT my girlfriend's letterboxd link, and asking for movie recs. This worked really well.

LLMs have loads of music criticism, forum posts, etc, inside them somewhere. Recommendations is a task they really excel at for me.

I also think that LLMs, for all their flaws, open up some exciting possibilities about what UI needs to be. Maybe that's a trite point now, but it felt fun to build something with that as the principle.

I've been using Dr Von Peel as my daily driver for a little while now, and I feel a little bit excited to share him with people. I've (tried to!) give any early adopters (pun intended) a reasonable number of free calls to OpenRouter via AIProxy, so you can test the Good Doctor's soundsystem selections without having to put in your own OpenRouter key. Once those run out, you can use your own, and mess around with the models used, the system prompts, etc.

It does require an Apple Music sub, ironically, given the things I was annoyed about that made me build it.

Some features are a bit janky because I _think_ there are some limitations on what MusicKit can achieve on MacOS vs iOS (saving tracks to user library, removing queued tracks, individual app airplay, _possibly_ full album queuing). The iOS version is much nicer (nicer still if Apple Intelligence can make the natural language aspects free!).

Hope you vibe with him! If you try him out, and have ideas, issues, feedback, etc, I'd love to hear it.