Concept · built with AI tools
Music Dashboard A Spotify-style player for your own music files
A portable, offline-first music player that lives on a USB drive: double-click a launcher on any Windows PC and a Spotify-style dashboard opens in the browser for the songs already on your drives. It reads tags from MP3, FLAC, M4A, OGG and more, fills in missing cover art and info from free web sources when online, and never touches the music files themselves.
- Status
- Concept · built with AI tools
- Type
- Web app
- Category
- Desktop / personal utility
- Version
- v1 (unversioned)
- Built with
- Python 3.8+ standard library, Mutagen for tag reading, Single-page HTML/CSS/JavaScript UI served locally …
This is a self-initiated concept, designed and built by Srini with AI tools. It is not a real company or client project.
The problem
A personal music collection spread across USB and PC drives has no good way to browse it like a streaming app — folders and file names are all you get, and most players need installing, an account or internet. The goal was a zero-install player that travels with the drive, keeps working offline and copes with Windows changing drive letters.
Who it is for
People with a personal library of downloaded/ripped songs on a USB drive or PC disks who want to browse and play them comfortably on any computer.
Features
- One-click start from a USB drive (.bat for Windows, .command for Mac)
- Scans multiple folders and subfolders; reads only, never modifies files
- Reads tags: title, artist, album, year, genre, track/disc, composer, embedded art, bitrate
- Fills missing cover art, year, genre and artist photos from iTunes Search and Deezer (no API keys)
- Browse by albums, artists, genres, years/decades, folders and songs
- Instant search with top result, songs and albums
- Player bar with shuffle, repeat, queue, seek and volume
- Duplicates view
- Survives changing USB drive letters; unplugged drives' songs hide and return automatically
- Incremental rescan that only re-reads changed files
- Online lookups can be switched off for fully offline use
- On-the-fly ffmpeg conversion for WMA/AIFF/APE; phone access on the same Wi-Fi
Pages & screens
- Home (recently added, top artists, browse all)
- Songs
- Albums
- Album detail
- Artists
- Genres
- Years / decades
- Folders
- Duplicates
- Search results
- Manage folders (settings)
Stack
- Python 3.8+ standard library (http.server, SQLite)
- Mutagen (bundled) for tag reading
- Single-page HTML/CSS/JavaScript UI served locally
- iTunes Search and Deezer public APIs (optional)
- ffmpeg (optional)
How I built it with AI
Built with an AI coding assistant as a single self-contained Python script (~1,700 lines) that serves its own browser UI, plus a plain-language README and a one-page 'Music Dashboard on a USB Drive' guide written for non-technical users. Srini set the constraints — portable, no installs or internet required, read-only on the music files, works across PCs — and the AI implemented them. No prompt file was supplied.
Design highlights
- Highlight 01 — Zero-install portability: bundled tag library and optional embeddable Python mean the whole app runs from the USB folder
- Highlight 02 — Read-only by design: everything learned (covers, metadata) is cached in a data folder next to the script, so it travels with the drive
- Highlight 03 — USB-aware library: folders are found again when the drive letter changes, and songs from unplugged drives hide then reappear
- Highlight 04 — Familiar streaming-app UI (dark theme, sidebar library, bottom player bar) applied to local files
- Highlight 05 — Privacy switch to turn off all online lookups