I’ve been using Sonic Oracle and I love it. Totally worth the small cost IMO!
What happens when you stop letting streaming apps pick your music?
This is the truth. Every streaming platform decides what you hear based on what's popular. The same 20 tracks float to the top for every artist. The same recommendations cycle through. The algorithm isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you listening to the safe, familiar, high-play-count stuff.
I stopped accepting it about a year ago so I built Sonic Oracle because I wanted to hear the other 80 tracks. The ones buried in an artist's catalog. The ones no algorithm would ever surface because they don't have 40 million streams. And now Sonic Oracle does it for you.
If you haven't followed my posts here: Sonic Oracle is a music discovery engine for Tidal and Qobuz. You type in an artist, pick a depth level, and it builds a permanent playlist saved directly to your streaming library. 10 million+ artists. No AI. No promoted content. Every artist is a real person with a real discography. Roon, Audirvana, Lumin, Naim, Aurender, dCS, everything picks it up automatically.
There are three depth levels. Essential is genre-pure. Put in a jazz trumpet player, get only trumpet players back. Put in a punk band, get only punk. Balanced widens the circle into territory you wouldn't have explored on your own. Adventurous is where it gets interesting. It crosses genre lines entirely and finds connections no streaming platform would ever make. I've seen jazz searches return soul artists, rock searches pull in ambient composers. The kind of discoveries you used to make by accident at a record store.
And now there's The Vault. This is the one I'm most excited about. Sonic Oracle's proprietary database. Built from the ground up over the past year. A separate track catalog with its own logic, its own connections, its own selection. No streaming platform has it. No other tool uses it.
Here's what makes it different. I ran Aretha Franklin through The Vault twice. 63 tracks each time. Over 90% were different between the two playlists. Completely different songs from across her entire career. Your playlist is yours and nobody else will ever get the same one. Toggle over to Popular and you get well-known tracks weighted by streaming numbers. Still better than what Tidal or Qobuz will give you because the artists behind it come from Sonic Oracle's engine, not theirs. But flip back to The Vault and you'll hear why I spent a year building it.
I built this because I was tired to listen to the same tracks on repeat. Turned out a lot of other people felt the same.
Happy discovering,
Alessandro
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I currently listen to mostly Jazz these days and a friend suggested I get a copy of The Penguin guide to Jazz recordings. With the book, I have a little knowledge about an artist or group before I stream or buy. I also have All Music Guide to Jazz. Same concept just a little older. I truly appreciate what @panyc77 is doing and I’m sure he’s got a great thing going, but even if it was free, I’d still never use it. Like I never tried Roon , J River or … And the only playlist I have is all hand picked music. |
- 20 posts total

