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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.

https://sonicoracle.music/

Happy discovering,

Alessandro

panyc77
Post removed 
panyc77 OP
105 posts
 

Good questions. I'll go through them one by one.

No AI: It means no black-box ML model deciding what you hear. The engine is data-driven. It uses structured signals from a proprietary database, but the logic is deterministic and inspectable, not a trained model. "No AI" also refers to the music itself: no AI-generated tracks, no synthetic filler.

The 90% Vault swing: Fair challenge. Two runs pull from a deliberately large qualifying pool, then vary the sampling. So you get a different valid slice each time, not noise. The pool is constrained by relevance filters. The shuffle is intentional so repeat runs stay fresh rather than identical. You're right that a 90% swing sits on the edge between intentional variety and low-precision pool. I'm not going to overclaim coherence here. It's tuned to lean toward variety because the whole point is hearing something different every time. If convergence is something users want, it's a knob I could expose.

Essential/Balanced/Adventurous: Based on catalog-relationship distance, not audio features. How far the recommendation sits from the seed across the signals the engine uses. You're right that adjacency can feel adventurous without being so. Honest answer: it's validated by listening and user feedback, not a published metric. 350+ paying users and growing, and the depth levels are the feature I get the most positive feedback on, especially Adventurous. But no, there's no formal benchmark behind it.

Ghost artists and AI tracks: Legitimate concern, and you're right that deep cuts are exactly where synthetic content hides. I run my own verification process rather than trusting what the platforms filter out. It's active and ongoing, not a one-time claim. Not perfect yet, but it's mine, not theirs.

API dependency: Straight answer. No, I don't have direct commercial deals with Tidal or Qobuz like Roon does. It's a real dependency risk. Contingency is multi-platform support. Already live on Tidal and Qobuz, YouTube Music coming soon. No single platform is a point of failure. And the selection logic is platform-independent. It doesn't rely on their recommendation APIs, only library access and playback.

Give it a try. Pick an artist you know well, set it to Adventurous, and see if the mechanism holds up for you. I think it will.

Alessandro

mark200mph
876 posts
 

You might have to use your brain,.enjoy the music.

panyc77 OP
105 posts
 

@ctlesq 

Funny you mention it. I've been working on exactly this. The idea is called Sonic Oracle's Listening Room. A place inside Sonic Oracle where users publish their playlists for others to browse, grab, and add to their own library. You'd see something like "Aretha Franklin Adventurous by @username" and with one click it's in your Tidal or Qobuz library.
And your point about what people are searching for is spot on. A weekly most-searched leaderboard would fit right in. You'd see what artists the Sonic Oracle community is exploring, what depth levels they're using, and where the discoveries are happening. The two features together turn Sonic Oracle from a solo tool into a community.
Not live yet but it's on the roadmap.
Alessandro

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