About — A Curated Music Archive

Sonic Atlas is a personally curated digital archive of over 3,600 recordings spanning 1,400+ artists across 26 genres — from progressive rock and heavy metal to jazz fusion, reggae, and classical.

What Makes It Different

Every album in the archive is enriched with metadata from multiple sources, creating a living encyclopedia of music knowledge:

MusicBrainz

Track listings, release dates, personnel credits, and band member histories for over 2,300 albums.

Last.fm

Listener counts, genre tags, similar artists, and community-driven classification across 2,900+ releases.

Discogs

Marketplace pricing, pressing details, and vinyl valuations for collection worth analysis.

Wikipedia

Contextual summaries providing historical background and critical reception for 1,600+ albums.

ListenBrainz

Track listings and listen data for forthcoming releases from artists in the collection — so you can hear new and upcoming records before they land in the archive.

YouTube

Album and per-track music videos captured across the archive, with enriched in-page playback so recordings can be heard alongside their metadata.

Spotify

Direct album links for instant streaming, connecting each recording in the archive to its counterpart on Spotify.

Apple Music

Direct album links for lossless streaming, bridging the archive to Apple Music's catalog.

Features

Interactive Musician Network GraphA D3-powered force-directed visualization mapping connections between musicians across bands and projects.
Intelligent RecommendationsGap analysis engine using a personal 5-star rating system to identify adjacent artists, catalog gaps, genre opportunities, and format upgrades with curator-style explanations.
Collection AnalyticsTaste profile radar charts, acquisition timelines, decade distribution, and value breakdowns by format.
Daily Music NewsAggregated from prog rock, metal, and music journalism sources, presented in a newspaper-style layout.
YouTube IntegrationAlbum and per-track video embedding with enriched playback across the archive.
Streaming LinksDirect links to listen to albums on Spotify and Apple Music, connecting the archive to the platforms where the music lives.
Forthcoming Releases via ListenBrainzThe Coming Soon view surfaces new and upcoming releases from artists in the collection, each linking to its tracks on ListenBrainz so you can listen before deciding to add it.
Vinyl LP TrackingDual-format support with separate CD and LP valuations from Discogs marketplace data.

The Collection

Core focus: Progressive rock, heavy metal, and hard rock and their subgenres — with meaningful representation in AOR, classic rock, and fusion.
Era: Recordings from the 1960s through 2026, with particular depth in the 1980s and 1990s golden era of melodic and progressive metal.
Physical media: Vinyl LPs and CDs form the backbone of the collection, with over 1,200 albums existing in both formats.

Technology

Stack: Built with Next.js, PostgreSQL, Prisma, and Tailwind CSS, hosted on AWS (EC2 + RDS).
Data enrichment: Pipelines integrate with the MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Discogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, ListenBrainz, Spotify, and Apple Music APIs.
Visualization: D3.js powers the force-directed musician network; Recharts drives the analytics dashboards. The daily news page aggregates RSS feeds from prog, metal, and audiophile journalism.
Ask the Atlas: A conversational curator grounded strictly in the collection and the Reverberations writing — never open-ended generation. It runs a tool-calling loop over read-only archive tools (search, pressing comparison, recording detail, article search), so every claim traces to a real recording or article. It speaks as well as writes: optional text-to-speech, and a live, interruptible voice conversation over WebRTC. The archive gate is enforced at the tool boundary — anonymous visitors reach the public writing while the full collection stays behind sign-in.