Classical Jukebox Guide

Open the app — Classical Jukebox

Have you ever wanted classical music on in the background while you work, only to burn the time deciding what to play?

Streaming services want you logged in first, and YouTube cuts in with ads.
All you wanted was “some Baroque, anything,” but picking an album and then picking a track comes first.
Old out-of-copyright recordings are piled up in the archives, yet searching there directly pulls up audiobooks and lectures alongside the music.

So I built this.
Open it, press one era, and sound comes out. No login, no install, no ads.

How to Use

The Basic Flow

1. Open Classical Jukebox.
2. Press [앨범 셔플] (Shuffle albums) on any era card.
3. Playback starts right away and the player appears at the bottom.
4. Browse composers and works while it plays.

Browsing isn’t a gate you have to pass before hearing anything.
Put something on first, then dig in if you like what you hear.

The interface is in Korean, but the era cards run in chronological order and the controls are the usual play, previous and next.

Picking by Era

The first screen is a timeline split into six eras.

The source data splits Romantic into early, middle and late. I merged them into one.
For most listeners that distinction is just cognitive load.

Romantic dominates simply because so many recordings survive.
Contemporary music is the opposite — it is still in copyright, so there is almost nothing in the public domain.

Compilation albums that mix several eras can’t be filed under a period, so they go to 기타 (Other).
That entry only appears in the top menu when there is something in it.

Narrowing by Composer and Work

Press an era and its composers are listed by how many recordings they have, not alphabetically.
A composer with three recordings sitting at the top gives you nothing to listen to.

Press a composer to see their albums and works.
Press a work and every recording of that same piece gathers in one place, so you can compare performers.

The genre chips near the top of an era screen (orchestral, chamber, keyboard and so on) filter one step further.
You can turn on several chips at once.

Listening by Album

On a composer screen, albums come before the list of works.

The first version had no album axis at all — everything was laid out by work.
A single record then scattered one track at a time across the works it contained, so the same album showed up as fragments all over the list.
A London Symphony Orchestra Vivaldi record was lodged one track apiece in a dozen or so work cards.

So there are two axes now.

They are two groupings of the same recordings, so neither replaces the other.
Each track on an album screen has a [다른 연주 보기] (other performances) link that jumps to the work axis.

Only records with four or more tracks and an actual title count as albums.
Call single-track uploads albums too and the album list becomes identical to the track list.
That rule yields 643 albums, holding 81% of all tracks.

Saving to a Playlist

The thumbs-up button next to a track, or the one on the player, saves it to a playlist.
This is the only feature that needs a Google login. Sign in and tracks you saved on your phone are there on your laptop.

• Up to 30 playlists
• Up to 200 tracks per playlist
• Names up to 60 characters

You can save a whole album as well as single tracks, using the save button on the album screen.

Saved tracks carry a full copy of everything playback needs.
So even if the catalogue is rebuilt later and track numbers shift, what you saved still plays.

If you only want to listen, you never need to sign in. The login exists for playlists alone.

Tidying Up a Playlist

Open a playlist and press the pencil button to start editing.
The reorder and delete buttons stay hidden the rest of the time, because you never use them while listening and three buttons per track push the titles out of the way.

While editing you can do the following.

• Reorder — press ↑ or ↓ at the right of a track. This is the easier one on a phone.
• Move with the keyboard — press a track once, then ↑ ↓ to shift it a step at a time, or Home End to send it to the top or bottom.
• Remove a track — press ✕.
• Rename — the playlist name turns into a text field. Enter saves it, Esc puts it back.

With buttons alone, the button moves along with the track every time, so you have to chase it with the mouse.
That’s why the selection follows the track after each move. Pick one and you can just keep pressing the key.

While editing, the highlight sits on the selected track rather than the playing one.
There is no reason the track you want to move should be the one currently sounding.

Press the check button when you are done.

Lock Screen Controls on a Phone

Play from a phone browser and the track shows up on the lock screen and in the notification shade.
Play, pause, previous and next work from there, and the sound keeps going with the screen off.

The buttons on Bluetooth earbuds work too.
This is meant to run in the background while you work, so I paid particular attention to that part.

Things Worth Knowing

Why Shuffle Mixes Albums, Not Tracks

Archive recordings vary wildly in volume.
When a 1920s shellac transfer is followed by a modern digital recording, the level jumps.
If you have to reach for the volume knob mid-task, having it on defeats the purpose.

But that variation happens between albums, not within one.
Tracks on the same record came from the same session on the same equipment.

So shuffle mixes albums, not tracks, and keeps the running order inside each album.
For the same number of tracks, the number of jarring volume jumps drops like this.

Normalising the loudness outright was on the table.
Measuring it accurately means downloading each track in full, though — about 50GB across 8,700 tracks.
Asking that of a non-profit archive didn’t seem right, so I dropped it.

The Track List Is Filtered in Advance

The catalogue holds 8,705 tracks, but only the 7,044 from vetted collections are shown.

Here is what gets left out.

• Sequencer renderings — not a matter of audio quality but of kind. You came to hear people play.
• Non-music files — readings, lectures and sermons slip in because a composer’s name appears in the credits.
• Archive files — the format name contains “MP3”, so left alone they end up in the queue.

Entries where the composer’s name sits in the performer field were cleared out too.
“Performed by Johann Sebastian Bach” is simply wrong, so those read “performer unknown” instead.

Long Pieces Remember Where You Stopped

Playback position is saved only for tracks over ten minutes.
A three-minute miniature is better restarted, while a symphony movement is punishing to start over.

Nothing is saved within the first 30 seconds or the last 30 seconds.
Resuming at either end wouldn’t mean anything.

This is kept in your browser only and works whether or not you are signed in.

Broken Tracks Are Skipped Automatically

Files in the archive occasionally vanish or refuse to open.
When that happens the player moves quietly to the next track and remembers which one failed so it stays out of the queue from then on.

If five in a row fail, playback stops.
That keeps a dropped connection from marching through the entire list, skipping forever.

The URL Is the Screen

Every screen has its own address, like /baroque/bach.
Bookmark it and you land right back there, the back button behaves, and you can send the link to someone.

Where the Music Comes From

The recordings are public domain and CC-licensed material from the Internet Archive.
Composer, era and work data comes from Open Opus.
There are currently 161 composers and 762 works.

The licence for each recording is shown on the track itself. For CC recordings that aren’t public domain, check the terms before reusing them.

The track list is a static file built ahead of time.
Nothing searches the archive while you listen, which keeps it fast and keeps the load off the archive.

Worth a Look Too

East Asian Chronology is built on the same idea of using time as the axis.
Open it when you start wondering who sat on the Korean throne while Bach was alive.

Open the app — Classical Jukebox