This is why I’m building Kanora.

I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. My first proper setup came when I was fifteen — a Cambridge A1 amplifier and a Marantz CD4000 from Richer Sounds, bought on my birthday with my dad. That system followed me everywhere: from my bedroom to university, along with the portable MiniDisc player that never left my side. Before that, there were cassette Walkmans. Recording was the ritual.

Collecting music and physical media is in my blood. But so is tech. I’m a developer — one foot in the listening room, one foot in the machine room.

At university, with that same Cambridge amp and Marantz CD player, I bought my first laptop off a friend: a white iBook G4. I remember ripping my first CDs into iTunes and watching the beginnings of my digital library take shape. I had a Nokia 6600 (which I still own) and a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle because the iBook didn’t have Bluetooth built in. Then I discovered Salling Clicker — a £12 app that let my phone remote-control iTunes. Suddenly my student room had a digital jukebox. Mind blown.

A few years later, I’d built a 10,000-track library and filled an iPod with it. The iPod is still the best thing Apple has ever made, in my opinion. Buy a CD, rip it, sync it, go. It was my old NetMD workflow reborn — slicker, bigger, and without the faff.

Then Spotify arrived. I never touched it. Renting music I already owned never appealed. Apple Music came next; I gave it a try, but it wasn’t for me. I still had the CDs. I still had the files. Paying again just to access my own collection on another device always felt wrong.

Then came iTunes Match — and on paper, it made perfect sense: My library, mirrored in the cloud. My files, available anywhere. A once-a-year fee instead of a constant rental. Except it didn’t work properly.

Tracks greyed out with no explanation. Some refusing to upload because they weren’t available “in my region.” Songs disappearing entirely due to licensing issues — record-label contracts and territory deals dictating whether my own CDs could play on my own devices. That was the breaking point. My personal collection was being interfered with, reshaped by decisions in boardrooms I’d never see.

Recently I re-ripped everything and put it back into Match. Half the files vanished. Again.

So after twenty years of iOS development, a lifetime of collecting music, and a growing frustration with modern “access” being sold as ownership, I decided to build the tool I actually want to use.

That’s how Kanora started. Proper library management. Rip CDs? Absolutely. Import a massive, carefully curated folder structure without it being renamed or reorganised? Yes. Record vinyl or MiniDisc and listen on your phone? Why not.

And then there’s AI — used for something genuinely useful: Chat to your collection. Ask what you haven’t listened to in a while. Build road-trip playlists automatically. Get your own version of “Wrapped” any time you like — based on your library, not an algorithm’s guess.

I’m a solo developer with a full-time job and two young kids. This isn’t going to ship overnight. But with modern AI tooling — Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex — and a stubborn determination to reclaim the way I listen, it’s finally possible.

Kanora isn’t a product pitch. It’s a response — to rented music, disappearing albums, algorithms shaping taste, and licensing deals deciding what you’re allowed to play.

It’s about taking control back, rebuilding the habits that worked, and combining the analogue world I grew up with and the tech world I work in now.

This is the music app I’ve always wanted. So I’m building it.