Why Kanora exists.

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 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 building software have grown up side by side for me. I've spent more than twenty years making software across the web, desktop, services, and product teams, with the last fifteen focused primarily on Apple platforms and iOS.

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 and a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle. Then I discovered Salling Clicker, a £12 app that let my phone remote-control iTunes. Suddenly my student room had a digital jukebox, and the overlap between software and hi-fi started to feel inevitable.

A few years later, I'd built a 10, 000-track library and filled an iPod with it. Buy a CD, rip it, sync it, go. It was my old NetMD workflow reborn, slicker, bigger, and without the faff. By then I was already deep into shipping software, and I kept noticing the same thing: the interfaces were getting smoother while the sense of ownership was getting thinner.

Then streaming became the default model. I never really bought into it. Renting music I already owned never appealed, and the wider shift from collections to temporary access felt like a downgrade dressed up as convenience.

That was the real breaking point: watching modern music software get better at access while getting worse at ownership. Libraries became contingent. Tracks vanished. Availability changed without warning. The industry kept calling it seamless, but too much of it depended on permissions, subscriptions, and licensing terms rather than the simple fact that you'd already bought the music.

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

So after more than twenty years in software, fifteen of them spent primarily building for Apple platforms, 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.