RiffReader's Story

I started building RiffReader just as a quick tool for my own use.

How I do music... I like to organize things myself, and I have a structure of folders with sheet music I've collected through the years, along with sets of MP3 files that go with them. I usually have multiple PDFs of the same thing - take for example Bach's Cello Suites, which has a ton of editions. I also have lots of different MP3s that go with a single song or piece - like accompaniments or different renditions for comparison.

Why, though? There are a lot of tools on the market for music. The big one is really aimed at professional musicians, but I'm just a hobbyist. It also has a ton of annotation features, sharing features, a very complex tagging system... the list goes on. Just too much. At the simpler end, most products are all about tabs and nothing else, or video-game-esque display of a curated list of songs that are not my repertoire and don't challenge me.

The answer! I wanted something I could just point at my organized set of folders, and have it display things easily. I built a rough prototype, and it worked great! Over the course of a year I added more features, made little tweaks, added automatic stemming / backing track generation, and some organizational features. I realized it was getting mature, so I brought in my full team at my software LLC to build it out "for real".

I still use it every day, and I'm proud of it. It's clean, fast, easy, and very low overhead to maintain my library.