Chop In
solo, 2025-present
A webapp for pianists (chop-in.com). Connect a Spotify account and Chop In polls your currently-playing track, matches it against our catalog of classical pieces + alias database, and surfaces the matching hand-curated public domain sheet music PDF inline.
The architecture is a full-stack Next.js app with all detection logic on the server, Spotify OAuth tokens encrypted (AES-256-GCM) before they're stored, and a Clerk-gated curator route that lets me add pieces and edit PDFs over time.
I wanted a way to quickly scroll through Spotify and have the sheet music PDF populate instantly. As a pianist listening to classical pieces (which are all mostly public domain), the usual flow is to go to IMSLP, find multiple public-domain versions of the piece, take ~15 seconds to download each, look through each PDF to find the version you like best, find the right number in the cycle (finding the right song in the album) out of the PDF pages, and then print as a PDF and send it to your iPad. Way too many points of friction. Hence chop-in.com.