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01. Introduction

Why VeeJay exists, who it is for, and the story behind it.

1.1 The story

VeeJay begins with my love of music videos.

I grew up in Philadelphia. We were the first city in PA to get cable. As such, I saw the birth of MTV and was captivated. I already loved music, but music videos made me love music more. Whenever I hear a new song that I like (which gets rarer as you get older), I always have to see the music video that accompanies the song. I sincerely believe it's an underrated art form. And artists like Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga have proved how music could be cinematic.

How the story shapes the product

Videos are part of the music. The video is not an extra. It is half of how the song is experienced, so VeeJay treats a song's video as a first-class part of the library, filed and named with the song.

The video behind every song. My habit is simple: when I like a song, the next step is to watch its video. VeeJay builds on that moment. Voting a video up on YouTube is the signal that starts everything else.

An art form worth keeping well. I believe a music video is an art form, and it deserves to be kept properly. That is why VeeJay aims for the highest picture quality available, keeps one definitive video for each song, and keeps the alternate versions that differ in story or presentation.

1.2 What VeeJay is

VeeJay keeps the music videos you love as a complete, correctly named library. It keeps your music video and music audio playlists the same across as many platforms as possible, finds the matching video and audio files, and gives every artist a page of their own.

Building a collection of music videos by hand is slow and inconsistent. For every song someone has to find the right video, download it at good quality, match it to the song's audio, and name and file it so that a media player such as Plex shows the video with the track. Doing that for a whole music library, and keeping it correct as the library grows, is the work VeeJay is meant to remove.

1.3 The three purposes

VeeJay does three things:

  1. It synchronizes music video and music audio playlists across as many platforms as possible. A song added in one place follows you everywhere else. See 3. Playlists and platforms.
  2. It downloads the matching music videos with yt-dlp and the matching music audio from SoulSeek with slskd. The right files are found, checked and filed with consistent names. See 4. Getting the videos and 5. Getting the audio.
  3. It gives you a rich, graphical artist portal, with links to each artist's own website and all of their social media, each shown only once VeeJay has verified that it belongs to that artist. See 6. The artist portal.

The three depend on each other. The artist portal needs verified identities, and the same identities let VeeJay recognize one song on every platform and pick the right video and audio to download. The identity work in 7. Research and verification therefore comes first.

Where it started

From the planning of my original music-video project, I wanted to:

  • Collect every music video for every artist in my music library.
  • At the very least, get the official music video.
  • Alternate versions as well, within limits. An alternate is a version whose release has a different story or presentation for a different country.

The current direction

  • A thumbs-up on a music video on YouTube adds it to a playlist, then downloads the video and the song's audio and files both in the library with consistent names.
  • A thumbs-down removes the song everywhere.
  • The video is the highest resolution available, with English closed captions embedded, and the audio is lossless where possible.

1.4 Who it is for

VeeJay is for anyone who is as obsessed with music videos as I am. A person who uses YouTube and Plex gets the product integrated with both.

The longer-term intent is to build VeeJay as something I can share beyond myself.

1.5 What success looks like

Success means the product is easy to install and use, stable, and well documented, with its documentation written in Zensical.

1.6 Key words

The documentation uses a few words on purpose, and each means the same thing everywhere:

  • Artist: a person or a group that performs or is credited.
  • Song: one recording by one main performer. A cover by another artist is a different song.
  • Video: one YouTube video. Every video belongs to one song.
  • Audio: the music file that matches a video.
  • Primary: the one video kept as a song's main video. Every other video of the song is an Alternate.
  • Platform: a service that holds playlists, such as YouTube, Apple Music or TIDAL.
  • Library: the VeeJay folder of files, together with the database that describes them.
  • Verified: shown by evidence to belong to the artist. Only verified facts are used.

The full list is in Appendix A, the glossary.