The Music Sanctuary

Overview

The Music Sanctuary is a full-stack web application built for music communities centered around rare, unreleased, and hard-to-find tracks. The platform hosts a catalog of popular musicians and over 21,000 song snippets, loosies, and unreleased recordings — all dynamically synced from community-maintained Google Sheets commonly known as "trackers."

Rather than forcing users to navigate clunky spreadsheets, The Music Sanctuary provides a polished, visual, and intuitive interface for discovering and listening to music that never made it to streaming platforms.

The Problem

Music communities tracking unreleased content have long relied on shared Google Sheets. These trackers are powerful but inaccessible — overwhelming to newcomers, hard to search, and impossible to listen from directly. Links break, ads are predatory, and there's no way to save favorites or organize playlists.

The goal was to take a community's existing tracker infrastructure and give it a proper frontend — without disrupting the workflow that community members already relied on.

Google Sheet Sync System

At the core of the platform is a custom-built sync pipeline:

• Google Sheets API retrieves sheet content for each musician's tracker
• Custom parser identifies songs already in the database and determines whether to create, update, or delete each entry
• Trigger.dev job system runs the full sync every 4 hours automatically — keeping catalogs current without any manual intervention

The result: editors keep using Google Sheets exactly as before, and the platform stays up to date around the clock.

Audio Playback

A custom audio player was built from scratch to replace the need for users to visit external file hosts — which are often unreliable and filled with malicious ads:

• Autoplay, shuffle, and repeat built natively into the player
• Song downloading lets users save tracks for offline listening
• Custom CDN integration combines file hosting provider APIs to bypass rate-limiting restrictions, enabling faster and smoother playback at scale

User Features

The platform is built around community engagement:

• User profiles — customizable avatar, banner, biography, socials, visibility settings, and default audio player volume
• Song favoriting — saved tracks displayed on the user profile
• Musician following — filters the homepage catalog to show only followed artists
• User following — follow other community members to see their activity and favorites
• Global user search — find any user on the platform by name or username
• Playlist creation — custom playlists with cover art, names, descriptions, visibility settings, and track sorting

Song Pages & Play Tracking

Every track has its own dedicated, shareable page — making it easy to link directly to a specific song in a Discord, forum thread, or message:

• Shareable track URLs — each song gets a permanent, linkable page with its full metadata, status, and file links
• Sheet-extracted notes — community-written notes from the Google Sheet (recording dates, session details, quality info, collaborators) are parsed during sync and surfaced directly on the track page
• Play count tracking — every stream increments a server-side counter silently in the background, surfacing the most-listened-to tracks across the catalog

Backend & Scalability

• Prisma ORM + MongoDB handles the NoSQL flexibility needed for varying song data structures across thousands of entries
• Public API integration retrieves song files from hosting providers — eliminating dead links and reducing reliance on any single third-party host
• Next.js 14 server actions power the backend layer for fast, type-safe data mutations without a separate API server