Aunty Archibald
A SoundCloud Archive Turned Audiovisual Platform
A prominent Canberra DJ contacted me with a straightforward problem: after years of publishing to SoundCloud, he still had no website of his own. That made his catalogue difficult to present as a coherent body of work and limited how effectively he could promote new mixes. I owned the strategy, UX, hero video, and complete technical build; the artist supplied the imagery and audio.
Wrapping a few SoundCloud embeds in an artist page would not have solved the real problem. The site needed to turn a 54-mix archive into an immersive destination without rehosting the music, keep playback continuous across the experience, synchronise rich visuals to long-form mixes, stay current automatically, and create a direct channel for announcing new releases.
Stack & Architecture
- Cloudflare Workers — edge-hosted application, scheduled catalogue sync, and push delivery pipeline
- SoundCloud Widget API — source playback with a persistent player that survives site navigation
- Windows WAV analyser — local master-audio processing for energy, onsets, beats, sections, and spectral movement
- Analysis sidecars — compact visual scores generated for the full archive and synchronised to playback
- Butterchurn and Canvas — curated MilkDrop-style scenes with a resilient fallback renderer
- Cloudflare D1 — notification preferences and delivery state for opted-in listeners
- Progressive Web App — installable, online-first experience with Web Push on phones and browsers
One Continuous Listening Experience
SoundCloud remains the audio source, but it no longer dictates the experience. A persistent player stays alive while listeners move between the archive, individual mix pages, and full-screen visuals, preserving the current track and playback position. The result feels like a purpose-built music product rather than a collection of third-party embeds.
Audio Analysis as a Visual Score
I built a Windows analyser that processes the original WAV masters locally and extracts energy, onsets, beats, musical sections, and spectral movement. It exports a compact sidecar for every mix, which the browser follows against the real SoundCloud playback position to drive curated Butterchurn scenes and a Canvas fallback. The visuals evolve with the structure of the music instead of running as a disconnected animation.
An Archive That Maintains Itself
The application polls SoundCloud each day, reconciles the 54-mix catalogue, and adds new releases to the site automatically. That removes double handling for the artist and keeps the website useful as an active archive, not a launch-day snapshot that immediately starts ageing.
An Installable Audience Channel
Aunty Archibald is an online-first Progressive Web App that can be installed on a phone or desktop. Web Push works across phones and browsers, while D1 records each listener's notification preferences and delivery state. When a new mix appears, opted-in listeners can be brought back directly instead of relying entirely on a social platform's algorithm.
Aunty Archibald now has a promotional home that does something a SoundCloud profile cannot: it presents the full catalogue as one continuous audiovisual identity, keeps itself current, installs like an app, and gives the DJ a direct channel back to listeners. It is too new for meaningful growth metrics, but the complete production capability is live now.
Want to build something like this?
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