Trellis is a music library app specifically crafted for the live recording collector.

Trellis is for people who want to fully enjoy their personal collections of digital audio, using their own files, and not rely solely on Spotify or other streaming services to provide a versatile and high quality music listening experience.

While Trellis fully supports studio album collections, it is designed specifically for collectors of live recordings. Recordings of independent origin (ROIOs) are community-produced and are often generated with varieties of formatting and no clear consistent standard. Trellis enables the casual collector and the hopelessly-obsessed archivist to easefully manage and enjoy their recordings. It has a whole host of features that have not yet been available all in one place.

Trellis also is a great place for anyone who is curious about live concert collecting, but doesn't know where to start!

Trellis allows collectors to build and manage their collection in their own local database. Rather than relying on file tags and info files to store key information about a recording in their collection, Trellis puts it into a clean database, enabling entirely new ways of interacting with the collection.

Trellis is designed specifically for collectors of live recordings. Each recording carries the details collectors care about, including source, lineage and taper, and the whole collection can be browsed by Artist, Musician, Venue, Event and Engineer. Cataloging, editing and playback happen in one app.

Lomax, Trellis's AI research assistant, searches the web to check a recording's date, venue, lineup and track titles, proposes corrections with its sources, and pulls artist bios and personnel.

Members can also listen to other Trellis libraries.

No. Trellis is a dedicated initiative. We have a lot of directions that we could go in, depending on the level of involvement and interest of the music collecting community.

Trellis orchestrates a multi-step ingestion process to standardize and unify your recordings into a central library, using both entity resolution and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with an AI agent. This produces a fast but highly accurate import process that will work with your most poorly-formatted recordings, as well as your pristine ones.

Trellis allows the seamless integration of live recordings and studio albums. When importing, Trellis resolves the recording type, and organizes it accordingly. You can easily browse your collection of an artist, including live recordings and studio records.

Because Trellis stores your recordings in a database, it enables you to view recordings by Artist, Musician (e.g. all Bela Fleck recordings, across his different bands), by Venue (everything at Red Rocks), Event (e.g. Newport Jazz Festival), and by Recording Engineer/Taper.

For each Artist, you can do a deep dive into their history. Store the musician membership and tenures over the ages, and record custom lineups for specific shows. Lomax, your AI research assistant, helps you research and populate lineup tenures, and answers questions you may have.

Curate custom collections of recordings (pulling from live and studio records) and mark favorites which are easily accessible in the UI navigation.

Trellis is fully functional for existing libraries, and does not move, rename, or tag the recordings in your Library folder if the user chooses to "keep my files as-is". Trellis will read in your existing Library folders, and you will choose which recordings to add to your Trellis database, processing in batches or all at once.

The Resolver tool will scan each recording and pull out relevant info, including Artist, Date, Venue, Location, Lineage, Engineer and track titles. Lomax, your AI research assistant, can do deep dives on specific recordings. You always get final approval.

Once cataloged, your collection can be navigated, researched, refined, and enjoyed in a whole new way.

Yes, Trellis fully supports standard albums. Official releases are excluded from network features.

Trellis provides an integration with the Live Music Archive API, enabling one-click downloads from the most expansive archive online directly into your Trellis library. The Live Music Archive contains legally taped and shared live recordings of independent origin (ROIOs). Many artists permit taping and sharing of their recordings, and that is a great place to start.

Trellis supports FLAC (16 or 24 bit) and MP3. Under Organize my files, it can convert SHN, WAV, AIFF and WV to FLAC with a click upon import.

No, Trellis is a library app that enables people to manage their own libraries of MP3s and FLACs on their local computers or network devices.

No, Trellis is audio-only.

Trellis is an app that builds a local database that you own and run on your machine to host your music collection. On Macs, this is stored in Library/Application Support. This database will store everything you tell it about your recordings, and will record what you play. That information will never leave your computer.

Users may also connect to the Trellis Hub service for integrated AI assistance and network features. In this case, specific information required only to use the service may be transmitted and stored for a specified time.

More details are available in Trellis's Privacy Policy.

Trellis is currently in a closed Beta phase. Pricing, including for network features, will be set at general release.

Live music collectors are dedicated tapers, archivists, and aficionados that have been in need of a single app to help them manage and listen to their collections with ease. Over the years, beloved software and websites have provided tools and resources, but nothing has arisen as a single place to fully manage, obsess over, and enjoy one's collection. Trellis intends to be that place, unlocking capabilities and experiences not possible with existing collection management tools.

Many live recording collecting communities emerged online in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, what was once a vibrant community with face-to-face trading and music discussions was by and large replaced by BitTorrent and Facebook. Some of us hope that with some new initiatives, we can get back to rekindling some of the same spirit of connection through our shared love of music.

Trellis is built and managed by Ryan Baker, a long-time live music collector and data engineer/product developer. Ryan's career has led him through both the music and software industries, including stints building digital library infrastructure at record labels, in audio archival work at Smithsonian Folkways, and most recently in database and analytics infrastructure development at Adobe. He also was involved in early online collecting communities, including SHNshare, Bluegrasshub, and Bluegrassbox.