{
  "id": 11753309,
  "title": "How I built a riff vault for Sam with open-source AI\"",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/03/how-i-built-a-riff-vault-for-sam-with-open-source-ai",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-03T19:25:11.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/jeswin_jaison_4537e4ccbf1/how-i-built-a-riff-vault-for-sam-with-open-source-ai-5f5l"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "This is a story about a guitar enthusiast named Sam who struggles to keep track of their creative riffs. Sam has hundreds of recordings with vague filenames that don't describe the music inside. One day, the author decides to solve this problem by building a local AI vault called RiffSalad.\n\nRiffSalad is a platform that allows guitarists to upload or record riffs, and the software analyzes them for various attributes such as tempo, key, energy, busyness, and even generates MIDI transcriptions. The software then creates short descriptions and tags for each riff, making it easy for users to search and find their favorite ideas using plain English descriptions.\n\nTo build RiffSalad, the author made several key decisions. They chose to use a small model for analysis, specifically the 1.5B-parameter Qwen2.5 model from Ollama, to ensure the platform could run on a normal machine without requiring high-end hardware or internet access. The platform uses Ears (librosa) to analyze BPM, key, energy, and note density; a Basic Pitch model to extract MIDI; and Faster-Whisper (a tiny model) to transcribe voice notes locally.\n\nThe data is stored in a SQLite database alongside nomic-embed-text embeddings generated by Ollama. The platform is built using FastAPI and SQLAlchemy for the backend, React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, and WaveSurfer.js for the frontend. The entire application can be run locally without any API keys, ensuring privacy and flexibility for guitarists like Sam.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend What I Built Somewhere on Sam's laptop, there's a riff Sam swears is the best thing they've written all year. It's in a file called recording_027_final_v2.wav . Or maybe heavyyy_enough.wav . Or idea_actually_good.m4a . He has 100s of these, and not many filenames say what's inside. Here's the cruel part: you don't…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}