Album Builder

If you record music, you end up with a folder of takes. Dozens of them, named things like take_04_final_REAL.wav, some of which are keepers and most of which are not. Turning that into an album means deciding what makes the cut, deciding what order it goes in, and then doing a lot of tedious file work.

Album Builder is the app for the deciding part, and it does the file work for you afterwards.

What it does

Point it at your recordings folder and it lists everything it finds. From there:

• Say yes or no to each track with a single toggle down the side of the list.
• Drag the keepers into order in a pane beside it, and listen back as you go.
• See what you have already used. Every track carries a badge showing which other approved albums it appears on, so you notice before you put the same recording on two records.
• Watch the lyrics scroll in time with the music during playback. This is optional and does real work behind the scenes — it listens to the recording and works out which word lands when, rather than expecting you to time anything by hand.

When you approve an album, it writes out everything you need: an M3U playlist, a folder of properly numbered tracks, and a report as both PDF and web page. The report comes in two flavours — the full one for you, and a stripped-back artist-facing version fit to send to someone else.

Your work is remembered between sessions, and the library refreshes itself when you add new recordings to the folder.

Getting it

On Linux it is a single AppImage — download, make it executable, run. On Windows it is a zip: unpack it and double-click AlbumBuilder.exe. Both bundle everything they need, including the PDF machinery. There is no Python to install.

Two things worth knowing. Windows will show a SmartScreen warning the first time, because the build is not signed; click More info → Run anyway. And the lyric-syncing feature is not in either download — the speech-recognition libraries behind it run to hundreds of megabytes, so it stays an optional extra you add when installing from source. Everything else works out of the box.

Linux distributions from roughly 2022 onward are supported. Older ones will refuse to start with a message about GLIBC_2.35.

Where it stands

In beta and feature-complete through its fifth planned phase: curation, ordering, usage tracking, lyric syncing and the full export pipeline are all in. Built with Python and Qt, and MIT licensed.