Your whole collection,
from SID to FLAC.

01What's inside

One server for the everyday lossless library and the weird corners of music history.

02Install & first run

SoniqBoom runs on macOS and Linux. Point it at your music, hit scan, and open it in any browser.

macOS & Linux — one-shot install

# clone, install everything, and start the server
git clone https://github.com/SFCyris/SoniqBoom.git
cd SoniqBoom
bash install.sh        # Python, ffmpeg, and ALL retro renderers
bash run.sh            # starts the server on port 8080

Or run it in Docker

One container ships ffmpeg and all the renderers. Your music mounts read-only at /music; everything the server writes lives in one named volume.

# clone, build, and start — then create the first admin
git clone https://github.com/SFCyris/SoniqBoom.git
cd SoniqBoom
docker compose up -d
docker compose exec soniqboom soniqboom-setadm -user alice -passwd 'a-strong-password'

Open http://<host>:8080, sign in, and add /music as a library folder. For automatic HTTPS on your own domain, the repo includes a Caddy stack — docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.https.yml up -d. Full details, updating, and backup notes live in DEPLOY.md.

Then, the first time you start it

1. Create the first admin account. A fresh install has no users; the native install prompts you for a username and password on the terminal. If it didn't prompt — or to add/reset one later — run this from inside the SoniqBoom folder:

   bash setup-admin.sh -user alice -passwd 'changeme123'

2. Sign in. Open http://localhost:8080 and enter those credentials.
3. Open the admin panel with the gear icon (top-right).
4. Add a music folder — a local path, or an FTP / SMB / WebDAV share.
5. Wait for the scan — roughly two minutes per 50,000 tracks. Your library is ready when it finishes.

03Browse your library

All Tracks, Artists, Albums, Genres, Years — plus folder trees that mirror your shares, and instant search.

Getting around a big library

Any track list has Play all and Shuffle buttons in its header — browse to a genre, artist or album and start it playing in one click, or press P to play and Shift+P to shuffle. Long track and group lists show an A–Z rail down the left edge — click a letter to jump straight to that part of the list. Right-click any track for Go to artist or Go to album to pivot to everything by that artist or on that album. And the ⌾ Locate button on the player bar — or the G key — scrolls the list back to whatever's playing, which is marked with a small animated equalizer. If part of a long list can't be loaded from the server, its rows say so and offer Retry.

The Library Galaxy

Every track in your collection rendered as a drifting star-field — each format its own glowing constellation, sized by how much of it you own. The legend doubles as a census of your library.

04Find anything

A search bar that understands field operators, and smart views that surface your library by listening habit.

Search with field operators

Type anything to search titles, artists and albums at once. Narrow it with field operators — stack as many as you like:

artist:Ghost  album:Impera  year:>2020  format:FLAC

Smart views

The sidebar's Smart section builds these on the fly from your play history and ratings:

Instant Mix radio

Press the 📻 radio button in the player toolbar while anything is playing and SoniqBoom builds an endless queue around it — tracks picked by genre, artist, era, tempo and format, spread across artists. A SID radio stays chiptune, a FLAC radio follows the genre. The queue refills itself as you listen, seeded from whatever is playing now.

Radio view. Starting a radio opens a full radio view: the cover art large with a live oscilloscope playing across it, the track that's on, and the upcoming tracks with their covers — the list fades out at the bottom because more is always coming; click any entry to jump to it. Save as playlist keeps the mix. Leaving the view — Stop radio, Esc or the × — ends the radio; the tracks already queued keep playing.

More like this

Select any track in the list and press the ◆ button in the player toolbar — a panel lists the closest matches with a relative similarity score. Tracks that have been played before are also compared by their loudness contour — songs that move the same way rank higher. Click a result to play it.

05Playlists

Hand-built collections that stick, and saved searches that keep themselves current.

Build a playlist by hand

Open the Playlists panel from the sidebar's Playlists section or the Playlists button in the player toolbar, then press + New to start one and name it. Add tracks two ways: select any rows in the library and click + Playlist to drop them into an existing list — or a brand-new one — or drag them straight into the panel. Inside a playlist a drag handle reorders tracks, and you can grab several at once to move them together. Delete a playlist whenever you're done with it.

Smart playlists — save a search

Any search can become a playlist that keeps itself up to date. Type a query — say format:SID year:>1988 — and press ⚡ Save search next to the search box. Name it, and it appears under Playlists with a ⚡ marker. Opening it re-runs the saved search, so new tracks that match are included automatically. Smart playlists work in Subsonic apps too.

06Internet radio

A hand-picked demoscene & chiptune station pack, plus the worldwide directory — every stream relayed through your own server.

The sidebar's Stations section plays live internet radio. It has three lists:

• Favorites — the stations you've starred. Nectarine Demoscene Radio is there to start.
• Scene — a curated pack of demoscene, chiptune, SID and game-music stations: SceneSat Radio, Nectarine Demoscene Radio, SLAY Radio, Kohina, Radio PARALAX, CVGM.net, Rainwave Chiptunes, Rainwave Game Music, OverClocked ReMix Radio, Keygen-FM and CGM UK DemoScene.
• World — the worldwide Radio Browser directory, browsed by continent → country, then split into Top 10, Top 11–50 and Remaining by listener votes.

Search the directory from the box in the Stations header, or straight from the main search bar at the top — matching Stations are listed alongside your music, and Show all → (or pressing Enter while the Stations view is open) opens the full list of matches.

Click a station to play it. SoniqBoom relays the stream through your server, so stations play in the browser whatever they're built on — classic Icecast / SHOUTcast, modern HLS, or a .pls / .m3u / .xspf / .asx playlist that just points at the real stream. Playback starts at the highest quality your browser supports and steps down automatically if the stream can't keep up; stations that offer several qualities appear once, under one name. The player shows the station and the track that's on air, and the ★ button adds or removes it from Favorites.

Live now-playing. As each song changes, the current track's title appears in the player — split into artist and song when the station provides it — read from classic ICY stream metadata and the in-band metadata modern HLS streams carry. When a track is announced, SoniqBoom looks up matching cover art and shows it in place of the station logo; if there's no confident match, the station's own logo stays. Community vote counts ride along, and playing a directory station reports the play back so the popularity rankings stay accurate.

Station details. While a station plays, the ⓘ button in the player toolbar opens its details — tags, website, the live now-playing title, and every available stream with the one you're hearing marked.

07Now playing

Click any track and it plays — even a 1987 SID tune or a 64-channel tracker module, rendered to audio on the fly.

Per-channel VU meters for tracker modules

Open any module and SoniqBoom shows a meter for every voice in the song — Paula channels, sample slots, OPL operators — dancing in real time, alongside the module's real metadata: channel and pattern counts, instrument names, and the embedded text messages trackers are famous for. A live signal path traces the exact decode chain for the playing track.

The pattern view — watch the module play

Open Track Info (the circled-i button, or right-click a row) on a tracker module and the panel leads with the module itself: channels, patterns, instruments — and a live pattern grid. Each pattern is laid out tracker-style — note · instrument · volume · effect — with the song's pattern order strip above it to jump anywhere. With Follow on, the playhead row tracks playback and the grid scrolls with the music, and every channel's column glows with its live level, in the same colour as its meter bar. Track Info is tidier for every format now: each file shows only the fields it actually has.

Modules that carry a song message — greets, release notes, ASCII art — show it exactly as written, spacing and all. A Made with row names the tracker software when the file records it, and BPM comes straight from the module's own tempo.

Multi-song files — the tune picker

A single SID, SNDH, AHX, Amiga, tracker or console-rip file (NSF, NSFe, GBS, AY, SAP) often holds many separate tunes — a game's whole soundtrack in one file. Open Track Info on one and a tune picker lists every subsong: ▶ play, + queue or ☰ add any one to a playlist, or Play all, Add all and shuffle the whole set at once — and those single-tune picks live happily inside playlists alongside ordinary tracks. When a SID is part of the HVSC collection, each tune shows its real name and length from the Songlengths and STIL databases — so Tune 3 / 6 reads "Assembly" rather than a bare number — with the full STIL commentary below and the chip model shown as a 6581 / 8580 badge.

Playing the file itself starts at its default tune, marked default in the picker: the start song a SID or SNDH file names, and for Amiga player formats (played by UADE), console rips and SC68 disks the first tune that isn't empty (tracker modules start at tune 1); a tune you pick plays that tune. On the phone, Now Playing lists the playing file's tunes below the controls; tap one to play it, and its number follows the title. A tune that renders to silence shows “This tune plays only silence” instead of playing — in the web player, a very long C64 tune from its second play on.

Equalizer & visualizer

A built-in 10-band graphic equalizer (32 Hz–16 kHz, ±12 dB) shapes the sound band by band — toggle it with E, and choose from genre presets or drag the bands by hand. A full-width visualizer plays behind the track list and cycles through its modes with V — oscilloscope, retro CRT scope, scrolling spectrogram, hyperspace tunnel, synthwave grid, wireframe globe, cosmic eye, lava lamp, and a singing raccoon. The visuals respect your system's reduce motion setting and pause when the tab is hidden.

Time-synced lyrics

Lyrics scroll line-by-line with playback — read from the file's own tags, or fetched from LRCLib when the file has none embedded.

Podcast & audiobook chapters

For files that carry chapter marks — MP3 podcasts and .m4a / .m4b / .mp4 audiobooks — open the Track Info panel (the circled-i button) to see a numbered Chapters list. Tap any chapter to jump straight to it.

About the artist & tag editing

The Track Info panel also shows an About the artist card — a short bio and portrait, with a link to the full article — whenever the artist has one. The artist is matched through MusicBrainz using the album and track you're viewing, and the bio comes from the matched artist's Wikipedia page: "Ghost" on an Impera track is the Swedish band, not the apparition. Below it, ✏️ Edit tags opens an inline form for title, artist, album, album artist, game, genre and year: Save tags writes the changes into the audio file itself (the game as a GAME tag) and updates the library at the same time. This works on local MP3, FLAC, M4A, Ogg, Opus, WavPack and Musepack files; every other track — network shares, archive members, modules and chip formats — gets ✏️ Edit info, which changes the library only. The Game row shows the game the music belongs to: a retro tune's game (usually the same name as its album, and an album you set is its game), with a note saying where it came from, or the GAME tag of a remix. When the file header, Modland, Demozoo, the song database, the archive name or the folder name call the game something else, those names follow on an also line (a name that is only the start of another one is not repeated) — game: finds the track by any of them. The folder name counts only while Album from folder name for retro formats is on, a Modland file-name guess only while Guess game from Modland file names is on, and the archive name only while Game from archive names is on.

Scene origins

Retro module files rarely carry proper tags — but the scene has spent decades cataloguing them. In gear → Metadata → Scene origin (Modland) SoniqBoom fingerprints each module and matches it against the Modland index, filling in the original author and adding a Scene origin row to Track Info that shows exactly where the tune sits in the archive — Modland: <format>/<author>/…. Refresh the index and apply it from the same panel.

Chip-music files that store their game's name (SPC, NSF/NSFe, GBS, VGM/VGZ, and PSF-family rips such as PSF, USF, GSF, 2SF or SSF) show it as the album and the game; other music files (MP3, FLAC, M4A, Ogg, Opus …) can carry a GAME tag. To read them again — the chip-music files whose game has not been read from the file yet, and every other music file's GAME tag — use gear → Metadata → Game names from file tags → Read game names (the other details read from those chip-music files, such as titles, are refreshed too); untick Include network shares to read only local files. From an FTP or SMB share, an MP3, FLAC or M4A file is read only as far as its tags where the file allows it (files inside archives are read whole), and Cancel stops the run after the current file. A Modland match also fills an empty album with the game the tune belongs to. With Guess game from Modland file names (on by default), Amiga and tracker modules with an exact Modland match can take the game from the Modland file name such as gold of the aztecs-intro when the track's title matches the part after the dash and either other files in the same Modland folder share the game prefix, or the part starts with a usual tune-part word such as intro, title, ingame, level or gameover (an Amiga custom-format tune, whose title is its file name, needs other files in the same Modland folder to share the game prefix). Such a game is spelled as the game title lists spell it when they know it on the track's platform — backtothefuture3-intro gives “Back to the Future III”, chuckrock 2 “Chuck Rock II” — and as the file name has it otherwise; these guessed albums carry a small “guessed from Modland file name” note in Track Info. An album you typed is never replaced. An album from the file itself is kept too, except that an exact Modland match completes an SPC game name that the file's tag cut off at 32 characters. Turning the option off removes only the albums it guessed.

In gear → Metadata → Song database (audacious-uade-tools), Download fetches the song database of the audacious-uade player (about 27 MB) from GitHub and Apply to library matches your modules against it by checksum. An exact match fills what is still empty: the artist, the label (the publisher or group), the album (the game or production — it also replaces an album guessed from a folder or a Modland file name), the year and — for many Amiga modules not played yet — the length. A production name that several groups used carries the group, e.g. “Megademo (The Silents)”. While Re-apply automatically after each library scan is on (the default), a download and every scan apply it too. Reset enrichment removes the artists, labels, albums and years it filled and turns the automatic re-apply off; lengths stay. Tags in your files and anything you typed are never replaced, and a year from the database is marked in Track Info. The database is audacious-uade-tools by Matti Tiainen, compiled from about 400 scene sources and licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Where a game's name comes from

A game you typed, or an album you set on a retro track, is always its game. Otherwise a retro track's game is the first name these sources give it, in this order:

1. The file itself — the game in an SPC, NSF/NSFe, GBS, VGM/VGZ or PSF-family header, or a GAME tag.
2. Modland — the game folder of the tune's exact Modland match.
3. Demozoo — the game Demozoo lists the tune as the soundtrack of, when the tune's composer and title match and the tune is named after that game (“Rick Dangerous”, “High Technique (tune 3)”); from the Demozoo index under gear → Metadata (an index downloaded by an earlier version needs a refresh for this).
4. The song database (audacious-uade-tools) — the game of an exact checksum match.
5. A Modland file name such as gold of the aztecs-intro, while Guess game from Modland file names is on — spelled as the game title lists spell it when they know it.
6. The archive's name, when it is the name of a known game of the track's platform, while Game from archive names is on.
7. The folder or archive name, while Album from folder name for retro formats is on.

The names the other sources give are the game's other names: Track Info lists them on the also line, and game: finds the track by any of them.

Game names from archive names

A retro track inside an archive takes the archive's name as its game when that name is a known game of the track's platform — Turrican.lha for Amiga TFMX tunes, Super_Mario_World.zip for SNES SPC rips. The name is compared with the game titles of the platform only: a SID with C64 games, an Amiga module with Amiga games, a YM or SNDH tune or an Atari ST player's tune with Atari ST games, an AdLib or Sierra AGI tune with DOS games, an SPC with SNES games, a PSF with PlayStation games, and so on; case, accents, punctuation, a leading “The”, Roman numerals, dots between letters and region tags such as “(Europe)” are ignored, a name written without the spaces a title has matches it (Megaman2.zip is “Mega Man 2”), and the game is shown as the title list spells it. Skipped are generic names (music, intro, disk 1 …), names of a part of a game's music, pure numbers, any name the archive's own tunes credit as their composer, artist, group, label or releaser, and an archive that holds a single tracker module or SID named like it (such as axelf.mod.zip); the next archive out is looked at instead. A one-word name shorter than eight letters needs two title lists of the track's platform to agree, and a tracker module (MOD, XM, S3M, IT, MED, AHX …) needs a name of two or more words that two lists of its platform agree on and that is not the title of a module in that archive.

The option is in gear → Metadata → Game names from archive names (on by default); it applies right away and after each scan, Track Info notes such a game as “from the archive name”, and turning it off removes only the names it added. The game titles of Wikidata (CC0), No-Intro, the MAME software lists (CC0) and ZXDB (ODbL) are included, and the C64 tunes in the GAMES folder of your own HVSC copy count as C64 games. Download TOSEC (home computers such as the C64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and MSX, about 100 MB) and Download Redump (disc consoles such as the PlayStation, Saturn and Dreamcast, about 10 MB) add their titles; each is fetched only when you click it, shows its progress, can be stopped with Stop and can be removed again. The downloaded files are kept in SoniqBoom's data folder: after Remove, Add … from the downloaded pack (or lists) puts the list back without downloading; Update downloads the TOSEC pack only when tosecdev.org has a newer release (and uses the kept pack when the site can't be reached), and says so when nothing changed; a Redump download that was stopped — or interrupted by stopping SoniqBoom — is continued with Continue the Redump download, which fetches only the systems still missing, while a stopped TOSEC download starts again; a Redump system that can't be reached keeps the titles of its kept list, and the next Update that reaches every system clears the note about it. A kept file that turns out to be damaged is removed (the next download fetches it again); one that can't be read for another reason — a disk error, a missing permission — is kept. Delete the downloaded pack (or lists) frees the space; the title list stays. Wikidata data is used under CC0; ZXDB contains information from ZXDB, made available under the ODbL.

08Make it yours

Rate, queue and build playlists — and drive the whole player from the keyboard.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? at any time to see this list inside the app. ⌘ is Command on macOS (the Super / Windows key elsewhere); ⌥ is Option / Alt.

Playback

Browse & select

Jump to a view

09Every format, at a glance

Hundreds of formats through one render pipeline — from FLAC to the deepest corners of the Amiga scene. The reference addenda below tell each one's story.

ZIP archives are scanned and played inline — tracks inside .zip files appear in your library without unpacking.

10Casting Beta

Send what you're playing to a TV, speaker or receiver on your network.

1. Press the cast button in the player toolbar.
2. Pick a device from the list — discovered Chromecast, Apple TV / HomePod (AirPlay), and DLNA receivers appear together.
3. Playback moves to that device. Even SID, MIDI and tracker tunes are rendered to standard audio first, so they cast like any FLAC.
4. Some AirPlay devices show a PIN the first time you connect — type it into the pairing dialog to authorise SoniqBoom.
5. Open Audio quality in the picker to choose: Auto (lossless when the device supports it, otherwise MP3 320), Original (no transcoding), FLAC (lossless transcode for every track), or MP3 320 (smallest bandwidth, widest compatibility).

11Multi-room sync

Play the same music in step across the devices on your network — one device leads, the rest follow in lockstep.

SoniqBoom has a dedicated multi-room controller. Open it at /multiroom on your server — for example http://localhost:8080/multiroom, or your server's own address. One device becomes the master and drives playback; every other device joins as a listener and stays in sync.

Start a room — the master

1. Open /multiroom in a browser on the device that will lead.
2. Type a device label (for example Kitchen speaker).
3. Click + Create new room, give the room a name, then Create & become master.
4. As master you browse Tracks, Playlists and Albums, search, and control playback — play/pause, next/previous, shuffle and repeat. The Listeners panel shows every device that has joined.

Join a room — a listener

1. Open /multiroom on another device and type a device label.
2. Pick the room under Active rooms — you join as a listener and follow the master in sync, with a live sync-drift meter on screen.
3. Press Leave to drop out. If a room has no master (the leader left), the next device to open that room becomes the master.

Stream a station to a room

A room isn't only for your own library. Open the master's 📻 Radio tab, pick any of your favourite internet-radio stations, and it plays to every device in the room at once. The now-playing card shows the station and its live artist and track as they change, right alongside the room's transport and Listeners panel.

12Listen anywhere

On your phone

Open SoniqBoom on a phone and it adapts automatically — the full player works at phone width, and on phones the site also serves a dedicated touch-first shell with Library, Search, Radio, Queue and Now Playing tabs plus a tap-to-expand mini-player and Settings behind the gear. Browse and play your library, tune in internet radio streamed straight to your phone, build and edit playlists, and sign in right on the phone. A Desktop site link switches to the full desktop UI whenever you want it. Casting is reachable from the mobile mini-player too (Beta).

Take it offline

Press the ⤓ download button in the player toolbar to keep the current track on the device you're using — it plays even with no connection to the server. The button lights up on tracks you've downloaded; press it again to remove the copy. Everything else streams exactly as before.

Multi-user accounts and roles, last.fm and ListenBrainz scrobbling, and a light/dark theme are all built in — see Manage your library & users and Settings.

13Manage your library & users

Add network shares, keep the index fresh, back up your data, and decide who can do what — all from the admin panel (gear icon, top-right).

Add a network share — FTP, SMB or WebDAV

In the admin panel's Music Folders section, switch from Local Path to the Network Share tab and pick a protocol:

Add an optional alias, click Test to check the connection, then + Connect — SoniqBoom attaches the share with no operating-system mount required and scans it straight away. When the connection fails, the message says why (for example a wrong password or a URL that is not a WebDAV folder). When a server refuses a share's sign-in, SoniqBoom waits before trying that login again (from 5 minutes up to 6 hours) and the share's row says so; Reconnect tries at once.

Tracks on a share start playing while they download: an MP3, WAV, Ogg or Opus file, or a FLAC with a seek table, plays from its first bytes, and a seek far ahead of what has arrived can be read straight from the share. A track inside a large ZIP archive on a share is read on its own, without downloading the whole archive. A share whose server is offline when SoniqBoom starts is marked unavailable and connects by itself once the server is reachable again.

Keep your library fresh

Local folders are watched automatically — files you add, change or remove are picked up a few seconds after the changes settle, and a file that is still being copied or downloaded is picked up once it is complete. Changes made while SoniqBoom was stopped are picked up by a rescan of the local folders a few minutes after it starts (Rescan local folders after startup in Settings). Network shares are re-checked on a periodic background poll, and you can force one with the Check now button on a remote folder. To rebuild everything by hand, use ↻ Rebuild Index; to re-scan a single folder, use its Re-Index button. While a scan is running you can Pause it and later Resume from where it left off — handy for easing server load during busy listening.

Back up & restore

The admin panel's Backup tab exports your whole database to a single date-stamped file (soniqboom-YYYY-MM-DD.sbz) — a compressed snapshot of your track index and metadata, waveforms, star ratings, play counts, playlists, listening history, your scan-folder list and library settings. Import .sbz restores it; it replaces the current library data and asks you to confirm first.

User accounts & roles

Manage people in the admin panel's Users tab — add a user, set their role, enable or disable them, set a password, or remove them. Three roles decide what each person can do:

New accounts come from two places: an admin adds them in the Users tab with a role, or a visitor signs themselves up from the login screen — self-registered accounts are always Read-only until an admin promotes them.

Reset a password or recover access

Run this on the server host (from inside the SoniqBoom folder) to set any user's password — it's also how you create the very first admin on a fresh install:

bash setup-admin.sh -user alice -passwd 'a-new-password'
bash setup-admin.sh -user alice -passwd 'a-new-password' -role admin   # also make them an admin

System notes

14Settings & integrations

Open the admin panel with the gear icon (top-right) to connect outside services and tune the extras.

15Troubleshooting

The handful of things people ask about first.

A track is listed but won't play

Its renderer isn't installed. Re-run bash install.sh (it installs them all), or install the one package SoniqBoom names in the error — sidplayfp, fluidsynth, libopenmpt, uade, libgme or adplay. Everything else keeps working in the meantime.

A SID tune shows the wrong length

Configure HVSC in Settings — without it, SID durations fall back to an estimate.

MIDI sounds thin or silent

Install or select a SoundFont in Settings; MIDI is synthesised from the active .sf2 bank.

I'm locked out / forgot the admin password

On the server host (inside the SoniqBoom folder), reset any account from the command line: bash setup-admin.sh -user <name> -passwd '<new password>' (add -role admin to restore admin rights) — it takes effect immediately. See Manage your library & users.

A scan reports files it didn't index

A file whose metadata can't be read within about 90 seconds, or whose reading crashes the scanner's worker process, is skipped and counted as a scan error, and the scan goes on with the next one. When five files inside the same archive time out in a row, the rest of that archive is skipped too. The automatic rescans (the folder watcher and the rescan after startup) try a skipped file again only after a wait that grows each time it is skipped — an hour, then four, then sixteen, up to a week; a file that has changed is tried at the next scan; each scan tries a limited number of them. If a network share stops answering during a scan, the scan shows Waiting for … to answer and waits up to about three minutes; if the share is still silent, the rest of that library folder is left for the next scan. Tracks already in your library stay. Once the files or the share are readable again, use the folder's Re-Index button — it tries skipped files again without the wait.

A network share won't connect

In the admin panel's Music Folders → Network Share form, use Test before connecting — it reports the exact connection error. Check the host, share name / path and credentials, and that the server can reach the share on your network.

A cast device doesn't appear

It must be on the same Wi-Fi / LAN as the server, and casting is in Beta — behaviour varies by device. Wake the device, then use the picker's Search again button.

The app didn't change after an upgrade

SoniqBoom is an installable PWA, so the browser may still be serving a cached shell — reload the page (or remove and re-add the installed app) to fetch the new version.

16Reference library

Three illustrated histories of the music SoniqBoom plays — where every format came from, and why it sounds the way it does.