A private music library for people who rate what they listen to.
Sound Atlas keeps a personal catalogue of songs and the ratings its listeners give them. From those ratings it builds ranked lists — what you have played recently, the best of a decade, an all-time chart — separately for each catalogue a listener follows, including Persian, Turkish and Arabic music alongside the global one.
It runs as an app for Android and iPhone, and your library follows your account, so a song rated on one phone is rated on every phone you sign in on.
Sound Atlas lets people in a few at a time. Sign in with Google or Apple, then enter an invite code, or join the waitlist and we will email you one. There is no advertising, no subscription, and nothing is sold — including data. It exists because its author wanted a better way to listen to his own music collection.
Saving lists to YouTube Music is not yet open to members: for now only the operator's own YouTube account is connected, and Sound Atlas does not accept or keep a YouTube permission from anyone else. That permission is used for one thing only: when Save is pressed on a list, Sound Atlas creates a playlist in that YouTube account and adds that list's songs, in the order shown.
Apart from saves, it does one thing a day: it lists the account's playlists to confirm that the ones it created still exist. Sound Atlas does not read watch history, subscriptions, uploads or comments; does not change playlists it did not create; and deletes only songs that have left a list it saved, a playlist it has just created when a save fails, or a temporary private playlist it creates to test write access. Connecting is optional — every other feature works without it — and access can be withdrawn at any time at Google account permissions.
Sound Atlas's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
There are no third-party analytics or tracking tools. You can delete your account at any time in the app, under Account. The privacy policy sets out the whole of it, and how to have it deleted without the app.
Sound Atlas is operated by Hooman Takhtechian. Questions, access requests and deletion requests: [email protected].