Scarlet>Fire

Scarlet>Fire is a free app for streaming the Grateful Dead's live archive: more than 17,000 recordings on the Internet Archive, there because the band spent thirty years letting fans tape and trade their shows.

I'm a Deadhead and I wanted a better way to listen, so I designed, built, and shipped it myself. I started in early 2026 and it reached the App Store that April. There are no ads and no subscriptions, and you don't need an account to press play.

It's one of the best cultural archives on the internet, and the Archive organizes it the way an archivist would: by date, source lineage, and taper. Every existing app inherits that. You get a list of years, then a list of dates, then a list of cryptic source identifiers, and you're expected to already know you want the Miller transfer of the Betty board from 5/8/77. That works for the person who taped the show. It's a dead end for someone who just wants to hear a great Scarlet Begonias>Fire on the Mountain.

The existing apps are database browsers, and they seem fine with that. I wanted the Spotify experience applied to the archive. Spotify will never have these recordings, but it sets the bar for how listening should feel: curation on the home screen, playback that just works, every screen made with care. I measured the app against that, and not against the other Archive apps.

People open the app either knowing what they want to hear or not. Handling both meant the app had to have opinions about the catalog.

For people who don't know, the app points somewhere good. Shows get a three-tier rating (3 stars legendary, 2 excellent, 1 notable) built from community consensus, HeadyVersions, Archive popularity, and a close reading of the Taping Compendium. My own taste isn't in it. Ratings look the same everywhere, so you can read quality at a glance.

The home screen makes suggestions instead of asking questions: legendary shows, collections I built by hand like the great multi-night runs, a Show of the Day drawn from the 365 most popular, and a radio mode that shuffles top-rated performances.

Filtering grew into a real tag system: years grouped into the band's actual eras (newcomers don't know 1972 and 1977 are different bands), recording format, venue type, and instrumentation like pedal steel and acoustic sets. Every tag shows a live count, so you never pick a filter that returns nothing. Search works the way people remember shows. It matches dates in any format (5/8/77, "May 8," 1977-05-08) and venue names and release titles, and "california" finds the CA shows.

The Deadhead's Taping Compendium is three out-of-print, phone-book-sized volumes of fan scholarship: reviews of nearly every show the band played, written by the people trading the tapes. I rebuilt it into the app. Parsing the scans meant recovering text the OCR mangled, repairing two-column layouts, and stripping thirty years of page furniture. The result is prose notes for more than 1,500 shows, so a show page can lead with what actually happened that night: the guest sit-ins, the equipment disasters, the second sets people still argue about.

Then the notes became data. A scoring pipeline weighs what each note asserts, docking praise that's about the tape rather than the playing, and awarding a tier only where the evidence supports one. Community consensus always wins; the Compendium fills in the thousands of shows consensus has no opinion about, and where the two disagree the date gets flagged for a human. The same pass pulled 4,000 song highlights backed by 7,600 verbatim quotes, each verified against its source.

A random Tuesday in 1984 used to be an unlabeled list of tracks. Now it has liner notes, and a rating when the book supports one.

Deadheads chase versions more than shows. The question isn't "what happened on 2/13/70," it's "what's the best Loser ever played?" So there's a full A to Z song index with performance counts. Tap a song and every performance in the catalog is there, sortable by rating and filterable by the same tags as everything else, so "best Sugaree, Brent years, soundboard only" is three taps. The Archive only knows about shows, so this turns its data model around to match how fans listen. I haven't found another app that answers the question.

That knowledge the Archive assumes, the Miller transfer of the Betty board of 5/8/77, is real, and it matters enormously to the people deepest in the archive. So the app organizes it instead of hiding it. A parser reads the Archive's free-text source notes and tags every recording by format (soundboard, audience, matrix, FM) and by lineage, the Betty Boards and Charlie Miller transfers among them. The picker lists every tape of every show, not a shortlist.

A playback preference decides which tape plays by default. Pin a different recording on any show and the app remembers the exception, synced across devices. Casual listeners never see any of this: they press play and the most popular recording starts. The taxonomy that shut newcomers out is still there, opt-in, for the people who care about it.

Dead shows aren't albums. They're three-hour arcs with sets, segues, and 25-minute jams, and generic players mangle them.

Gapless had to be done properly: the whole show goes to the native player queue instead of loading track by track, so Scarlet Begonias flows into Fire on the Mountain the way it did in the amphitheater. When a show ends the next chronological one starts, and every show page lists the next three tour stops, so you can follow 1977 night by night the way fans followed the bus. An optional setting skips the tracks that are just tuning.

The Archive has no artwork, which is why every competitor is a wall of text. This one has looping video behind the main player and the frosted mini player, and share cards get seeded generative art, so a posted link looks like something.

Lock screen and Control Center scrub live, with next and previous routed back through the app so shuffle and radio logic stay correct. That routing is also what made CarPlay work for free.

Dead shows are long, and the places you most want them, planes, canyons, the drive to the lot, are exactly where streaming dies. So whole shows download to the device: tap the button and a progress ring fills as the tracks land. Downloads run in the background, survive force-quits, default to Wi-Fi only, and require no account, because nothing in this app does. They live in the Saved tab, and the player prefers the local copy automatically.

The biggest constraint on this feature doesn't show. Soundboards are streaming-only under a longstanding arrangement between the band and the Archive, so the app won't download them, even though it technically could. I'd rather lose the feature than put the arrangement that keeps 17,000 recordings free at risk.

The Archive thinks in shows, but fans keep their own shelves. Collections save the shows that matter to you. Playlists go a level deeper: track lists built from across the catalog, so the best Scarlet Begonias from '77 can sit next to the best one from '89. Once the app could rank every version of a song, people needed somewhere to keep their favorites.

In the player, playlists get the same treatment as shows. A playlist plays gapless, has its own shuffle mode with a labeled badge in the mini player, and saves apply optimistically, flipping before the server confirms. Everything has a deep link. Links unfurl with a branded share card in the message thread, and tapping one opens the app to the thing being shared instead of a web page telling you to go find it.

Dead fandom was never a solo activity. Tape trading was social infrastructure before the internet had a name for it, yet every Archive app treats listening like a private errand. So you can follow other fans, browse their public profiles, and watch a feed of what they've been listening to, favoriting, and playlisting. Popular community collections are browsable too, which turns other people's taste into another way in.

Profiles are opt-in. Signing up is one tap with Apple or Google, usernames check availability live, and a public-profile toggle decides whether anyone can see you at all. Profiles have deep links too, so "check out this guy's '73 collection" works as a text message.

Streaming from a nonprofit's free infrastructure means I don't control the backend, so I attacked latency everywhere the client could. DNS and TLS warm at launch. Opening a show page fires a HEAD request that warms the CDN for the first track, so tap-to-play is effectively instant. Radio tracks and detail pages prefetch ahead of need, deferred until after first interaction so they never compete with render. When playback fails, the app retries a fallback stream before it ever shows an error. None of this shows up in a screenshot, but it's most of why the app feels nice.

The visible half works the same way. Free apps tell you they're free in a hundred small ways: default haptics, system spinners, a login wall before you hear a note. Haptics here follow a hierarchy, strong for play and pause, medium for skips and saves, light for pills. The dark system runs on near-black surfaces, a signature red, and Familjen Grotesk over Inter. Show pages open on full-bleed artwork that fades into the tracklist as you scroll, loading gets skeleton shimmer, and empty and error states are unified.

Guest mode has a prominent "skip for now," so nobody hits a login wall before hearing music, and signing up is one tap, framed as backing up your favorites rather than a demand. Share cards preview before you send, and the sender's card matches the recipient's unfurl because both come from the same seed.

Scarlet>Fire is an Expo app on Supabase, so one codebase ships to iOS and the web. I set the style with a few screens in Figma and built the rest with Claude Code.

The Archive is a backend nobody controls, so a lot of the engineering was defensive: recordings with missing tracks, sources with inconsistent metadata, streams that drop. Testing was listening. I used the app every day the way I wanted to use it, and the friends who picked it up told me what broke and what they wished it did. That loop set the roadmap more than any plan did.