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 share their shows.

It's a passion project in the most literal sense. I'm a Deadhead who wanted a better way to listen, so I designed, built, and shipped it alone, with no ads, no subscriptions, and no account required to press play.

It's available on the Apple app store now.

The Internet Archive's Grateful Dead collection is one of the great cultural datasets on the internet: more than 17,000 live recordings, authorized by the band, free to stream. The Archive organizes it the way an archivist would, by date, source lineage, and taper attribution, and every existing app inherits that taxonomy directly. 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 that 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, utilitarian and proud of it, so the goal I set was different in kind, not just degree: bring the Spotify experience to the archive. Not Spotify's catalog, which will never have these recordings, but its standard. A streamlined, polished interface where curation greets you at the door, playback just works, and every surface feels premium, the kind of app that seems expensive even though it's free. The bar wasn't the other Archive apps. It was the app people already spend their listening life inside.

Every session starts in one of two ways: you either know what you want to listen to, or not. The app is designed to be great in both scenarios, and with 17,000 shows, that meant having an opinion about the catalog rather than just exposing it.

If you don't know, the app guides you to something great. The foundation is a three-tier rating system (3 stars legendary, 2 excellent, 1 notable) built from community consensus, HeadyVersions, archive popularity data, and online articles, rather than my personal taste. Ratings are rendered the same way on cards, tracklists, and show headers so quality is readable everywhere.

On top of it, the homepage leads with answers instead of questions: a curated list of legendary shows, a Show of the Day drawn from one of the 365 most popular shows, a radio mode that shuffles top-rated song performances, or shuffle play from the users saved songs or shows. These features remove decision paralysis and make the app more approachable and fun to use.

I also put a lot of effort into the search and filters. Filters organize 30 years of history into the band's actual chapters ("The Early Years," "Keith & Donna," "Brent Years"), because newcomers don't know that 1972 and 1977 are different bands. Search meets people where their memory is: it matches dates in any format (5/8/77, "May 8," 1977-05-08), venue names, official release titles, and even resolves "california" to CA shows.

Deadheads chase versions, not just shows. The question isn't "what happened on 2/13/70," it's "what's the best Loser ever played?" So the app has a full A-Z song index with performance counts. Tap a song and you see every performance across the entire catalog, sortable by rating. This inverts the Archive's data model, which only knows about shows, into the mental model fans actually use. No other app answers the question at all.

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

Gapless playback 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, playback continues into the next chronological show, and every show page lists the next three tour stops, so you can follow 1977 night by night the way fans followed the bus.

The Archive has no artwork, which is why every competitor is a wall of text. I gave the app a unique a visual identity, with looping video backgrounds on the main audio player and behind the frosted mini player. Share cards also get seeded generative art, so texting or posting links looks great.

System integration goes all the way down: lock screen and Control Center with live scrubbing, 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.

Shows are how the Archive thinks, but fans also keep their own shelves. Collections let you save shows and organize the ones that matter to you, and 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. It's the natural companion to song-first discovery. Once the app can show you every version of a song ranked, the obvious next move is keeping your winners somewhere.

Playlists are first-class citizens of the player, not an afterthought. A playlist plays gapless like everything else, gets its own shuffle mode with a labeled badge in the mini player, and saves and collection actions apply optimistically, flipping instantly before the server confirms. Everything has a deep link, so a playlist or collection can be sent to a friend as a clean URL, and the link is a real invitation: it unfurls with a branded share card in the message thread, and tapping it opens the app directly to the thing being shared, not a web page asking you to go find it.

Dead fandom was never a solo activity. Tape trading was social infrastructure before the internet had a name for that, yet every Archive app treats listening like a private errand. So the app has a social layer built on the older instinct: you can follow other fans, browse their public profiles, and watch an activity 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 discovery surface alongside the ratings and the eras.

Profiles are opt-in. Signing up is one tap with Apple or Google, usernames check availability live, and a public-profile toggle (optimistic, like every other switch in the app) decides whether anyone can see you at all. Profiles, like everything else, have deep links, 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 connection warming fires at app launch. Opening a show page sends a HEAD request that warms the CDN for the first track, so tap-to-play is effectively instant. Radio tracks, detail pages, and videos prefetch ahead of need, deferred until after first interaction so they never compete with render. Saves and collection actions apply optimistically before the server confirms. When playback fails, the app silently retries a fallback stream URL before it ever shows an error.

None of this shows up in a screenshot, but it's most of why the app feels nice.

Free apps tell you they're free in a hundred small ways: default haptics, system spinners, a login wall before you hear a note. The bar here was the app people already spend their listening life inside, so the details had to hold at that standard too. Haptics follow a deliberate hierarchy (strong for play and pause, medium for skips and saves, light for pills) instead of being sprinkled at random. The dark design system runs on near-black surface tokens, a signature red, and Familjen Grotesk display type over Inter body. Frosted-glass surfaces are implemented correctly per platform. Loading gets skeleton shimmer, pull-to-refresh is branded, 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 when someone does sign up, it's one tap with Apple or Google, framed as "sign in to back up your favorites" rather than a demand. Share cards preview live in a branded tray, and the sender's card matches the recipient's link unfurl because the OG image is generated server-side from the same seed.