recreview

A personal album review tracker. Search MusicBrainz for a release, rate it, write what you thought, and keep a local library of reviews.

• Search albums against the MusicBrainz release-group API, including Lucene queries (red AND taylor swift)
• Cover art from the Cover Art Archive when a release is selected or when viewing saved reviews
• 1–5 star ratings and freeform remarks
• Duplicate protection so the same release group cannot be reviewed twice
• Edit and delete existing reviews
• Local persistence via localStorage — reviews survive refreshes with no backend
• Dark UI by default, with a theme provider that also supports light and system preference

• / — Home; jump to create or saved reviews
• /create — Search MusicBrainz, pick a release, rate and submit
• /saved — Browse saved reviews with cover art; edit or delete

• UI — React 19, TypeScript
• Routing — React Router 8 (createBrowserRouter, nested routes, outlet context)
• Styling — Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui (Base UI / nova), Geist
• State — Lifted review list in App, shared with useReviewContext()
• Persistence — localStorage
• Data — MusicBrainz WS/2, Cover Art Archive
• Tooling — Vite 8, Oxlint, Bun

Reviews live in App and are passed to child routes through React Router outlet context. Pages read and write that list through useReviewContext(). A useEffect on the create and saved pages writes the latest list back to localStorage under the reviews key.

src/
  App.tsx                 # Review type, lifted state, theme + toaster
  reviews-context.ts      # Typed outlet-context hook
  pages/
    Home.tsx
    CreateReview.tsx      # Search, select, rate, persist
    SavedReviews.tsx      # List, edit, delete, cover art
  components/ui/          # shadcn primitives

Each review stores:

• releaseGroupId — MusicBrainz MBID
• releaseGroupTitle / releaseGroupArtist
• rating (1–5)
• remarks

Needs Bun (or npm/pnpm if you prefer).

bun install
bun run dev

Other scripts:

bun run build    # tsc -b && vite build
bun run preview  # serve the production build
bun run lint     # oxlint

The app talks to public MusicBrainz and Cover Art Archive endpoints from the browser. No API keys. MusicBrainz asks that clients identify themselves; if you hit rate limits, add a User-Agent on a proxy or wait and retry.

• Data never leaves the browser except the two public music APIs.
• Clearing site data wipes reviews.
• Cover art is best-effort; some release groups have none.

Private project — not licensed for redistribution unless you add a license.