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Notion for Songwriters in a Vibe-Coded Standstill

By day, I am a Senior Product Designer, but I have recreationally been taking singing classes and playing around with songwriting. I get lots of ideas for lyrics and melodies and always write them in my phone. I've heard lots of songwriters use their Notes app, but I've been using Notion. I've tried 'songwriting apps' but always found them disappointing.

I have found that the apps that are "designed for me" do not solve my problems, and I have no interest in changing my workflow. Apps like Demo and Chord Butter are trying to hit closer to a dumbed down version of Logic, rather than what I think it should be, a songwriter's text editor.

For my first iteration of the app, I have been using Bolt to vibe code. Their integration with figma has been the most impressive that I've seen, getting the styling as close as I could have asked.

I have been able to:

  • create a file/folder structure
  • effectively create an Apple Finder-like page layout with collapsable columns
  • add accounts
  • set up the database to keep (almost) all the file content
  • implement create/edit/delete capabilities for files and folders
  • implement audio recording functionality (record, replace, delete) for desired lines of text (ie. I have a melody idea for this set of lyrics)
  • implement chord annotation functionality (create, drag to relocate, replace, and delete)

I think the experience is 70% of the way there. I have not replaced my current workflow with this app yet, which is my only metric for success at this stage.

There are a couple of technical barriers I'm hitting that's stopping me from using it as my tool and database for song ideas:

  1. The typing experience sucks.
    If I type too quickly, the cursor jumps back to the front of the line of text. It makes it impossible to type unless I type very slowly. This is frustrating because every other text editor is able to do this. It doesn't feel like something that should be a problem.

  2. Annotation Permanence
    The way I am building chord annotations is quite novel (I haven't seen it elsewhere, so from what I can see, it hasn't been done). An issue with this is that the database does not know how to store/document the annotations that are made in a file. When I leave the page and return, or log out an log back in, the chord annotations disappear.
    The way the text editor is built right now, in order to support an "annotation frame", is that each line of text is an individual element. All lines of text have an annotation frame that hides when there are no annotations in it. This way, when there are no annotations, it appears as normal text.
    Along with annotation permanence, this strategy poses my third technical barrier I'm facing...

  3. I can't highlight more than one line of text.
    Because each line of text is, at least how I understand it, an independent text editor, I'm not able to highlight multiple lines of text. This is annoying, and again, not how a standard text editor is expected to work.

I'm posting this because Vibe-debugging has not been fun, and I wanted to see if anyone might have insights. I'd be happy to connect and hear ideas, and I'm always happy to provide design advice/feedback in return.

Hope you enjoyed reading about my project. Happy building!

posted to Icon for group Developers
Developers
on April 13, 2025
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