I wanted the shelf back

9 September 2026

Years ago I spent an evening with the early Queen albums. That was the evening's entertainment. I sat there and played tracks off albums I had not listened to in a very long time.

I had gone to the CD rack with a mood rather than a title, and worked along the spines until something stopped me.

Evenings like that were common. Streaming is my main source of music now, and I seldom have one.

What the rack was actually doing

It took me a while to work out why, because on paper streaming is better at this in every way. Everything I own is available, plus everything I do not own. Search is instant. Nothing is scratched.

But when I stood in front of the rack I was not searching. I usually did not know what I wanted. What I had was a mood. Something up-tempo, or something more melodic, or something to wind down to. You can type that into a streaming service. It hands back a playlist someone else assembled. At the rack I did the choosing, by recognising something I already owned.

What I did instead was browse. The rack made that work, and I never noticed how until it was gone.

Everything was in one view. Not a scrolling list, a wall. I could take in several hundred albums with my eyes rather than my memory.

It was ordered by genre, because that is how I had shelved it. Genre is a crude description of music. It matched my moods well enough. Wanting something up-tempo, I would go and stand in front of the rock records. The shelf had already done the filtering.

And I would find things I had forgotten I owned. That is the whole Queen evening. I saw them.

What I get instead

You cannot see your whole library at once. You scroll a list.

There is no ordering that helps. My saved albums in YouTube Music can be sorted three ways: recently added, A to Z by album title, and recently played. There is no sort by artist, never mind by anything that gestures at mood. Four albums by the same artist sit in four different places in the grid and the only way to see them together is to remember all four titles.

And my library rediscovers nothing for me. Recently played puts the things I already play at the top, which makes it worse. The albums I have forgotten are exactly the ones it buries.

I think this is why I listen to less music than I used to. The deciding got harder, and when deciding is hard I do something else instead.

So I rebuilt the shelf

I wrote a Chrome extension. It scrapes my saved albums out of YouTube Music and renders them in its own grid, which can sort by artist and can hold an order I set myself by dragging.

The part that matters is sections. You can create named groups and drag albums into them. I shelved my CDs by genre for twenty years and I wanted the shelf back, so I built the shelf.

Sorting by artist turned out to matter more than I expected, and for a reason I had not thought about. On the shelf, an artist's albums sit together, so seeing one means seeing all of them. Alphabetical by album title scatters them across the whole library.

None of this was hard in an interesting way, but almost none of it worked first time. What I tried first was reordering YouTube Music's own tiles, which held until the page next redrew itself and then went back to how it was. Every time. So the extension takes a copy of the library and draws its own grid instead, which means it shows a snapshot and you have to tell it to go and look again. An AI agent wrote every line of it, which is its own subject and not this one.

Has it worked?

So far, yes.

Since I have been using it, the browsing has started happening again. I opened the grid one evening with no plan, and there was Galliano, and then a run of other acid jazz records from the nineties that I used to play constantly and had not thought about in years. I was excited. That is the thing I was missing.

I have been using it for a week and I built it myself, so weigh that accordingly.

It is at alpha, waiting on Chrome Web Store approval, and I have asked some friends to try it. Mostly I want to know whether it does anything for anyone who did not build it.

Status: Alpha, September 2026. There is a product page with what it does and what it does with your data.