A record that wears where you played it.
Every groove on a real record degrades in proportion to how many times a stylus has crossed it. Play one track to death and you can see it. That band goes milky while the rest of the disc stays mirror-black. DeadWax renders that, driven by your actual listening history.
It is one self-contained HTML file. No build step, no server, no account.
→ codedrichy.github.io/DeadWax
The wear is real data. Bands are laid out by track duration and shaded by play count on a log curve. The shading is normalised against both the record's own range and an absolute reference. A track played 141 times and one played 9 times do not look alike.
The scatter is deliberately view-independent. Worn vinyl is micro-scratched, and micro-scratches scatter diffusely, so a played band reads as worn from every angle. The specular highlight is no longer the only place the wear shows. That was the difference between the wear being the point and the wear being invisible.
Bring your own history. Drop in a Spotify extended-history export, a Spotify StreamingHistory*.json, an Apple Music CSV, or a Google Takeout watch-history.json. Plays count at 30 seconds. That is Spotify's own stream threshold, so skips do not wear grooves. Everything is parsed in the page; no file leaves your machine.
Or paste a YouTube link. It looks the track up, presses a record, and plays it. The needle is driven by the player's clock, so dragging the tonearm seeks the video and scrubbing the video moves the needle.
Riffle the crate. Records stand on edge, packed and leaning. Scroll, drag, or arrow through them and pull one out.
The parts that are easy to fake are the parts that give a render away, so they are not faked:
- The flip is a rigid-body turn of the record. It rises clear of the spindle, rotates about its own diameter, and settles. The camera does not move. The face swaps at the measured edge-on angle: −33.5° at the default rake, solved from the camera basis. It does not swap at 90°, where the disc is actually more face-on than flat.
- The tonearm is a swept S-arm with a real gimbal, closed headshell, and per-face backface culling with painter's-algorithm depth sorting.
- The pressing is off-centre by ~0.7 mm, so the disc orbits the spindle once per revolution, like every record ever made.
- Sides split by duration. A side takes 22 minutes of music, whatever the track count. That is what a 12″ at 33⅓ actually holds. A record that fits on one side is honestly one-sided.
- Surface noise is modelled from measurements: a floor near −48 dB, dominated by content below 100 Hz. What you hear is rumble.
This page is the demo. The product is a desktop app. It sits on your machine, watches what you are actually playing, and presses the record as you listen. No export to upload, no link to paste. The wear arrives on its own, over months, the way it does on a real shelf.
The web build exists because the surface had to be proved first. Does wear read as wear? Does the flip feel like an object? Does a stranger understand the disc without a legend? Those are the same questions in a window on your desktop, and a page you can send someone answers them cheaper.
The render is verified by measurement. scripts/verify/ holds the harness: boot and dead-binding checks, twenty interaction assertions, the side split and flip arc, the edge-on angle solved from the camera basis, needle position against the player clock, and wear values across a play-count spread.
deadwax-data.js is gitignored and never published. It is a personal listening history with embedded album art. GitHub Pages serves the branch tree publicly, so anything tracked is public.
The shipped build stores your crate in localStorage only. It has no backend, no analytics, and no account.
All rights reserved. See LICENSE.
This is not open source. No permission is granted to copy, modify, distribute, fork, re-host, or use this code or its design. That includes use as training data for machine learning models. Viewing the repository, or viewing source on the live page, grants you no rights to it.
If you want to use any of it, ask: github.com/CodedRichy
Note on forking. GitHub's Terms of Service grant every user the right to view and fork any public repository, regardless of its licence. This repository is public by choice, so that is a trade made knowingly. The licence removes permission to use the work, not the ability to copy it. The same is true of the live page. It is a single client-side HTML file, so its full source is readable in any browser. Readable is not licensed.
Not covered by the above, and under their own terms:
- Instrument Serif by Rodrigo Fuenzalida, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Self-hosted in
fonts/, which the OFL permits; the page makes no third-party requests. - The record icon (
favicon-*.png,apple-touch-icon.png) is derived from a third-party stock illustration.scripts/make-favicon.jsmasks it to a real alpha channel. The source JPEG's "transparency" is a checkerboard painted into the pixels. Check the stock licence before relying on it. - Album titles, artist names, and cover art shown at runtime belong to their rights holders. They are fetched by the viewer's browser and are neither stored in nor distributed with this repository.