All the music in my films, in one searchable library

I make long, quiet hiking films for my YouTube channel, and lately a lot of short vertical clips cut from them. Almost every one has music under it. I've been licensing that music for years, from a few different libraries, and until this week none of it was written down in one place.

Why keep a list of songs at all?

Three reasons kept coming up.

1. Finding music. When we cut a new short, the question is always "what have I got that sounds like this?" The answer was spread across three websites and a folder of WAV files.
2. Not repeating myself. I wanted to know if a song was already the soundtrack of another film before using it again.
3. Copyright claims. YouTube's Content ID sometimes claims a song I've licensed. To clear it, you need to know where the song came from and which licence covers it. I was looking that up by hand, film by film.

So I asked Claude to build a music library inside KraigOS. I said yes to the plan on October 13, and it was built and loaded the same day.

How Claude built it

1. Read the libraries. My Musicbed licences and most of my download history there, my Artlist downloads, my Storyblocks download history. Epidemic Sound needed a sign-in, so its songs come from claims and notes instead. Read only: it looked, it didn't click anything that changes an account.
2. Read YouTube's claims. Two days earlier, Claude had read the copyright claims on 125 of my films in YouTube Studio. Every claimed song was either matched to a licence or listed separately.
3. Read my own notes. Old project notes, file names in Google Drive, the build notes for each short, and my film descriptions, which often credit the song.
4. Wrote it all down, with sources. Each song has which library it came from, its page in the library, mood and tags, and a note on where that fact came from. Each use says which film or clip, where in it, and the claim on it, if any.
5. Tested before loading. The library is two new tables in KraigOS's database. Claude's tests load it into a test copy twice, to prove that running it again changes nothing. Only then did it go into the live database.

What's in it

867 songs in all: 621 used somewhere, 246 with no use on record.

• Musicbed: 652 songs, 555 used, 97 with no use on record.
• Artlist: 172 songs, 31 used, 141 with no use on record.
• Epidemic Sound: 18 songs, all used.
• Artists or labels directly: 12 songs, all used.
• Storyblocks: 9 songs, 1 used, 8 with no use on record.
• YouTube Audio Library: 4 songs, all used.

A few things stood out.

• The shorts reuse a handful of songs. "Seine River" by IamDayLight is under 31 of my clips, "Eternal Recluse" by Kyle Preston under 19. The map-route reels lean on four or five quiet Artlist tracks. That's fine for now, but it's easy to see.
• The long films are the gap. Only 47 of my 249 films have a known song. Most older films don't credit their music anywhere I could read, so the library can't say what's in them yet.
• Claims are tracked now. Of the uses with a claim recorded, 51 are claimed, 24 disputed, 12 released after a dispute and 19 cleared.

What it does now

The library is a tool Claude can use in any conversation:

• Search: "calm piano, no vocals, not used yet" returns songs ranked by how well they match.
• Similar: give it a song and it finds others with the same mood and tags, the same artist, a tempo within 10%, or songs used in the same films, with the reason for each.
• Where is this used? Every film or clip lists its songs, and every song lists its films.
• Claims: a list of every claimed or disputed use, so clearing them is one list instead of a hunt.

It's a ledger only. It never downloads, licenses or clears anything by itself.

What I learned

• Writing down where each fact came from was worth the extra time. When a claim comes in, the note says which licence page or email backs it up.
• I have a lot more music than I use. 246 songs have no use on record. Some may be in older films whose music isn't written down anywhere; others may be unused, so new shorts can start from those.

What's next

The point of all this is simple: when we need music, Claude can find something similar to a song I liked, check whether it's already been used, and reuse the good ones.

FAQ

Does the library store the music? No. It stores the song's name, artist, library, licence reference and where it's used. The audio stays in the libraries and in my Drive.

Did AI make any of the music? No. Every song is a real track from a music library or an artist. Claude only found and organised them.

What's KraigOS? The system Claude and I built to run my work: one database of my projects, films, clips and now music, which Claude reads and updates. There's more in the note on how I built it.