TIDAL · Record Pull
Record Pull for TIDAL
a lot of music gets played as background now. Record Pull lets you save a song, a moment, or a lyric while it plays and tag what it did for you. i took a teammate's first version, designed the full concept, and built the alpha in the TIDAL Android app.
people rarely have words for why a song hits them, and the first version of Record Pull asked them to type it out. most people don't write notes.
i replaced the text box with tags, added a glossary that explains music vocabulary, and let a pull include the friends and places around it. i designed and prototyped it, then built the alpha in Android.
pitched at TIDAL. the Android alpha runs on a feature branch with 244 passing unit tests.
the music never pauses. a quick pull is one tap and an optional note.design rule
the first version
it saved a whole song, a moment, or a lyric with a note, an emoji, and a crate.
it worked, but a blank text box asks a lot of a listener, and free text is hard to use for anything else.
tags, a glossary, and people and places
tags give listeners words for what they hear, the glossary explains each one, and tagging people and places ties a pull to where you were.
pulls in the app
collection is your private library in TIDAL, where crates sit next to playlists and albums. your profile is the page other people see, with your pinned pulls. the alpha has crates and pins. "your ear", resurfacing old pulls, crate matching, and the profile shelf weren't part of the scoped prototype or the alpha: we split up the work, and i was in charge of the main pull flow.
there were two of us, so i focused on what we could build well and get in front of listeners quickly. i checked each feature against services TIDAL already runs, tried the cuts in a second prototype, then built what was left.
the pull sheet in the app
craft, feeling, and connection tags, your most-used tags first, the glossary one tap away, and the moment saved as a timestamp.
- 01next: tagging friends, and places as typed text so there's no location prompt
- 02next: connecting the real API
- 03later: the recording visual, suggested tags, and listening history
the alpha keeps the core of the design and changes what the app can't support yet.
| prototype | Android alpha | |
|---|---|---|
| captured moment | a recording visual of the range | the timestamp as text ("at 0:44"). the app has no way to draw the recording visual, so it was cut. |
| tag order | suggested tags | your most-used tags come first |
| new pull picker | recent listening | tracks you've pulled before, since the app has no recently played list this feature can read |
| pins | on your profile | at the top of pulls and on the home card |
| tag chips | a custom chip | built from wave2 tokens, since wave2 has no chip component |
| friends and places | tag people, pick a place | not built yet |
i used Claude Code throughout, mostly to move faster and to keep the two of us in sync.