Core concepts
Track, capture, research, match, classification, Done. The vocabulary the rest of the manual is built on.
Track
A track is one song with one identity. Same title + same artist + same version on the same platform = one track. A remix or extended cut is a different track — see "Duplicates" in Troubleshooting.
Discovery / Capture
Capture is the moment a track enters CatchIt! — from a Shazam, a paste, a share, a tracklist row, a recording, a playlist import. We use "discovery" interchangeably.
Single captures land in Mobile Shazams in the Inbox sidebar; batch captures become Tracklists. Either way, the review workflow is the same.
Research and matches
A captured track is a piece of metadata — a title, an artist, sometimes a Shazam ID, sometimes an Apple Music ID. That's enough to identify the song, but not enough to play it. Before you can listen on Apple Music or Spotify, CatchIt! has to look the track up against the streaming service's catalog and attach a playable handle. That's Research.
Research is the action; Match is the outcome. A track has a match status per platform — matched on Apple Music, matched on Spotify, both, or neither. The track row shows the per-platform status at a glance.
Research is always manual. CatchIt! never runs it automatically on capture. You trigger it from the Research button in the Inbox — bulk-by-default, so you usually research a whole batch at once. Even Shazam captures that already carry a deterministic Apple Music ID need Research before they're playable: the ID tells us which song it is; Research is the step that attaches the streaming-service handle the player needs.
Founder note
Auto-research-on-capture would have been the easy default, but I deliberately kept it manual. Capture should be invisible and free — every Shazam, paste, share, or recording costs you nothing. Research costs API calls and decides which streaming service handle gets attached. Keeping it user-triggered keeps capture latency-free and gives you explicit control over when CatchIt! reaches out to Apple Music or Spotify.
Classification states
Every captured track has one of three states:
- Unclassified — we haven't decided yet. Lives in the Inbox.
- Green (Enter) — "I'd play this in a set, and I'd buy it for performance."
- Red (Space) — "Not for me, move on."
The colors mirror universal language: green = go, red = stop. Press once, the app auto-advances to the next track.
There is no "Hold" state. We tried that conceptually early on and decided it was a bad fit — the act of hovering forever is what makes curation backlogs scary. Binary forces a decision, and re-classification is always one click away in the Wishlist.
The Done flag
This is a separate axis from classification. A green track can be:
- Pending — you've classified it green, but you haven't bought it yet
- Done — you've bought and downloaded it from Beatport / Bandcamp / Traxsource / wherever; it's in your DJ library now
Done is a tracking marker, not a third classification state. It tells the app to stop nagging you about a track that's already handled. You mark a track Done from the Wishlist; you can also un-mark it if you flagged something by mistake.
The Inbox
The Inbox is where new captures land — anything that hasn't been classified green or red yet. It's a two-pane surface: the sidebar on the left holds Mobile Shazams (with smart presets like Needs Research and Needs Decision) and your Tracklists; the main pane is the review list with search, filters, and keyboard-driven classification. The macOS app focuses on the Inbox first — keyboard shortcuts, auto-advance, big play buttons — because this is where the bulk of your time goes. Full tour in The Inbox.
The Wishlist (the greens)
Once a track is green, it lives in the Wishlist | The Greens tab. The Wishlist is where the value crystallizes — it's not just "a list of greens." It's where:
- You re-listen to a track before purchasing (last sanity check)
- You change your mind and demote a green to red
- You see if you've already classified this same track from another source (dedupe history)
- You see if you've already bought it (the Done flag)
- You hit Smart-copy to clean up the title + artist for pasting into your store
- You search by artist or title and filter by source and Done status
In other words: capture happens everywhere, classification happens in the Inbox, and purchase decisions happen in the Wishlist.
Cross-platform sync — one library, three devices
CatchIt! has a macOS app, an iOS app, and a web dashboard at catchit.io. They share one library: every Shazam, every paste, every classification syncs in real time across devices that are online. You don't need to press anything — when both ends have internet, your data is current within seconds. (A Sync Now button exists in Settings → Sync for when you want to force it.)
What lives where is described in Cross-platform & sync.