The Song Tab Interview

Four parts in, the pictures existed, the tool worked, and the questions I’d been carrying about copyright were settled. This last part is about what actually happened once my daughter got her hands on it. Once the song tab had pictures, did she actually use it the way you hoped? More than I hoped, honestly. Tapping through pictures to find “her” song became a favorite activity on its own — separate from actually listening to anything. She’d flip through several before settling on one, the same way she flips through book covers on the other tabs. ...

Part three was about the tools that actually made the pictures. This part is shorter, and it’s less about code than about a decision I made along the way. The Kids Player has always been private — your family, your NAS, a password on every new device. So copyright wasn’t really the issue here? Right, and I should be clear about that up front. Because it’s a private, password-gated app for my own family, I could have reused existing footage — a frame grabbed from a video of the song — the same way I already do for the audio side of the library. Nothing about that would have been a legal problem for a personal app like this. ...

Part two covered the tool Claude and I built to manage lyrics and images per song. This part is about the actual picture-making — which took more trial and error than the tool itself did. You’d never really used AI image generators before this. What changed? Nothing had needed one. I’d poked at a couple out of curiosity, the way most people have, but nothing in my daily life depended on a generated image. Once I decided the song tab genuinely needed one picture per song — good enough that my daughter would want to look at it — that curiosity turned into something I had to get right. ...

Part one was about why the song tab needed pictures at all. This part is about what I actually typed to get there — and why I didn’t know the answer myself before I typed it. You knew what you wanted. Why not just plan the build yourself first? Because I genuinely didn’t know how. I’m not a developer. I know what I want the result to feel like — my daughter looks at a picture, taps it, hears a song — but I have no instinct for how that should be structured underneath. So I stopped trying to design it and just described the situation to Claude instead, the way I’d describe it to another parent, not to an engineer. ...

I want to explain how the song tab in my Kids Player came together — not just the build, but the reasons behind it. Some of those reasons are more about parenting than about code, and I found it easier to lay them out as straight questions and answers instead of one long story. This is part one of five. Your daughter can’t read yet. How does she use an app that’s mostly lists and menus? ...