A beat battle platform for music producers

I've been making beats as a hobby for years, and I kept noticing the same problem — influencers in the music production space were running beat battles for their communities, but they were duct-taping the whole thing together with Google Drive submissions, email threads, and whatever platform they could hack together. There was no real tool for it.

So I built one. HeatLab was a platform where producer communities could host structured beat-making competitions. A host creates a battle with specific rules — time limits, sample requirements, custom rating criteria like "Creativity" or "Mix Quality." Producers submit their beats, rate each other's entries, and optional judges provide expert scores. The final rankings combine peer and expert ratings into a single result.

The engineering was fun to figure out. Every uploaded beat ran through an FFmpeg pipeline for audio conversion before getting stored and served back with waveform visualization. When multiple users rated entries simultaneously, I had to build a custom FIFO queue to prevent race conditions from corrupting scores. This was 2021, pre-AI, and there was no existing template for how a multi-round competition platform with mixed peer and expert evaluation should work as a system — so every piece of the architecture was designed from first principles.

I launched it, ran some battles myself, and put it in front of a Reddit audience. Then one day I noticed a traffic spike and traced it to a Romanian producer community that had found HeatLab on their own and was running a battle with a couple hundred entrants. Getting to sit there and listen to real beats from real producers on something I'd built — that was the best part of the whole project.

I eventually took it down. It solved a real problem but wasn't going to become a long-term business. Still, designing a novel software platform entirely from scratch — figuring out how structured competitions with multi-round scoring should actually work — was one of the more satisfying engineering exercises I've done.