We’re excited to introduce the new Advanced Search feature on Audius, which allows users to refine their searches with filters like genre, mood, key, BPM, and more, making it easier to discover the vast and diverse Audius catalog. However, building this feature was far from straightforward, and I’d like to share some of the technical challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

Since Audius search is powered by Elasticsearch, querying for existing fields like genre and mood was relatively simple. The primary task here was ensuring these fields were properly indexed in Elasticsearch, which allowed us to integrate them into our search queries seamlessly.

When developing software for decentralized systems, the bugs and errors that appear can be incredibly complex compared to traditional distributed systems. At Audius, the protocol not only has to deal with a decentralized blockchain, but also our decentralized discovery network (responsible for indexing), and decentralized content network (responsible for storing and serving content to users). For this reason, good observability is crucial at Audius.

When we first built the Audius Music mobile app, we chose to simply create a thin React Native WebView wrapper around our already existing web app. It allowed us to go to market quickly and provide a full-featured mobile experience with minimal development effort.

But over time, it became clear that the WebView-based mobile experience was not ideal for users in a few different ways.

Introduction​

Web3 is a rich ecosystem with many competing ideas and technologies. This competition, while great for innovation, also leads to fragmentation and lock-in: the chain you start building on is usually the chain you stay on.

Introduction We propose the introduction of a fully decentralized incentive system for the Audius Protocol, known as ‘$AUDIO Rewards’. This system allows artists and fans on Audius to complete challenges in exchange for small amounts of $AUDIO, leveraging the high throughput and low costs of Solana to put more $AUDIO in the hands of the grassroots community than ever before.

Audius faces many challenging engineering problems running crypto code at consumer scale, namely the recent issues around client communication with the Ethereum blockchain (eth-rpc). This includes:

Reliance on a single web3 provider that has proven to be a dangerous single point of failure. Different users frequently reading the same data from the chain, which is both expensive and inefficient. Leaking API keys to paid providers isn’t great when they’re hard-coded in a client or DApp We’ve found that using Cloudflare workers with an assortment of different web3 mainnet eth providers effectively mitigates these concerns.