© 2026 Tympanon, LLC

What? A music player? Files? Really?

The flagship product is an unapologetic throwback to a more innocent time, yes. I remember an early review of the iPod nano that said something like “to hold one is to buy one”, and they weren’t kidding. Those things were special, and they were fun, even though using them took a surprising amount of effort. Curating a personal music library, sharing playlists; these acts long predated digital media and always took some work. Twenty years ago, these expanding digital means could still feed healthy traditions. We were growing our access to sounds, influences, and each other. Doors were opening.

Now the doors have grown many gatekeepers. Commercial streaming platforms promote what is efficient to sell at wide margins while aught else withers. A book, a film, a song are “yours” only so long as groups that exclude you continue to trade property with each other. Artists are fed only after intermediaries. Even the services you buy now feel entitled to pimp you with tasteless advertising. The digital ecosystems meant to disrupt ossified hierarchical distribution have nurtured their own corrupt hierarchies.

While the convenience of streaming platforms is truly impressive, many works of great value are not there. Some of the works in my own library have been around for decades, but they are not available to stream. Their value to me is not a matter of hoarding or nostalgia. Rediscovering art over long years is just one of the many poorly advertised and very deep joys of aging. So yeah, I think it’s a decent idea to actually own a file, or anything more tangible than a login.

Streamers are Frustrating, but Streaming is Neat

On the other hand, it would be nice if acquiring, organizing, and accessing said files as you wander about this blighted earth wasn’t such a pain in the ass. It would be cool to consolidate my library with my wife’s without managing file servers. It would be cool if you could buy straight from the artist or from a record store too. It would be cool to have the streamers’ level of ease with my own library and my own sources. There are still plenty of places to acquire digital music and I’d like to support them with my own product.

So to those ends, Ducky is simply a tool which I wanted at home. I know there are other platforms for self-hosting media, open-source and commercial, and several are quite good. I did find the established self-hosting options more operationally demanding than I had hoped, and almost all commercial options too expensive, given the wholesale cost of related cloud services. And uh, none were written by me, so there.

I also really wanted a great voice-controlled music playback experience in my car, which AFAICT still doesn’t exist anywhere. Who is doing truly creative UX design for voice? That remains an unrealized goal for now.

Launch and Future

The first version of Ducky is launched! It is humble in scope, but functional. It’s better to launch when it works rather than to stuff it with features that maybe nobody will use.

Ducky is not yet available on mobile. I expect that may frustrate some. However, its current state was already useful to my family in our home, where we have several personal machines with different stashed music. Consolidating and streaming out of those has been fun, so I reasoned there are probably a few people out there in the same situation who might give it a shot.

I plan to release about every other month. Based on beta user feedback, plans for the remainder of 2026 include:

• mobile app
• casting devices
• offline features for travel

Though the plan is always subject to change to follow signal from active users.

What will never be on the horizon: advertising and data sharing. If we need that to live, we were never going to make it anyway. Supporting free services with advertising is fine. Re-selling your users’ attention when they’ve paid you for a service is not fine: it’s lazy. Earn more money with a better product.

Who?

Tympanon is primarily me, Jason Trump, with some moral and technical support from family and friends. Especially my wife, who’s been paying the mortgage for the last two years. I’ve been a professional software engineer for 26 years, the last 20 in Seattle. I worked at startups, as a consultant, and for a long time at Amazon before striking out on my own in 2024. Finally, a corner of the internet where some dude delivers his thoughts on life and technology! Photo of me with dog on hike forthcoming.

The outline of Tympanon was determined by the things I had rejected when I stopped working for other people. Pressure from other people’s money, exit paydays, industry trends, social e-vomit, stupid things heard and said about AI, ad cash hustling, data brokerage. Perhaps I’m an inveterate hater and can’t do anything reasonable to put bread on the table. But there were things I wanted positively. I wanted to build a tight product that connects directly with people, to be profitable but not growth-obsessed. I wanted to build something which has some undiluted personality, is cheap but well done, and feels hand-made. I wanted to make my kids proud and be excited to talk about what I do.

I assessed a few ideas that I thought I could pursue given those constraints. The private cloud music player was one I had prototyped for myself years ago, so why not start there?

-jt