Our Story

The Beginning

Music has always been everything to me.

I've been a music lover my whole life. Growing up, I was always finding ways to get closer to it. I was collecting songs on iTunes, loading up MP3 players and iPods, and watching my friends stuff their PSPs with tracks they loved. When the Nintendo DSi dropped, I figured out how to get music on that too. And then I found Flipnote Hatena, this platform where people made hand drawn animations. I started making animated music videos and skits right there on that little device, spending hours on it just because I genuinely loved mixing music with something visual.

When Flipnote Hatena got shut down, I didn't really stop. I picked up GarageBand, started making beats, and had a blast with it. That led me into cinematography and visual effects, and before long I went from making action short films for fun to shooting real music videos with local artists I knew in Toronto. I found FL Studio after that, and even though I never went all the way into music production, everything I'd learned making movies gave me a solid foundation in sound design. Friends would come to me to help mix their vocals because I understood enough of the fundamentals and I genuinely loved experimenting with it.

The Problem

I wanted to DJ. Then reality hit.

With all the playlists I'd built up over the years, I figured DJing was the next natural move. I was ready to get into it and mix the music I actually loved. But when I started looking into it, I ran into a wall pretty quick.

So I went looking for solutions. Every tool I found was either too complicated, too limited, or couldn't keep up when you added new songs to a playlist. None of them solved the actual problem. You find a new track, it goes into your playlist, and now your local library is already behind. It was frustrating because the answer felt like it should exist already.

The Idea

So I built it myself.

The idea was straightforward. A tool that converts any playlist you own into your own MP3 files, and when new songs get added to that playlist, syncs them to your library with a single click. No re-scanning. No manual downloads. Just your music, always up to date.

I spent close to a year figuring out everything it would take to make that actually work. The software, the infrastructure, all of it. At some point it hit me though. Why keep this to myself when other people are clearly dealing with the same thing?

That's when Make MP3s was born.

Building the Community

One reel changed everything.

I made an Instagram page, @makemp3s, and started posting music content I loved while I kept building. I wanted people to know something was coming. The first few reels I posted went nowhere. A few views here and there, nothing that made it feel like it was going to land.

Then I made one that clicked.

That moment showed me something real. There's a massive community of music lovers out there who feel exactly the same way I do about owning their music. People who remember what it felt like to have a collection that was actually theirs.

I'm writing this a week before launch day and honestly I can't wait for you to try it. This whole thing started because I wanted to DJ my own playlists without jumping through a hundred hoops, and I have a feeling a lot of you know exactly what that's like.

Thanks for taking interest and being part of this. Welcome to the community.