Why "Trobar"

In the 12th century, in the langue d'Oc of southern France, a trobador practised trobar — an Occitan verb meaning "to find", and by extension "to compose". To trobar was to find a song: to hunt down the right words and melody and make them your own. The troubadours wandered from court to court with their entire repertoire on their backs, performing whether or not anyone had asked them to — history is politely silent on how often they were asked to stop. What mattered was this: the songs were theirs, and they went where the singer went. Later, scribes gathered those songs into chansonniers — hand-bound songbooks that fit a life's worth of music into something you could hold.

That is what this app is. Not a stream you rent that vanishes when a licensing deal expires, but a chansonnier you keep. You find the music that matters to you, curate it into your own collection, and carry it — losslessly, on your own terms — to your phone, your player, your SD card, even where the signal doesn't reach. The troubadour owned his songs and took them on the road. So do you.

And the logo is his lute, seen from up close: the carved rosette over the sound-hole, an eight-point star ringed by twelve pommels, a nod to the twelve-pommel Occitan cross. When your library syncs, the star turns, the way a sound-hole seems to while the strings are ringing. Unlike his medieval colleagues' audiences, you only hear what you asked for.

Trobar: to find your music, and keep it close.