Custom playback, no other dev could crack it.

Built a custom audio player, then rebuilt it in-house to cut platform costs.
role
Solo UX/CX designer + developer
industry
Entertainment
tools
Webflow, Figma, 3rd party music player
status
Live

The problem

Barry Wolfe — Sanremo-award-winning singer — needed a site with no existing solution: high-quality MP3 playback, directly from the browser, on mobile, with no third-party app. He'd already interviewed several web developers who couldn't deliver it.

Process & Decisions

Phase 1: Built the site in Webflow with CMS, using a Webflow widget to handle playback — solving the original problem and getting Barry's music live for the first time.

Phase 2 (later revisit): CMS was only ever being used for the music library, so I downgraded his plan to Basic and hand-coded a custom player pulling tracks directly from Google Drive — retiring the paid widget entirely.

Outcome

  • Barry got the seamless, native playback experience three prior developers couldn't build
  • The rebuild cut his ongoing platform costs by dropping an unnecessary CMS tier and a paid widget
  • Site now handles galleries, multilingual bios (PT/EN/Hebrew repertoire), and event-type categorization (corporate vs. festas) on top of the custom audio system

"Three developers walked away from this brief before I got it. Turns out the fix wasn't a fancier plugin — it was refusing to accept 'that's just how it works' as an answer. Some problems just need someone stubborn enough to rebuild them twice."

More about Hans →
Let's talk