MDB Audio — Recording-Studio Platform

Recording-studio platform — site, booking and content management on a multilingual Directus headless CMS with a React / TypeScript (Next.js) frontend, plus n8n automation. Aveiro, Portugal / remote. The project received a Directus Innovation Grant.

Highlights

• Scale across two Directus instances: dev.mdbaudio.com (public site and booking) and team.mdbaudio.com (internal team operations) — 100+ API endpoints and 60+ Directus Flows combined (about 50 endpoints and 30 Flows each), on 210+ collections (about 100 on dev and 110 on team) with multiple relationships and foreign keys, modelled together with my Directus MCP server.

• Directus Visual Editor on both instances: dev.mdbaudio.com is 100% React and every page is editable in context in the Directus Visual Editor, including the studio catalogue and artist content.

• team.mdbaudio.com: internal operations backend — two-way Google Calendar sync for studio scheduling, per-user mailboxes as Directus extensions and the lead-research pipeline.

• End-to-end product: designed, built and operate dev.mdbaudio.com — studios catalogue, artist showcase, live-session video and lead capture; embedded self-hosted scheduling for bookings with graceful fallback when it is unavailable, and e-mail confirmations.

• Backend, auth & testing: Node.js / TypeScript services behind the booking and content flows, PostgreSQL as source of truth, Redis for caching; Auth0 (OAuth2 / OIDC, JWT, role-based access); Docker Compose for local parity with production; unit, integration and end-to-end suites.

• AI integration patterns: built and published an MCP server on npm — 29+ tools letting AI agents query and act on the backend in natural language; an agent-driven contact-research pipeline bulk-writes verified leads into the Directus CMS that powers content and outreach; per-user mailboxes built as Directus extensions.

• Design-to-code & delivery: Figma integration with Next.js translating design files directly into production React components, with the Directus Visual Editor for no-code frontend edits; self-managed Hetzner Linux server with git-driven deploys and systemd services; structured metadata (Open Graph, robots, i18n) for search visibility.

• Beatslicer (Rust): real-time audio slicing instrument — MIDI Learn mapping of any hardware controller to slice triggers and parameters, sample-accurate playback under audio-thread constraints (lock-free, no allocation in the callback), persisted user mappings, cross-platform desktop build.

• Ableton Live training: production and audio-engineering sessions — translating technical workflows for non-technical people.

Stack: Directus 12, Next.js, React, Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Auth0, n8n, Docker Compose, Rust, Hetzner, systemd.