Bandcrash GUI progress

I’ve made a bunch of progress on the GUI for bandcrash! After a bunch of false starts trying to figure out the “easy” and/or “right” way of doing things, I ended up just doing things the kinda-boneheaded way, using Qt and way too much stateful boilerplate. I figure that Working is better than Nonexistent, and someone who’s better at GUI shit than me could probably come along and improve things later.

Anyway, it isn’t very sexy looking just yet, but the basic editor controls (including loading and saving new files) is done:

bandcrash-gui-20231015-1.png

There’s still a few things that need to be wired up before it’s usable as an MVP, namely:

  • A preferences dialog to configure the encoder/tool paths
  • Per-album encoder settings
  • Actually running the encoder

And of course there’s a whole lot that could be better in general; I have a GitHub project for this where you can see my vague note-keeping and progress on things. Some major points of interest:

  • Artwork display in the editor (like in the Bandcamp upload UI)
  • Live preview of the player itself
  • Maybe have some collapsible widgets on the editor for some things
  • Making an actual app icon? (and an itch.io distribution page of course)

and there’s some bigger-picture things I want to add to bandcrash in general, including:

  • a revamped player with more modern look/feel and, like, a volume control
  • user CSS for the player
  • the ability to specify “purchase” and “share” URLs (for self-hosted/opengraph card purposes)

Also for install process purposes it’d be nice if there were a way of bundling the various encoders with the program directly. I’ve looked into the current options for hosting lame/oggenc/flac from a Python app and they’re… let’s say fiddly. But it would simplify a bunch of stuff for the user, especially on Windows where it isn’t always obvious how to install opensource CLI tools. Like, Linux users are gonna just use apt-get/yum/pacman, no problem, but macOS users don’t all know how to use homebrew, and Windows users aren’t all using Chocolatey or WinGet or whatever (and it looks like WinGet only has the various GUI frontends for Lame/Ogg Vorbis/FLAC rather than anything that’s CLI-compatible with what Bandcrash expects).

I suppose for the Windows version in particular I could just, like, bundle prebuilt binaries with the .zip or whatever, if that’s allowed by their respective licenses.

But anyway I think when I finally have a release of this in the wild, it’ll encourage others to help out with things. I hope.

Also it is extremely late o'clock and I should be in bed.

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