busybee fluffy rambles

So hey, the Bandcrash GUI is finally, finally in a working state! You can now use it to easily encode a bunch of wav files into mp3/ogg/flac and make a web preview, and optionally upload it all to itch.io automagically!

Also, I’ve released prebuilt macOS and Windows binaries over on itch.io. I’ll probably do a Linux version as well at some point, although Linux users are likely much better-equipped to just build-and-install it themselves.

To that end, I used it to upload one of my older albums to itch, and I gotta say, having a GUI to set it up is actually a lot nicer than doing it all from the CLI with hand-written JSON files? Weird.

There’s still a lot left to do on it but what is there right now is Good Enough for now.

That said, I’m hopeful that bandcamp remains viable for the long term, but now it’s a lot less necessary to worry about a single platform like that.

As mentioned earlier today, the pyBlamscamp name was incredibly confusing and needed to be changed. Thankfully, blackle mori (who made blamscamp in the first place) came up with a much better name suggestion, “Bandcrash.” I have now renamed pyBlamscamp and its associated Python package appropriately. The blamscamp pypi project now just exists as a thin wrapper around bandcrash and its usage should be discontinued.

Existing installations should continue to work (and might even pull in future updates!) but it’s highly recommended that any scripts, venvs, etc. that rely on it be updated with the new package.

And of course this gives me even more of an impetus to finally write that damn GUI.

As usual, Bandcamp is waiving their cut of the purchase price on the first Friday of the month. So this is the best time to consider buying my music. Update: Today only, use discount code plaidfriday to get up to 80% off on everything, including my full discography. Because why not.

As a voracious consumer of music, I maintain a running list of things to buy on the next Bandcamp Friday so that I can make the biggest impact on a monthly cadence (and also keep better track of my music spending habits). Here’s what I bought this month:

• Botak — built-in presets, vol. 1, some fun silly music made from the built-in presets of a Yamaha PSR-3
• Last BeNeVoLeNcE — The Other Worlds - 2nd Act, some videogame-inspired nerdcore hip-hop
• wohali — Variety Show, some weird weirdness that I’m not quite sure how to describe, much less explain
• The entire discography of bgm, an amazing Songfighter who’s been really knocking it out of the park lately
• The entire discography of Ghost, who makes nice cozy tunes
• Deacon Bill — Intelligent Toilet
• Hopeless Otis — Dangerfield

For more recommendations, check out my Bandcamp profile, or look at my past Bandcamp Friday posts.

For the next 23.5 hours, Bandcamp is waiving their cut of music purchases made on their platform, which makes it an amazing time to buy independent music there.

As always, I have plenty of stuff you can get there (including a recently-released 80-minute meditation album and an hour-long musical journey inspired by a variety of coffee grinders), and you can get a pretty decent discount on my music if you just buy it all at once as a discography.

I also like to keep a checklist of albums to buy on this day, and this month the two albums I bought are a recent release by my friend Sam and the discography of ratwyfe mostly because I heard someone do a cover of his song cryptid and I knew right away that I’d totally dig all of his music.

Anyway. Support independent musicians, both by buying the music that you like, but also spreading the word of mouth of the music that you like, too. You might not think you have much of a voice but every little bit helps way more than you think; every flood begins with a handful of raindrops.

So, within a day of the Bandcamp announcement, several folks had already started building their own tools for escaping from Bandcamp. Of particular note (and brought to my attention many times) is one called blamscamp, which is a web-based GUI that builds a web player bundle for itch.io.

This tool definitely has a lot of merit, but in the near term it only handles one specific use case, namely taking a collection of already-encoded-for-the-web mp3s and turning it into an itch previewer. The player itself is nicely-written, but this isn’t the sort of tool which works well for me.

So, I adapted the player engine into my own version, which is a CLI tool. Feed it a JSON spec, audio files, and ancillary data (album art and lyrics and such), and it automatically encodes and tags the album for MP3 preview, high-quality MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC, and builds a web player (based on the original blamscamp’s although it’s diverged quite a lot now). And, if you install butler, it can also automatically upload these bundles to your itch page!

Here is the first public demo of it.

With all that said, I do still intend to keep using Bandcamp as my primary music distribution platform; it’s been very good to me over the years, and just because they’re being bought out by a questionable company doesn’t mean it’ll actually go downhill. But diversifying my offerings is always a good thing, and by posting my music in both places, I get even more of a potential audience. Plus, the satisfaction of owning (a big part of) my own delivery pipeline.

The pyBlamscamp pipeline can also be adapted to anything that takes a bundle of files; it could also be used, for example, to simplify the process of posting albums on Gumroad.

At present the main difficulties of it are that it’s a Python application and that it relies on external encoders. One of my potential change sin the future is to have it self-host the encoder libraries which would make a lot of things easier, and would also make it more feasible to provide a stand-alone application.

It’d also be really handy to have tools that make it easier to create and edit the .json file. That’s definitely a rough edge that’s not suitable for general end users.

There’s also a heck of a lot of things that still need to be done even for my own uses. But for now, this tool is at least ready to get started with.

EDIT: god damnit I should have called it “bandcamp” aejrklajrlajlajla i’m not gonna rename this twice in one day