v0.6.1

I keep telling myself I’m going to take a few days off from Bandcrash but then I keep getting inspired to do a thing.

The user-facing difference is that now you can finally set the player theme controls from the UI. Also the player now shows song duration and gives a time indicator while it’s playing.

However! This is just stuff I added while working on refactoring the way player engines work, because I really want to be able to give a choice of player backends.

The current player is Blamscamp v0.0.1, with a whole bunch of modifications that aren’t supported upstream. Merging in those changes with the current upstream version (v0.0.3) would be a nightmare, and I don’t feel that the upstream changes are worth the effort to pull in.

But one of the things I’ve planned for quite some time is to also support Scritch, which is nicer in a lot of ways and also probably easier to integrate (since all customization goes through a JSON file rather than through fiddly HTML+javascript templates). So I’d really like to add support for that.

But also I have an idea in mind for a different player look and feel, which I kind of want to develop at some point as well.

Anyway, I’ve laid some of the groundwork to make it possible to choose a player engine, and it’s also conceivable that in the future it’d be possible to make a plugin system so that people can provide their own players distributed separately from Bandcrash. (Although right now Scritch seems to have the biggest mindshare amongst folks trying to escape Bandcamp’s orbit.)

The main thing I don’t like about blamscamp or scritch, incidentally, is that they aren’t particularly elegant when it comes to supporting smaller displays. (Also scritch takes up a huge visible footprint.) They’re both perfectly reasonable when it comes to making a player that’s the only thing on a page, but I want something that’s better for embedding into any website.

Also at some point I need to start making Linux builds. Right now I’m just leaning on Linux users being able to pip install bandcrash[gui] instead of bundling it on itch, but it’d be nice to make an itch app-installable thing for non-CLI-savvy Linux users. Also it’s annoying for Linux users to have to install the correct version of Python and so on. In theory all of the plumbing for building for Linux is there, though. I should try out WSL 2’s GUI support, so I don’t have to set up a third computer on my desk.

EDIT: I went ahead and made a Linux build as well. It turns out that pip install bandcrash[gui] is insufficient to get it working on Linux without a lot more work and y’know what, let’s make it easy for folks everywhere. Anyway it turns out I can in fact host (and test) the build from WSL so that’s pretty nice.