Bandcrash

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Bandcrash is a static site generator meant to make it easier for a musician to encode their audio and host it on their web platform of choice.

Bandcrash allows musicians to easily provide their master recordings in whatever format they'd like and then have them automatically converted and tagged to a number of common formats for Internet distribution, including MP3, AAC, and FLAC. It also builds an iframe-embeddable player, and for users of itch.io, automatically upload the latest encoded version for purchase or web-based playback.

It is a locally-installed application written in Python, and has both a Qt-based GUI and a command-line version. Its documentation also provides information on using a number of static file hosts, including Backblaze B2 and various common CDNs, to actually present the music player to the world.

History

In the aftermath of Bandcamp's 2022 buyout by Epic Games, a number of simple self-hostable audio player tools such as Blamscamp and Scritch came about to enable people to embed their albums onto independent sites such as itch.io. However, these tools are fairly cumbersome for doing revisions and do not support the actual encoding and tagging of audio, making them incomplete and difficult to use for non-expert users.

Due to this shortcoming, fluffy implemented pyBlamscamp, a Python-based encoding pipeline that also generated a modified Blamscamp player and provided an optional integration with itch.io's CI/CD tools. However, being a Python command-line tool, adoption was fairly limited.

In 2023, when Epic then re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, this sparked renewed interest in independent music hosting, so fluffy wrote a GUI frontend to the tool, and due to naming confusion, renamed it Bandcrash. She also ended up writing a new IndieWeb-oriented player engine called "Camptown" as the default playback engine.

History

See also