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84887ae01b
docs: explain music situation docs: more internal documentation feat: make timeout configurable chore: clean up some sections of code
75 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
75 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
# The State of Lowfi's Music
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> [!WARNING]
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> This document will be a bit long and has almost nothing to do with the actual
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> usage of lowfi, just the music embedded by default.
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Before that though, some context. lowfi includes an extensive track list
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embedded into the software, so you can download it and have it "just work"
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out of the box.
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I always hated apps that required extensive configuration just to be usable.
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Sometimes it's justified, but often, it's just pointless when most will end up
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with the same set of "defaults" that aren't really defaults.
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Lowfi is so nice and simple because of the "plug and play" aspect,
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but it's become a lot harder to continue it as of late.
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## The Lofi Girl List
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Originally, it was planned that lowfi would use music scraped from Lofi Girl's own
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website. The scraper actually came before the rest of the program, believe it or not.
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However, after a long period of downtime, the Lofi Girl website was redone without the
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mp3 track files. Those are now pretty much inaccessible aside from paying for individual
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albums on bandcamp which gets very expensive very quickly.
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Doing this was never actually disallowed, but it is now simply impossible. So, the question was,
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what to do next after losing lowfi's primary source of music?
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## Tracklists
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I was originally against the idea of custom tracklists, because of my almost purist
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ideals of a 100% no config at all vision for lowfi. But eventually, I gave in, which proved
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to be a very good decision in hindsight. Now, regardless of what choices I make on the music
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which is embedded, all may opt out of that and choose whatever they like.
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This culminated in a few templates located in the `data` directory of this repository
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which included a handful of tracklists, and in particular, the chillhop list by user
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[danielwerg](https://github.com/danielwerg).
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## The Switch
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After `lofigirl.com` went down, I thought a bit and eventually decided
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to just bite the bullet and switch to the chillhop list. This was despite the fact
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that chillhop entirely bans third party players in their TOS. They also ban
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scrapers, which I only learned after writing one.
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So, is lowfi really going to have to violate the TOS of it's own music provider?
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Well, yes. I thought about it, and came to the conclusion that lowfi is probably
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not much of a threat for a few reasons.
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Firstly, it emulates exactly the behavior of chillhop's own radio player.
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The only difference is that one shoves you into a web browser, and the other,
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into a nice terminal window.
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Then, I also realize that lowfi is just a small program used by few.
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I'm not making money on any of this, and I think degrading the experience for my
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fellow nerds who just want to listen to some lowfi without all the crap is not worth it.
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At the end of the day, lowfi has a distinct UserAgent. Should chillhop ever take issue with
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it's behaviour, banning it is extremely simple. I don't want that to happen, but I
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understand if it does.
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## Well, *I* Hate the Chillhop Music
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It's not as "lofi". It is almost certainly a compromise, that much I cannot even pretend to
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deny. I find myself hitting the skip button almost three times as often with chillhop.
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If you are undeterred enough by TOS's to read this far, then you can use the `archive.txt`
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list in the `data` folder. The list is a product of me worrying that the tracks on `lofigirl.com`
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could've possibly been lost somehow, relating to the website going down.
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It's hosted on `archive.org`, and could be taken down at any point for any reason.
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Being derived from my own local archive, it retains ~2700 out of the ~3700 tracks.
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That's not perfect, the organization is also *bad*, but it exists. |