Saw announcement that Bandcamp is implementing the Subsonic API
Is this something fair music platforms should look into supporting? Mirlo, Jam.coop, etc.
I don’t fully understand what Subsonic enables or doesn’t but I did see Navidrome supports the API as well so I assume this allows purchases to be streamed alongside your self hosted media… or something?
Anyone using it and know more?
Can this be leveraged for the benefit of musicians (support and discovery and promotion of fair platforms)?
The announcement
Yeah, honestly, we didn’t know this API standard existed. It seems specifically for owned collections, which is definitely something we support.
We have been talking to the person who builds Radiccio and it sounds like they support SubSonic too.
While it only does collection, we’re definitely conscious that having a system in place that would allow to simultaneously listen to bandcamp and mirlo (and others !) collections alongside eachother would, in a way, be great for discovery by proxy because it would mean someone could feel “ok” buying things anywhere on any platform reassured they will still be able to access it anywhere from one single place, so it makes smaller platforms more enticing. In this spirit, it’s something we’re definitely going to give more thoughts to in the future.
It’s some kind of rss for collections of music. The client is music player software. I used it with my private collection of music on nextcloud which i can then play on my phone with PowerAmpache app. i feel with this move bc made a small step towards opening up, or at least using an existing open protocol allowing third party players to be part of it.
Just to fold it into the conversation @limebar , remember your post about FunkWhale implementing some aspects of SubSonic?
Can you say more about this @petitminion , and whether it seems to have been worth the effort?
Also, according to a post by @lollerskater in the verse, BrandCramp is using the OpenSonic variant of the API, which …
improves on the API while staying backward-compatible.
from my pov subsonic is a very nice way to allow users to choose their UI. You can use Funkwhale without relying on the app we provide. It is also a very nice example of a protocol allowing interoperability .
BTW
This isn’t working for me. Bandcamp’s api I mean… anyone else?
I am using Symphonium on Android which seems to support ingesting multiple collections via Subsonic API and combining them into one.
But even when I remove my Navidrome personal collection the Bandcamp feed is showing nothing.
I don’t have another Subsonic API feed to test… which also begs the question…
Are there any open Subsonic API feeds out there? Like on some public domain or creative commons free music sites? I suppose I could create a funkwhale account somewhere and try that…
Not all Subsonic compatible players seem to work. From what we’ve seen, only two work, and that’s down to how they handle the API, with the most “common” way to handle it not being Bandcamp compatible. Can’t remember what the two compatible apps were, but it’s likely that it’ll require some tinkering to add Bandcamp support from the player makers.
Do you suppose it is a case of a standard that is more of a suggestion -or- something more malign that Bandcamp is specifically doing for some reason (e.g. “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”)? Or just “early days” for Bandcamp support? I guess you can’t really know… time will tell.
I think it’s kind of a half baked rollout, maybe to test the temperature around it. It’s definitely not “easy to use”, it’s definitely not done with the idea of popularizing the use of Subsonic rather than to catter to the niche that already uses Subsonic, and they definitely did not take into consideration a lot of things that might not work when doing it.
Looking at how they maintain this will be key. I also think it would be interesting to figure out what’s the best way to make it work as is and do the advertising for it that they’re not doing, to grow the number of users for it and make some more noise around this, but that’s energy I don’t have.
That would be my starting assumption. Whatever the motivation of the engineers working on SubSonic support, they’re constrained by having to do it in whatever way is best for BrandCamp’s business, rather than for open standards.
Maybe there’s enough buzz around SubSonic right now that they thought they could get capture some mindshare by loudly announcing support for it? Like a lot of companies did with ActivityPub around the time Melon Husk bought Titter (Tumblr, Flickr, Medium, Mozilla, even scAmazon). But only a handful actually shipped functional support (FlipBoard, Ghost, WordPress by acquHiring the dev of the major AP plugin). FarceBook’s Threats and their half-arse AP federation (definitely designed for EEE) may be the equivalent to what BC is doing here, but as both @limebar and @LLK point out, we’ll have to wait and see.
When I’ve looked into players it seems like there aren’t any which let you easily traverse multiple subsonic collections as a unified thing. The various mobile clients in particular seem to only allow a single connection to a single server.
I keep thinking there’d be space in the world for some sort of aggregating server that will glom multiple subsonic collections together, which could then be part of the greater aspirations I have for Chorus.
Like in theory I could have a Navidrome server that’s my primary source of music (being my collection) but it would also pull in data from a Chorus aggregator that provides a subsonic connection as well, and that would then in turn pull from Mirlo/Fairplayer/etc. for discovery. Although it also would quickly become a big mess of things to keep track of if not careful.