[PLUGIN] Bandcamp Discover

Hi everyone,

Here’s a plugin that tries to provide the Bandcamp Discover feature on Volumio:

https://github.com/patrickkfkan/volumio-bandcamp

You can discover, search and listen to music that is publicly available on Bandcamp:

Sorry, the plugin doesn’t support account login for reasons stated here, so I’m not sure how useful it is in reality. But anyway, those who want to try it out can follow the Github link for installation instructions install from Volumio plugin store.

You can report issues here and suggestions are welcome.

-Patrick

7 Likes

just tired a brief check…

I have searched and am currently playing a stream

Well played and thanks!

wonderful, well done!

I will try it for sure, many thanks for sharing it!

hooray :smile:
@patrickkfkan thank you so much, this is way more than expected, especially for the 0.1.0a. tried it out at lunch and found it absolutely fantastic. really good work.

Thanks. Next on the roadmap is “Browse by Tags” (perhaps sometime in the next month when I have more time). I found that you can find a lot more music through the Tags page, especially for locations. It’s a bit odd though, that Bandcamp would maintain two separate features that can really be merged into one…but then again I can’t say I’m an experienced Bandcamp user (I haven’t even registered for an account :laughing:)

@patrickkfkan
since yesterday i got some curious things happen to my volumio. after playing around with the bandcamp-plugin i was leaving it in pause-mode. today in the morning i was trying to hear my radiostation, but i wasnt able to reach the volumio. after many restarts there was only one moment i was on it and the cover i see was the last from yesterdays bandcamp session and then i wasnt able again to reach the pi. strange. after changing powersupply now i try a new setup on another sd card.
will report …

update: everything is fine again. yesterday i gave my pi a static ip for easier SSH access and it seems that volumio doesnt like this … :roll_eyes:

I just configure my router’s DHCP to assign a static IP to Volumio.

yes, thats what i have done after finding out the problem :+1:

@patrickkfkan
hi patrick. is it maybe possible to include “bandcamp weekly”:

or things like the polls?:

this would be a great improvement i think :grimacing:

It should be easy enough to get albums in Bandcamp Weekly to show up in Volumio.

As for Bandcamp Daily…I’m not so sure how I can do this efficiently. It seems to be a collection of articles introducing artists and albums. To collate the albums into a list (so you can select them in Volumio) would require going through each “article”… and it could take a rather long time to build a list of 50 or so albums.

Updated to include Bandcamp Daily and Shows. Follow instructions on Github link to update.

Note that a Bandcamp Show could take a while to load, because the plugin has to fetch information for each and every track featured in the show.

@superkoch, would you be able to test this?

1 Like

Thank You for this awesome plugin!
No bugs until now, everything just works!
Keep up the great work!

Awesome plugin, thank you very much!
What a pity not to have the chance to login with personal account.
Hopefully Bandcamp will make this possible in the future.

Sorry if I go off topic for a moment but I’d like to ask a question to Patrick: since you are an expert, do you think it’s possible to work on a plugin to integrate the lyrics from Genius in Volumio?
Here’s their API documentation Genius API

(eventually, if the thing is of any interest to you, we could open a new topic)

Thanks again!

I’m not an expert by any means, but I would imagine implementing a lyrics plugin to be difficult given the limitations and constraints of Volumio. If ‘lyrics’ were to be implemented, it should IMO be done as a core function rather than a plugin, since it would involve - at a minimum - changes to the Volumio UI itself (to show the lyrics on the screen and highlight the relevant line as the song plays).

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Okay, thanks, got it.
Unfortunately lyrics do not seem to be among the greatest wishes of Volumio users, so I don’t think the Volumio team has ever considered implementing it.
Going back to the topic, I tried the plugin in a more extensive way and I can confirm my first positive impression: it works very well. Basically it’s like navigating the Bandcamp site within Volumio, great job!

@patrickkfkan hi
i have now tested the new update for two days and i am very enthusiastic. everything is included and easily accessible, the filters work great, the collection of data is quite fast and the plugin runs stable. thank you for your great work, can i buy you a beer somehow?
today in the morning i found a bug. first i thought that the “go to album” button from e.g. bandcamp daily doesn’t work, but today i noticed that the whole search delivers the right result, but when it comes to go to the found album or artist it aborts with an error message. before the update the search went without a problem. maybe you can still do something about it, that would be fantastic.
btw: can you actually, for example in the album view, include links that open the album in the browser, so that you can easily get to the “buy” button?
again: thank you very much for this plugin :smiley: :+1:t2: :muscle:t2:

Hi @superkoch, it seems Bandcamp made some changes to their site which caused scraping album info to fail.

In search results, I can go to an artist without problem. It’s just going to any album that triggered an error. Could you confirm this? If you have problems when going to an artist, could you tell me which artist it is so I can test?

for example, i found the album “hunger for a way out” in the best punk albums of 2020 from the “sweeping promises”. the “go to album” link doesn’t work because bandcamp, as you said, changed something. when i search for “sweeping prom” via the search, i get the correct results, but when i tap the link to the album or the artist, an error message comes up saying “error no matches”. i tried that with smartphone and tablet, btw.

just now i tapped another link from the search results (artist) and it worked, but then again another one didn’t (track) …

I’ve just updated the plugin to fix the album loading issue. Could you please test it?