write-up: I built the coolest thing I have ever made, and last night Charles Hamilton posted it himself.
http://listen.charleshamilton.app is a player I designed and built for Charles Hamilton's catalog. 1,218 songs, streaming free, and it never stops playing.
Everything in it was a decision:
The catalog: over 1,200 tracks pulled from the archives, cleaned, cataloged, and hosted so any song can start in a tap.
Endless playback: press play once and it shuffles forever. Built to live on a tablet in a room, screen on, and to keep playing with the screen off.
The Tape: a live spectrogram waterfall that renders the song as it plays. You watch the music leave, which makes you stay. Every player shows you a progress bar. This one shows you the sound.
A listeners board: listening is scored, live. Points accrue fractionally while a song plays, to two decimal places, so you see your score move every second. Finishes pay a bonus. The first time you hear a track each week pays bigger. Milestones pay for long sessions and finish streaks.
An honest economy: only 8 hours a day count toward your score, because the board should reward listening, not idling. An anti-cheat layer checks every reported play against the clock, so nobody can fake minutes they did not hear.
Identity with no accounts: you claim a name with a password and get a public code. The server stores only a cryptographic hash. There is no password reset, by design. Lose it and the name is gone, like the old internet.
Three views: Standings, where the crown sits. My Road, your rank and the gap to the listener above you. And a back room that ranks the songs themselves by completion rate, with track lengths printed next to the percentages so a 30-second interlude cannot fake its way past a 6-minute record.
The skin: a retro game system look skinned in the site's own colors. Black ground, white type, one pink. It looks like it sounds.
The infrastructure: a self-healing database that repairs its own migration state on boot, an always-on server, and a custom domain with its own certificate.
I teach 8th grade science during the day. I built this at night, for the artist who made me want to build anything at all.
Last night he found it, played it, and posted it to his own timeline with the words "This changes everything."
Then his listeners showed up. The board has strangers on it now, competing to listen to Charles Hamilton.
Go take the crown from them:
^
Reg, (@kanye on twitter) words cannot express my gratitude. I am honored and humble. And I will keep pumping out the records, "as long as you keep turnin' this mu'fucka up!".
~Enter the Hamiltton~
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