I've seen a couple of posts about Scritch and Blamscamp recently, and that reminded me that I haven't posted about Bandcrash here.
On and off I've been working on this app which handles the annoying parts of encoding and tagging music for uploading onto your own website, rather than being stuck with Bandcamp or the like. Currently, the web player is based on @blackle's blamscamp player engine, although I'm looking at moving it towards another player engine such as @torcado's Scritch, or ideally giving the user a choice in players.
For most of its life, Bandcrash has been a slightly fiddly commandline tool that required knowledge of Python to use well, and that's not a great situation for most musicians. But I'd always intended for it to be an installable GUI application, and the recent Songtradr buyout of Bandcamp has lit a much larger fire under my ass. For the last several days I've been working hard on making the GUI portion it, which will hopefully make it much, much easier for everyone to use. I'm really close to having something I can actually release, at least in so-called "minimum viable product" form.
While Blamscamp and Scritch both do an amazing job of making a player for your albums that you can embed pretty much anywhere (including itch.io), neither of them handle the annoying task of actually encoding and tagging your files, which is one of the things that Bandcamp has historically done an amazing job of and which is hard to do well. Bandcrash basically exists to automate those annoying/tedious/difficult things, and to also build your web player and upload everything automatically to itch.io as well.
You can see some examples of its output on my albums section on itch.io; most of those albums were encoded and tagged by Bandcrash and built with the modified Blamscamp player.
What I really like about using Bandcrash is that I can just edit the album as I go (like on Bandcamp) and push a proverbial button to have it be updated on itch, player and downloadable files and all. I can also upload my purchasable assets easily to Gumroad and Ko-Fi and any other shop that lets me upload a .zip file to be purchased. And I can also embed the player itself on my own website, for those sites which don't allow embedding an iframe or the like. (I'm also going to eventually add OpenGraph support so that you'd be able to embed your player just by linking to it on sites like Cohost and Mastodon!)
Anyway. Yeah. Scritch and Blamscamp are great, and Bandcrash fills in a huge missing piece too.