First of all I'm thrilled there are people interested in contributing to this project. Having spent many, many hours working on it alone I sincerely appreciate that someone else would want to donate their precious time to my little side hobby.
For me, a large part of the appeal of working on personal projects is to build software over which I have complete control. I build software as part of a team for a living, so working on projects without requirements or constraints from others is refreshing. I love being able to freely design and plan out software, building it exactly as I like, and deciding on my own when it's finished. Unfortunately, this can result in software which is poorly-documented and otherwise difficult to understand for others.
In addition to my desire for absolute creative control, this project is special to me in that it's used for presenting my own artistic works. While the app is intended to be a platform for artistic work rather than an artistic work in and of itself, there are decisions made for reasons which are more artistic than practical. One example would be the use of a stop button rather than a pause button; there is no technical reason for this, and in fact a pause button would probably be a better choice for a site presenting itself as a music player. However, I deliberately chose to omit pause functionality because I felt it was disruptive to the experience I want people to have with the music.
For these reasons, while I'm grateful for the generosity of those who willing to spend their time writing code for the site, for the time being it's unlikely I will be accepting any outside pull requests. See below for better ways you can contribute.
This project is a learning experience for me, and one thing I'd love to learn is how to manage an open source project. Eventually I will be more open to outside contributions, but not at the moment. If you like, keep an eye out for issues tagged "accepting pull requests," but no promises.
Thanks for understanding.
-- Alex Bainter (@metalex9)
I feel there's plenty of value in having the code freely available to anyone who wishes to see it, learn from it, play with it, or integrate it into their own project. Open source software rules. Again, I fully intended to accept code contributions in the future.
We can talk about it. This project is meant to be a platform capable of accommodating other artists' work as well as my own. Right now, it would need to fit the current vibe of ambient music someone might actually want to listen to. Someday, I'd like to feature all sorts of different generative music on the site, even the beep boop experimental stuff. If you have an even better idea for a generative music platform, I'm all ears.
Right now, it's most helpful for me when users interact with the repository's issues. For anyone not familiar, "issues" sounds like it's just for bugs, but it's actually a system Github projects use to track all sorts of work, including new features and even requests for help. Anyone with a Github account can do the following:
- Report bugs
- Request features
- Vote (:thumbsup: / :thumbsdown:) on bugs you want fixed and features you want added
- Have discussions in the comments
You can also send an email to [email protected] with questions or feedback.
Share the site with anyone you think would like it. You can also follow me on Twitter which I use to keep in touch with people who are interested in the site.