Album Rater Website

For the past few sessions, I’ve just been working on a dynamic theme for the album page. It automatically samples a dominant and secondary color from the album cover, and then:

• Creates a gradient for the banner, with both colors darkened (or lightened if needed) until it’s within a certain luminosity threshhold
• Darkens the primary color to create the background color
• Raises luminosity of the secondary color to color the tracklist numbers and “Tracklist” title.

I just need to make the ratings and comments for this page, and I should be done with the album pages. After that, I’ll probably work on customizing the album page themes, since sometimes they don’t pick the best colors automatically. Then, I’ll have to do rating and comment functionality.

The project is going well so far, and I think I’m close to done. I only have a few more big tasks left, and then I just have to do some finishing touches and I should be done.

Made the UI for the album pages (this is temporary, I plan to work on this a lot more later). I also added the ability to edit the album data. User input for the songs is not implemented yet, so this is all hardcoded.

I spent a while trying to use ColorThief to automatically sample a background color for the album cover, but there were some issues with the package and I couldn’t get it to work, so I just hardcoded this color for now. I plan to get ColorThief (or a similar package) working soon, since the accent color is pretty important to the look of the app.

My next steps are to implement song input (rating & comments) and improve the UI for this page, as well as the home page.

I’ve made the process to generate album pages. It’s not hooked up to a script yet, so there’s no functionality, but the Search->Page Generation pipeline works perfectly. You can search for an album with MusicBrainz API (or just give a release ID) and find an album, then get a preview to make sure it’s the right album, and finally generate an album page for it.

All that’s left is making the script to edit the album pages as needed. I’m guessing this will be in 3 parts: being able to edit album “hard” data, being able to input ratings and comments, and being able to export/import album pages as a file.

For the last part, I would like it to be a text file or CSV file, but an HTML file could honestly be easier if all the data is written in there anyways. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, I need to work on the former 2 parts.

UI for the homepage is coming together well, but I might update it at the end of the project. For now, there’s a theme and it looks good, so that’s good enough. I also added a Search by Release ID feature, since the MusicBrainz API search isn’t that great and oftentimes doesn’t suggest the album that I want, so now I can just paste a release ID to get the album immediately.

Next steps are building the functionality for the rating pages and figuring out how to store the user-inputted page data.

The program can now search for albums, preview information, and load it in a new file for further use. The UI looks like a mess for now, so the next step is to fix the layout and interface. This is a great experience, learning to use the MusicBrainz API and learn how Electron works, and I’m glad to be working on this project.

Basic Electron setup for the app, learning how it works. This is my first time using Electron for any project, so this will be fun.