Give Faircamp a folder of audio. A few minutes later, get a complete static website with your music, podcasts, whatever. That includes playlists, RSS, and a Web player, downloads, third-party links, purchases, and unlocks. No coding. And it’s free.
I’m hesitant to suggest Faircamp is a Bandcamp alternative, because in reality, Faircamp solves something even Bandcamp never did. (Plus, there’s nothing stopping you from using this alongside your Bandcamp page or even linking to it from Faircamp) Music folks just wanted to be able to share their work, and back in the day, even assumed we’d be able to do it on a server we controlled.
Now, having something lightweight that doesn’t require a bunch of server maintenance, doesn’t make you code if you don’t know how (or don’t have time or desire), and respects your control and privacy matters more than ever. This isn’t the only solution, but it’s one you should absolutely check out — and it’s free, non-profit, and AGPLv3+-licensed. (Donations welcome!)
About those embeds: here, try it:
This covers a ton of use cases that, frankly, a lot of paid services don’t do all that well. Got game audio assets or sound design you need to share? Masters in progress? Running a podcast? Want to share an album/label? Maybe you already have Bandcamp, true, but also want something on your own site. This does all of that.
Version 1.5 was released at the end of last month, and continues the development cadence with some nice new features:
- Anchor/id link support for in-page links (as in #page-id, not just https:)
- Fixes
- Finnish language support and other updates (aivan välttämätön!)
All of that on top of the robust feature set:
- Runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux with startup guides (linked) so you can run on your own machine and OS
- Streaming support with Web player, embeds
- Browse/search
- Automatic transcoding
- Podcast RSS
- M3U Playlist support
- Automatically generated downloads with custom formats, single tracks, full release archives
- Unlock codes for exclusive downloads
- Soft paycurtain — this is nice, add a third-party platform and ask for support from those who can
- External download (if you want to support a third-party download/purchase platform)
- Label mode for multiple projects on a single site
- JavaScript enabled/disabled option
- Accessible (keyboard, screenreader support)
- Unlisted (private) releases
- Optimized and responsive for small screens and all devices and everything everywhere
Plus you can make this look however you like, with dark/light themes, background images, per-release options or site-wide design, and even an interactive theming widget so you can mess around right onscreen until you’re happy. Oh and it even supports wide-gamut color with OKLCH, for you color geeks.
Yeah, I mean, why does this work better than a lot of the stuff we pay for? Heck yeah, I’ll donate.
Check the site, as it not only covers this but also has a ton of community-driven resources (scroll down to the bottom for those, as they’re a wonder):
https://simonrepp.com/faircamp
Now, locally you’ll run this on any of those three OSes, but let’s be honest, we’ll all serve on Linux. Here you go, if you like video — this is great:
Luca Mancini wrote a blog post that answers a question I’m sure some of you are now asking:
Faircamp integration: How I integrated Faircamp within my website
Want to check out more examples? There’s a webring(!) (Why back in my day… so, basically this is a way for users to discover fledgling new Faircamp sites.)
There’s a lot more to say about this, but — wow, Faircamp lead developer Simon Repp also has built a tool for static video sites, which is being developed at a rapid pace by the community:
https://codeberg.org/simonrepp/hyper8
That deserves its own article, but check it out in action with this Kristoffer Lislegaard page, as it works beautifully for music, too!
“Oh, but I need YouTube to embed.”
Nope. Nope, you do not:
And you’ll see similar features and workflow, meaning these two will complement one another nicely if you plan to manage both sound and video. The just-released version 0.22 added browse and search, playlist sidebar, layout improvements, a poster cropping tool, and an outro screen (YouTube-style), and lots more. There’s also a command-line UI I’d love to see in Faircamp, too.
Let’s talk about this more, for sure. I’m embarrassed it’s taken me this long to mention, but I’m back on the case, y’all.