BUILDING KBAMP.EXE

The music page used to be a stack of cards, one per track. It's now kbamp.exe: one Winamp-style player with a playlist, a proper transport, and eight visualizers you can flip between. The goal was to make listening to my music here feel like using a real player, not a web page.

The music follows you. Start a track and click anywhere else on the site, and it keeps playing. A mini-player at the bottom of every page has play and pause, next and previous, and a button that takes you back to the full player. Previous does what you'd expect: it restarts the song, or goes back a track if you're right at the beginning.

There are eight visualizers: an oscilloscope, bars, an LED meter, a spectrogram, a VU meter, a vectorscope, a waterfall, and a laser harp. As an audio engineer, I didn't want them to be screensavers. The meters are calibrated, so a level on screen means something, and the VU meter moves like the real thing, with the same unhurried rise and slight overshoot as hardware. The vectorscope and the stereo VU dials show what's happening between the left and right channels, the same things I check when mixing.

Getting there meant throwing a lot away. Some ideas that looked great on paper were distracting in motion, and a few visualizers were scrapped entirely. Everything that survived was tuned by eye and by ear, then restyled to match the rest of the site, light and dark modes included.

The smallest control gave me the most trouble: the seek bar. Jumping ahead in a song produced a stutter on the way to the new spot. A player doesn't stream a song straight off the internet. It keeps a small runway of upcoming audio downloaded and ready, called a buffer. When you jump, that runway suddenly points at the wrong place, and while you drag, the player keeps receiving new destinations, so it was juggling old audio and new audio at once. The fix was to stop the juggling. The moment you grab the bar, the music stops. When you let go, the player throws out the old runway and builds a fresh one from the exact spot you chose. With nothing left over from the old position, there's nothing to interfere, and since the song is already saved in your browser, rebuilding is nearly instant. Scrubbing is now silent, and playback picks up right where you dropped the marker.

It's easy to take a journey like this for granted. Dragging from where you are to the part of the song you want is such a routine part of life that we never think about what it takes to get there without a mess in the middle. When it works, you don't notice it. Open the music page, pick a track, and click through the buttons above the display.