In 2024, my extremely talented friend musician friend Sam Reider released an album called the Golem. To support the album, which is a telling of the golem from Jewish folklore in 8 tracks, features 8 beautiful accompanying panels to help tell the story.
He wanted a listening experience that automatically moved between the panels while listening - so I helped him build it.
The experience has a number of interesting features that were interesting to build that I hope to write more about some day.
- Seamless audio between the tracks (this is was a prerequisite! A frustration for him is that listening to the tracks on most streaming services introduce an ever so tiny pause in music between the tracks, even though they were meant to seamlessly blend).
- Media Session integration. While you listen, the OS properly reflects what track is playing.
- Themed play/pause and track buttons. I had to bust out some photoshop skills to skin the audio player to match the artwork.
- Embedded into squarespace. Even though I built the project in elm, it's embedded into his squarespace site (so that he can manage merch links, etc.)