About BC Explorer
Explore your Bandcamp collection online!
You can easily search your whole collection and play it streaming rather than downloading every mp3 to your computer and using a media player.
(you should download every mp3, though, because the Bandcamp TOS says they can take away your online access at any time)
Why?
I mainly wanted to arrange my collection as labels instead of album covers. I've bought music from a variety of artists, but it's hard to find all of them amidst the enormous backlogs from Singto Conley and Lost Frog Productions. Giving each label the same amount of space makes my collection more fun to browse because I'm not scrolling past the same things over and over again.
I also wanted as many different facets as possible for browsing my collection: albums, artists, labels, and tags. I want to be able to jump from one place to another. What else has this artist produced? Who has produced music in these tags? What else have I written reviews for?
Skimming your collection is easy because there's no "load more", everything shows up instantly. The inline music player sticks around while you keep exploring.
Tips and tricks
All the little tags under things, like 39 the number of albums, or 92 the artists in a label, are clickable. If you click them it applies a filter and switches tabs to show you who they are.
While having a filter active, you can click the tabs at the top to use the same filter in a different facet. For example, you can go to the tag cloud, search "breakcore", click it to see all the breakcore albums - there's a lot, right? Yes, but it's not because I'm enthusiastic about breakcore. From that page, switch to the labels tab. Turns out most of it's just from the same label, so there's not much diversity there.
The tag cloud view takes this diversity into account automatically. Everything is grouped by label before being counted, to ensure that a large backlog from a single label does not take up an unworthy amount of "space" and crowd out the other singles that you're quite fond of. It's the same with the statistics heat bar. If you have all of Louie Zong's albums, they'll only count for one red hot entry rather than over 150 entries.
Don't take the statistics too seriously! Some are a bit silly, like lonely tags, which are tags that only exist on a single item in your collection. Some are best guesses, like monetary value, which doesn't know if you chose to pay more than the minimum price or paid less via a discography discount or album code. Some are just for fun, like diversity, which shows whether you prefer popular or unpopular labels. Each label is one slot in the bar and it gets a hotter colour if it's more popular. Popularity is measured by the average number of other people who bought the same items as you.