Dear devs,
This is an experiment bringing together Hugo and Internet Archive to provide a rock solid, lightweight and ethical solution to serve audio files.
The main objective is to share loads of audio files (hundreds of gigabytes are fine) without the hassle of Youtube / Dropbox / Soundcloud etc
Demo
- Visit the Lou Reed Bootlegs Collection, and see this collection of 2000+ hiphop tracks.
- The focus is now on audio files, but Videos and PDF files are also supported.
- We favor hosting files on Internet Archive, but media files from Youtube, Bandcamp and Soundcloud are also fine.
Main features
- unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth
- Total running cost: $0 /month
- built to scale: media files are served by the non-profit Internet Archive, which handles smoothly more than 5M daily users. The code is hosted by the rock-solid & lightning-fast Netlify CDN.
- careful UX, based on a stack respecting users, creators, and devs (see below for details)
- use your own domain, or a free subdomain such as .netlify.app, .gitlab.io, github.io or .frama.io
- future-proof: It’s all built just with Hugo, Git and data from Internet Archive.
No other requirements:
- no database
- no npm
- no security update
- no server maintainance
What makes phoni.es different?
we are users, creators and devs all at the same time. So:
We care about users
- no ads, no trackers
- no account, no dark patterns
- privacy friendly: VPN and Tor users welcome, no JS required
- clean and responsive UI, mindful UX
We care about creators
- no hassle: publish and forget – focus on what matters for you
- upload full-quality WAVE files, automatically share WAVE, MP3 and Flac
- no lock-in: all files & metadata are available for easy export / download.
(both from the browser or from the CLI) - define a license for your content and display it next to the download button
We care about devs
It’s all simple technologies and pure flat files tracked in Git:
- no database, no npm
- no security update, no server maintainance
- batch import / export (i.e upload / download)
- automatic conversion from WAV to Flac and MP3
- affordable for non-profits: ✨ Total running cost: $0 / month ✨
- built to scale, provides unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth
As devs, we just want to code when we want to, and stay free to postpone when we have better plans
How to use:
You can embed audio files, full albums and even videos with the provided Hugo Shortcodes.
Here is a preview:
Embed an audio file
Include audio directly in Markdown with the following Shortcode:
{{< audio "https://archive.org/download/foo/bar.mp3" >}}
An audio player will then be displayed:
This player is performant, accessible, elegant – and fully customizable with CSS variables.
Embed full albums / folders
All audio files contained in an archive can be embedded this way:
{{< audio-archive "https://archive.org/details/laute-jorn" >}}
File names and audio players are automatically listed:
-
L'aute jorn - Tutti - version La CDC
-
L'aute jorn - Tutti - version Passeurs et Passeuses
-
L'aute jorn - Voix 1 - version La CDC
-
L'aute jorn - Voix 2 - version La CDC
Videos work too!
Here is a demo:
{{< video "https://archive.org/download/foo/bar.mp4" >}}
will display:
(See the Shortcodes documentation to learn more.)
Note: so far we focused on media files hosted on Internet Archive. Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud are supported too, documentation coming soon!
Let’s speed up things
Automatically generate a complete media library
So far we had to include manually each file and albums.
Let’s learn how to create, in minutes, a website collecting hundreds of audio files, videos, and PDF.
- Upload your files to Internet Archive
- List the folders to include in your library
It’s a simple bullet list like this one:
- https://archive.org/details/lou-reed-live-and-bootlegs-1975-1977
- https://archive.org/details/lou-reed-acoustic-demos-1971
- https://archive.org/details/youtube-24en0GiOzbs
- https://archive.org/details/youtube-2dlOQxy8nPg
...
- Run Hugo
cd prebuild && hugo && cd .. && hugo serve
- Done!
You can now browse your collection locally, automatically organized in folders like in this demo: see /audio, /videos, and /PDF.
Play around, then deploy for free on Netlify, Gitlab Pages, Github Pages, etc
FAQ
How to install?
Note: the code is now being reviewed before publication.
You can join as an early tester: get access to the repo, test and discuss the future of the project!
Here is how a local install looks like:
- Get the code
git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.com/Roneo/to-be-announced.git
- Define archive URLs in Yaml. For example:
- https://archive.org/details/laute-jorn
- https://archive.org/details/heya-moli
- https://archive.org/details/erba-d-agram
- Run locally
(Requires Hugo extended > 0.95)
cd prebuild && hugo && cd .. && hugo serve
- Deploy!
Deploying to Netlify works fine, Gitlab CI should not be a problem
(Note: Deploying in
One-click to Netlify is on the roadmap)
How does it work under the hood?
Remember the build command? ("cd prebuild && hugo && cd .. && hugo serve")
Let’s have a closer look:
Hugo automatically runs the following steps:
- read URLs from
archives.yml - for each URL, fetch Internet Archive API to get a file list and JSON metadata (like in this example)
- each file listed out there triggers the creation of a local and dedicated Markdown file
- Markdown content is automatically generated from metadata, following a custom template
- Markdown files are converted to HTML with Hugo – HTML templates are also fully customizable
- Hugo then generates a complete website, with Taxonomy, Sitemap, internal search, Blog posts, and automated listings based on filetypes (examples: /audio, /video and /PDF)
Any known limitations?
Yes, here they are:
- There’s no CMS implemented so far. While
Netlify CMS is a good candidate, we wait for
its future to be clarified. (Update: NetlifyCMS
is now “Decap CMS” – let’s see how the situation evolves)
Until then, you have to use an IDE or a web editor like Gitpod, well integrated in Gitlab
- No social network features, like voting, following etc. Comments may be added in the future.
- No content monetization: some platforms provide revenue based on advertisement and viewer profiling. Archive.org doesn’t.
- Archive.org promotes alternatives to traditional copyright and only supports the following licenses:
- Public Domain
- Creative Commons (which are a good pick if you want to share your creations while requiring to be properly credited, or limit usage to non-commercial purposes for example. See this license chooser to get details)
What was the problem with Dropbox / Google Drive / Soundcloud?
In the past I’ve used Myspace, MegaUpload, Dropbox, Google Drive, SoundCloud and . . .
.. that was bad. Really bad.
That was bad:
- for users: invasive cookie banners, ads, trackers, endless ToS, bloatted apps, dark patterns
- for creators: datacenters burn and services close sometime without notice, let aside the inevitable pricing updates, automated (self)censorship, endless migrations, and data loss on the way
- for devs: we don’t want to choose between these services and self-hosting Wordpress / Nextcloud / XYZ (which are all nice but a pain to deploy, secure, maintain, upgrade, backup, etc)
Is it magic?
No. This is possible thanks to
Hugo and
Internet Archive.
This
series of articles by
Regis Philibert was a precious spark, the
book Hugo in action an awesome reference, the
Hugo and
Archive.org communities were priceless resources along the way
Also contributed to this project: Daniel Saunders, Utkarsh Verma, Sam Potts, ajlkn and the teams and communities around Plyr
Brought to you by Yann Dumoulin ( Gitlab – Blog – Github )
Want to give it a try?
The code is being reviewed and will hopefully get released in June 2023.
You can already join as early tester – or receive a notification only when it’s ready:
Get in touch
You can reach me – in english or in french – at or with the following form:
2023 – Yann Dumoulin ( Gitlab – Github )