diig is a record digging app that provides a high performance audio player and ergonomic user interface to make digging through record snippets rapid, responsive and enjoyable.

It provides a record store agnostic audio player with a familiar social media infinite scrolling interface to allow users to dig for new releases and provide click through links to stores to buy. Feeds and snippets are cached which also enables offline browsing.

The aim is to be extensible so more record stores, genre sections and views can be added from different sources. The current scope of the sites and sections that are being monitored is opinionated and targeted to a small group of friends, but the overall goal is to allow community contribution and expand the project.

The project provides schemas and a unified data representation so that other record stores and sources can be added to expand the database.

A release schema defines a single release, specifying artist, track names, track urls of snippits and artworks amongst other information. Releases are stored in a flat dictionary with the key being their id plus the store name prefix to avoid ID collisions, each release is treated uniquely per record store. In the future aggregating releases and cross checking them might be a feature worth looking into.

{
    "id": "string - store specific id for the release",
    "link": "string - url link to the store specific page for the release",
    "artist": "string - the artist name",
    "title": "string - the releases title name",
    "label": "string - name of the label",
    "label_link": "string - url link to the store specific page for the label",
    "cat": "string - the catalogue number for the label of the release",
    "artworks": [
        "string list - 3 artwork sizes: [small, medium, large]"
    ],
    "track_names": [
        "string list - track names"
    ],
    "track_urls": [
        "string list - url links to track mp3s"
    ],
    "store": "string - the specific store this release is from",
    "store_tags": {
        "out_of_stock": true,
        "has_sold_out": true,
        "has_charted": true,
        "preorder": true
    },

    "<store>-<section>-<view>": "int - position in a view (page) for particular store and section (genre group)",
    "Example Genre": "Genre Tag"
}

A store config can specify parts of a record store website to track. store is the record store itself, sections define genre groups and views define charts, latest releases, preorders and other criteria which may vary from site to site. You can supply the special variables ${{section}} and ${{page}} to record store urls to scrape multiple pages and sections.

{
    "sections": [
        "string list - Sections names to parse from the website, these strings will appear in the website urls",
    ],
    "section_display_names": [
        "string list - Display names for the sections for rendering within the app"
    ],
    "views": {
        "weekly_chart": {
            "url": "https://www.recordstore.co.uk/${{section}}/weekly-chart",
            "page_count": "int - number of pages to parse for the url"
        },
        "monthly_chart": {
            "url": "https://www.recordstore.co.uk/${{section}}/monthly-chart",
            "page_count": 1
        },
        "new_releases": {
            "url": "https://www.recordstore.co.uk/${{section}}/new-releases/page-${{page}}",
            "page_count": 100
        }
    }
}

Scrapers run nightly to update information, if you provide a store schema then you need to define a page scraper function. There are currently a few examples in the project. It involves parsing the release schema information from the store's html pages.

Data is uploaded and synchronised to firebase with data publicly readable. For a dump of the entire releases database you can use:

curl https://diig-19d4c-default-rtdb.europe-west1.firebasedatabase.app/releases.json

A beta is available on iOS, you can follow these instructions to get access or request an invite:

1. Download and install TestFlight for iOS from the AppStore.
2. Obtain your email address associated with your apple id, the best way to confirm this is Settings > Click Profile Picture: email address is beneath you profile picture.
3. Send over the email address (you can request in GitHub issues or request via email).
4. Once you are invited you will receive an email with a link, open this email and click the link to open in TestFlight on your device.
5. Accept the invite in TestFlight and install.
6. diig will now be installed on your iOS device, you can open it like any normal app from the home screen.
7. Opening TestFlight will give you chance to update if one is available.

The dig app currently runs natively on iOS, it is implemented using C++, Objective-C and ImGui via my cross platform game engine pmtech. You can find more info in that repository on how to build in more detail but for a quick start you can use:

git submodule update --init --recursive // fetch submodules pmtech, pmbuild
cd app
pmtech/pmbuild ios

An Xcode project will be generated into the app/build/ios folder. From there you can use Xcode to build. If you wish to build from the commandline you can use:

pmtech/pmbuild make ios dig

The project is also buildable and runnable on macOS, just switch ios to mac in the build commands.

Android, Windows and Linux can all be added in future, although currently the aim is for a mobile app so iOS and Android will be priority.

The app will soon be available via TestFlight if you want to be invited to the Nightly build please open an issue.

Contributions and requests are welcome. If you have requests for features and stores to scrape you can raise an issue. Better still if you can implement your own then go right ahead, make a fork and then a pull request we can start from there.

If you like this project and are interested in helping it expand further, sponsorship will help with the cost of developer fees and hosting fees for the cloud infrastructure. Currently the costs are low and the project is open source but expansion may require incur some costs.