trackyard

A searchable, tag-based, login-free registry to upload and find .track parts — instrument packs, waves, motifs, tunings, full songs. Live at trackyard.p11c.xyz, part of the game-audio ecosystem.

Uploading

Drop a .track file — no login, no account. Every upload is loaded through game-audio and written back out (parse → Display), which has three effects:

• Invalid files are rejected with the parser's exact error message (line number included).
• Unknown or junk sections are stripped — the stored file is always clean, canonical .track.
• The format is normalized, so files in the registry all look the same regardless of how they were written.

Uploads must also be complete: every instrument used by a note or motif placement, every waveform used by an instrument, and every placed motif must be defined in the file or provided by one of its imports. Incomplete uploads are rejected with a list of what is missing. (If the track has URL imports, this check is deferred to rendering, since the server does not fetch URLs during upload.)

Uploading requires agreeing that the track is published under CC0 — everything in the registry is free for anyone to use. The upload limit is 1 MB.

Ids & duplicates

An entry's id is a hash of its musical content — metadata (title, author, description, tags) is excluded. That gives two guarantees:

• Re-uploading the same music, even with a different title or tags, is detected as a duplicate and points to the existing entry instead of creating a second one.
• Editing an entry's metadata never changes its id, so download and play links stay valid forever.

Uploading a changed version of a track is a new entry by design — content is immutable.

Imports

Tracks may import other tracks (@import) under a strict policy. Allowed are exactly:

Anything else — relative or absolute local paths from the uploader's machine — triggers a replacement form: each offending import gets a field (with autocomplete over all registry tracks) to substitute a URL or a registry entry, and the upload proceeds with the rewritten imports.

Tags

Every entry carries two kinds of tags:

• auto tags — derived from content, never assigned by hand: song or part (has playable layers or not), plus sounds, waves, motifs, tunings for whatever the file defines.
• free tags — chosen by the uploader (nes, lead, boss-theme, …).

The file's own ## Tags section (under # Meta) is the source of truth: tag edits are written back into the stored .track, so a part stays self-describing outside the registry too.

Tags are normalized to lowercase a-z, 0-9 and -; anything else becomes a dash. Boss Theme, boss_theme and boss-theme are the same tag. At most 16 tags of up to 32 characters each.

Editing & ownership

Ownership is a visitor cookie — still no login. The uploader (and the admin) can edit an entry's metadata: title, author, description, and tags. The musical content is immutable.

Uploading redirects straight to the edit page, pre-filled from the file's own metadata. The tag menu lists every existing registry tag with its usage count, filters as you type, and offers a marked (new) chip when the name matches nothing — adding and removing tags works without page reloads.

Browsing, search, votes

The index filters by free tag (?tag=chiptune), by content (?auto=waves), and by text search over title, author, description and tags — all combinable. Sort criteria: newest, most downloaded, most liked, best like/dislike ratio, most controversial; each reversible.

Anyone can vote 👍/👎 (one vote per visitor, toggleable). Downloads are counted per entry.

Listening: preview, play, remix, export

• Previews. Each entry page renders audio snippets on the server: the whole song, every layer solo, every local instrument (a short arpeggio), and every wave. Cached after the first request.
• Play. Links into plainaudio via URL fragment — hear a track in the browser without downloading anything.
• Remix. Links into plainsong (#url=…) — open a track in the editor and build on it.
• Export. Playable entries render to WAV or MP3 on the server.

URLs

Git mirror

If the data directory is a Git repository, the server commits and pushes all track changes about once a minute — the registry doubles as a public, forkable library. Only canonical .track files are published; the rendered audio cache, deleted entries, and the JSON index (it contains visitor ids) are kept out via a generated .gitignore.

git -C data init -b master
git -C data remote add origin <public repo url>

Admin & moderation

A random admin token is printed on the server console at every start. Logging in at /admin allows editing and deleting every entry. Deleted tracks are moved to deleted/ inside the data directory, never destroyed.

Running

trackyard [--address host:port] [--data directory] [--public-url url]
          [--player-url url] [--editor-url url]

Source: gitlab.com/porky11/trackyard (Rust, axum + maud + game-audio; MP3 export needs a C compiler at build time).