It has been a while since I had made a good yap blog. From my official blog page being abandoned since I don't use GitHub for much other than reporting issues, to briefly losing interest in SpaceHey because of it's semi-dead nature, there's been a lot of reasons why I've not been posting. I say Semi because a lot of users still happily post. I just haven't found the right friends yet, I think.
Not sponsored, by the way. I just happened to really like this tool, and needed to talk about how I moved to using it. As a little dedication to this cool little tool? hi ungive! I may or may not have written about your little tool to end up on the "Media" section of the readme...
and if that ever succeeds, hello! I make blogs, you know me from the Discord!
Discord came out with Rich Presence during about November 2017 (we don't talk about how old I was when I was using Discord around this time, shh) to enhance how games show their information. On launch there was a good few games like Osu, Payday and Call of Duty: WWII... Wait, that made it to this list?
Yeah, those games. We had games like that on launch (and I think Dota 2??) that would show information about who the player is playing with and what kind of match they're in. It was made in mind for things like current player counts, current character, map name, that stuff. This was all stuff made in mind for 2017. The old blurple era. Before the "for everyone" ad-filled rebrand.
Since then, a lot of talented developers have over the years made very cool tools to abuse this kind of system. CustomRPC is a classic example, simply just being... Well, a rich presence tool. There would be tools to make Winamp have it, Battlefield, even casual web browsing had a rich presence tool you could use with Discord. Of course, there's lots of time to care a lot about what these tools do for us, but there's one question that can be thought about; How am I involved in any of this? apart from being a discord user myself
Around late 2020 is when I'd start caring about Rich Presence. My obsession with it wouldn't be set in stone until August 2024, when I'd discover PresenceDB, so keep in mind. I did discover my fix-it-all (then as a "For Now" fix, now basically permanent) later than that, but... That's not important yet.
Maybe in a future blog, I'll yap about PresenceDB. For now, let's get back to what matters: displaying music on your discord profile. Spotify does that already, right? How could that be bad?
Well... If you remember my August 2024 blog about Spotify, you'd know that Spotify is not really an option for listening to Music. At all. So then, we switched to foobar2000, right? That has a plugin for that! I'll just use the famous plugin for that and-
Oh. I'll just... Oh...
Yeah, so foo_discord_rich is very buggy. Among being last updated on August 2024, a fork adding a progress bar that Qwertiest didn't impliment yet (sorry to diss mate), and Q's busy life adventures (especially noticable with SpiderMonkey Panel if you use that), that's not quite an option now, is it? Well, you could always go back to Spotify, and...
No. You forgot, didn't you? Around here, we do things until it works, at every cost. Let's look into another option I discovered.
Let's talk a little about Music Presence. The first commits were made March 28th 2024, with an official discord server coming the days after on April 2nd. At the beginning, the project was pretty obscure. The main goal was to provide rich presence for a couple of small players, eventually growing with the idea to support a load of other players.
I had used the tool roughly since v2.2.0 (before the Icon refresh, that's how I know), since about September 2024. I would actually end up joining around October of the same year! After using the tool for what I can roughly guess is about a few months, I eventually joined the Discord server to hang out and get pings. And now I'm a semi-regular member... Fuck.
Now, I am no encyclopedia. So I can't say exactly what music players Music Presence supported initially. But I can say that near thirty music players work with this thing. That's a lot of rich presence plugins to cut out in the end. You can even cut out Discord's official Spotify integration if you wanted to! That's something.
Right... To explain how we got here. Well, as you can expect from foo_discord_rich, (no disrespect, the customization is bomb! but the crashing was driving me nuts :< so was it's limitations with caching, the creator seems inactive) it doesn't work well. So turning to other options, just wanting the rich presence to "just fucking work!", I looked for more options and stumbled across Music Presence by some fucking coincidence.
Now, I don't really know where exactly I heard it from, considering I don't even know half the time where I discovered any of my software. No dates, no links, nothing, just that I made it to replace this, and replace that. excluding directory opus, i know i got fed up around march!
But oh boy, good thing I heard about it.
So, it was time to get it inserted. I slapped the program on the computer, and wha bam, works with foobar2000 just great! Everything's going really swell and-
Oh...
So as it turns out, you cannot simply "have a progress bar" like foo_discord_rich at the time. While foo_discord_rich is extremely buggy and crashed a lot, Music Presence, at the time, just didn't have a progress bar. After talking a bit with the lead developer Ungive, and finding out he already inquired on the hydrogen audio forum, the home to foobar2000, we just let it go for now. There was no updates since September, I had joined October 3rd, so I took a bit to decide if it's really worth staying on Music Presence...
For 8 days.
That was a problem for only eight days.
On the morning of the 11th, it happened. Ungive had spent time since about the 7th (since a fellow foobar2000 developer informed him that there's an SDK) to get familiar with the SDK, and in just a few days, progress bar like that.
By then, the choice was obvious, Music Presence was a winner. Of course, there's no browser support, no customizing that status, but by then I just wanted things to work. I just wanted to keep going, and for a time, that was definitely what worked.
And then, of course, crashing season began.
For some context, this was around version v2.2.4. Members of the Discord had been reporting of Music Presence crashing, but nobody really knew where to hunt the issues down. These crashes were infrequently reported, were hard to reproduce by scratch, and were near random. So this was already an issue, I just hadn't noticed yet.
On the night of October 20th, it was 10PM. Playing music as normal, taking a look at my profile... and you just can't help but notice that my little rich presence is gone. I took a look at the tray,
Terminated. It had crashed.
On the 22nd, it had crashed again. Once again, I had noticed my rich presence was gone, and rushed to go post it to the Discord Server. Upon bringing it up, it was speculated to be introduced around version 2.2.3, so I was asked to install 2.2.2. That left about another day of smooth sailing.
Two days later, 45 minutes after the clock turned midnight on the 24th, another crash. v2.2.2 was ruled out.
By the 26th, I had contributed so many crash logs for the project. In about a few weeks, I went from a lurker to literally providing crash logs out of my ass. By then, I must have contributed a lot, and by v2.2.8, it was ironed out pretty good. I became an official "contributor" (in quotes because I don't program -- I only contributed crash logs and feedback by that point) and I was even awarded the exclusive role "Crash Pilot" for managing to crash Ungive's app so much. Talk about convenient?
By then, I had become a permament Discord member. In Janurary 2025, I did have to dip for undisclosed reasons (that I prefer to not get into), but I returned around Feburary and wasn't really remembered until late March when I had gotten Revert8Plus (which will be a future blog topic) and wanted to complain about the tray color looking bad on Windows 7 Basic. I ended up getting my Crash Pilot role back too after kindly asking, had gotten my "original booster" role back (I discord boosted around back when I was still present before Janurary -- I repaid Ungive that way then while I could), and I even donated in April 2025! I've chosen to make my donation count towards an Apple Developer account so he can add Apple Music animated artwork, though I was accidently charged twice on BuyMeACoffee, so he gets like 10 bucks on me, I was originally going to donate 5 since I couldn't afford to donate every day and such. Ten bucks for a great project is 100% worth it at least :)
So now, the only thing left is to do more than luxuries and do the cooler stuff I need to also get out of it. I'm sure eventually, that'll go down, and I'll be able to add the year to the album part of my status... For now though, until something else sets on fire, I think I'm happy where I am.