Bandcamp gives you a play button and a stopwatch. Crate puts a waveform, a tempo and a key under the album — so you can tell in two seconds whether a track is worth your money, without listening to all six minutes of it.
Free · 72 KB · Chrome 116+ · nothing leaves your machine
One wide strip pinned to the bottom of the window. It stays there while you scroll, and it does not disappear when you click through to the next release.
Bass, mids and highs drawn the way a CDJ draws them. Intros, breakdowns and drops are visible as shapes — you stop guessing where the track opens up.
BPM and the Camelot code, right next to the waveform. An uncertain key is marked with a question mark instead of pretending to be sure.
Click the waveform to jump. Arrows seek and switch tracks, space pauses. The strip tells you how much is left, and turns amber for the last thirty seconds.
Digging is clicking through links for an hour. Two things usually break that rhythm, and both are fixed here.
Follow a link to another release and the track carries on from where it was. The player lives inside the extension, not inside the page that you just left.
A track is analysed when you play it or put it in the crate — never by crawling an artist's catalogue in the background.
Chrome only installs extensions from its own store, so this one is loaded as a folder. It takes about a minute.
Download the archive and unpack it somewhere you won't delete — Chrome loads the extension from that folder every time it starts.
Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode
in the top right corner.
Click Load unpacked and pick the unpacked crate folder.
Open any album on Bandcamp. The strip appears at the bottom of the window.
Chrome will show a “Disable developer mode extensions” banner every time it starts. You can dismiss it; the extension keeps working. There is no way around it outside the store — it is Chrome protecting you from folders you didn't inspect.
No. There is no server behind it. The audio is decoded and analysed in your own browser, and the results stay in your browser. Nothing about what you listen to leaves the machine.
It reads the same preview stream Bandcamp's own player uses, holds it in memory long enough to compute the waveform, and drops it. Nothing is written to disk, and buying the track is still the only way to keep it.
Yes — tag pages, feeds and discovery too. Anywhere music plays on Bandcamp, the strip comes up.
Tempo is reliable on four-to-the-floor material and can land on half or double time on unusual rhythms. Key is harder: on a dense mix it is a guess, and when Crate isn't sure it says so with a question mark rather than showing you a confident wrong answer.
Because it is early. It is being shared with a handful of people first, and the store's review is a conversation worth having only once the thing has proven itself on real digging sessions.
Open chrome://extensions and press the reload arrow on the
Crate card, then reload the Bandcamp tab. If it happens again, that is
worth telling me about — the exact page helps.