A tiny 16-bit club for your desk that moves to whatever you play — and quietly keeps your focus honest.

Desk Rave is a little pixel-art nightclub that lives in a corner of your screen. Play internet radio, your own files, or the built-in Creative-Commons soundtrack, and the whole scene reacts to it in real time — the bass drives the crowd, the highs shimmer the lights, the DJ scratches on the beat. It's not a looping animation faking it; it's an actual FFT reading whatever's playing.

It's also a gentle focus companion. It wakes when you're at your desk, grows a crowd as you work, and — after a good stretch — nudges you to take a break. Rewards, never penalties.

Features

• Real audio reactivity — one AnalyserNode drives the crowd, the LED wall, the lights, and the DJ. Feed it anything: the bundled soundtrack, your own files, or any internet-radio stream.
• 40 hand-drawn venues — a neon club, a rooftop at golden hour, a moonlit beach, a forest rave, a barcade, a ski lodge… each a bespoke little pixel scene.
• Real day/night — outdoor venues follow your actual clock. Linger somewhere after dark and you might get an unexpected visitor.
• Presence, your way — 100% on-device — the DJ wakes when you're there. Choose how it senses you: keyboard/mouse (default, zero permissions), microphone (room-loudness only), or webcam (on-device face detection). No video, no audio, nothing ever leaves your machine.
• A soundtrack that doesn't run dry — a built-in Creative-Commons library plus one-tap music packs and an in-app Discover search that pulls more free CC music from the Internet Archive. Every artist is credited.
• Cozy progression — earn Cred just by building a healthy work rhythm, unlock venues, grow your crowd. A progress meter shows how close the next venue is.
• Calm mode — hide the whole game layer and just have the music and the scene.
• Readable on any monitor — Small / Medium / Large HUD sizes.

How to use it

• Tap the scene to open the menu (pick a station, drop in files, tweak options).
• Click the now-playing track (bottom-center) to open the library grid — browse and play anything in your library.
• Change venues with the ◀ ▶ arrows, by scrolling the wheel over the switcher, or from the venue board.
• Drag & drop audio files anywhere to add them (MP3 / WAV / FLAC / M4A / OGG).
• The volume fader lives on the right edge; the speaker icon mutes.

Music & licensing

Every bundled and streamed track is verified CC-BY, CC0, or Public Domain (no NC/SA/ND), sourced from the Internet Archive and checked against its license metadata before inclusion. Full attribution is in the app (Options → credits) and in CREDITS.md.

There is no AI-generated art or music here — the scenes are hand-coded pixel by pixel, and the music is made by real people.

🎧 Are you a musician? Desk Rave gives your tracks a room that dances to them — and credits you everywhere they play. If you make instrumental electronic music (house, techno, trance, dnb, synthwave, lofi, chill, downtempo, ambient) and you're up for CC-BY/CC0 licensing, we'd love your music →

Privacy

The presence feature can use your keyboard/mouse, microphone, or camera — you pick, and it defaults to keyboard/mouse. If you choose the mic or camera, all processing happens locally in your browser (via on-device face detection). No frames, no audio, and no images are ever recorded, saved, or sent anywhere. No account, no tracking, no analytics.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev        # open the local URL Vite prints

Pick a station or drop in a file and let it run in a corner while you work.

Build for the web / itch.io

There are two editions, selected at build time:

npm run build          # kiosk build (dev-server APIs, phone remote) → dist/
npm run build:itch     # standalone static build (no server, no APIs)  → dist-itch/
npm run preview:itch   # preview the standalone build locally

The standalone build is a pure static site — no backend, no phone remote, localStorage for saves — ready to zip and upload to itch.io or drop on any static host.

Under the hood

• Vite + TypeScript, plain <canvas> (low-res pixel backbuffer, nearest-neighbor upscale, additive bloom). No game engine.
• On-device face detection via MediaPipe Tasks Vision (only loaded if you enable the camera).
• All balance lives in one file: src/config.ts holds every tunable — venues, genres, the CC music catalogue + packs, reward curve, FFT bands. Don't scatter these into the render code.
• Rough flow: AudioStream (sources → AnalyserNode → Levels) → Classifier (auto-vibe) → Visualizer (the scene); Presence gates it on "are you here?"; main.ts is the entry point.

Credits

• Music — SwapXFO, Komiku, Broke For Free, Chris Zabriskie, Lee Rosevere, and Andrey Avkhimovich, under their own CC-BY / CC0 licenses. Full list and sources in CREDITS.md.
• Font — Press Start 2P by CodeMan38 (SIL Open Font License 1.1).
• Face detection — MediaPipe Tasks Vision (Apache 2.0), loaded only if you enable the camera.
• Art & code — hand-drawn and hand-coded by Dave Euson.

License

The source code is released under the MIT license. The bundled music is the work of third-party artists under their own Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY / CC0) and is not covered by MIT — see CREDITS.md for per-track attribution.