busybee fluffy rambles

I think there were three major things which led to this problem.

The first one was when I worked at Sony, I had a number of coworkers who did not respect the headphones or my use of music to focus on my work. One particularly frustrating coworker would try to get my attention while I was in focus mode, often grabbing my shoulder or waving his hand in front of my face, instead of just sending me an email or an IM to try to initiate a conversation on a better schedule. And as a result I grew more wary about going into deep focus mode.

The next one was when I worked at HBO, on VR stuff. Part of it was a lack of headphone-focus respect, but also much of the work I was doing was very audio-related, and I couldn’t listen to music while doing my work. I had so many disruptions to my music listening that I would just plain not remember to start my music back up.

Finally, I think what made me permanently stop was my own fault: my first major self-directed project after I first went freelance in 2017 was a series of games based on one of my albums. Given that the gameplay was entirely driven by the music, and required a lot of replaying/relistening to the same track over and over and over and over… That just kind of ruined music while working, for me.

There were a few less-major things, as well. For example, when I was trying to make my way doing art streaming on Twitch, I had to limit my background music for the sake of the almighty copyright. And much of my other freelance-era work has been focused around making music, and I didn’t want to listen to music while not actually working on it so as to not fatigue my ears so much. And later when I rejoined the workforce in 2019, so much of my day was occupied by constant interruptions, and later random video calls thanks to the nature of remote work.

But in general, I had just fallen out of the habit of listening.

This morning in the shower I had a sudden realization, though: I am feeling miserable without music playing, and I don’t need to be.

So I’ve been listening to music all day, and I’m feeling way better. Helpfully I’ve also been using my whole-house audio setup (namely running iTunes on my Mac and simulcasting it to my Apple TV and a few other AirPlay receivers)¹, so I don’t have to feel stuck at my computer while listening either.

One of the things I always enjoyed about music listening was recording stats about what I was listening to, particularly using last.fm (which I could have sworn I’d signed up for in like 2004 but apparently just 2008?). There was a big gap in my stats-gathering due to AudioScrobbler becoming pretty unusable for externally-synced devices, but it works a lot better now, and when I’m mostly listening from my desktop anyway. So, feel free to follow me there to keep tabs on my filling of my ear-holes and to get an idea of my questionable musical taste.

Music (re)discoveries for 2023/04/11

I’ll try to share some of my music (re)discoveries on a regular basis. Here’s some of my favorite stuff from today:

• Courtney Barnett is great; I first learned of her when I was tasked with doing a cover of her song “Avant Gardener.”
• Sevish - 3 Remixes was a wonderful discovery of something I’d acquired ages ago but never listened to. It’s probably one of the more approachable microtonal/xenharmonic albums out there.
• Remember when the Internet really hated Rebecca Black? She was actually quite good as a singer-songwriter, even back then, but she’d been exploited by an awful, opportunistic music producer who completely ignored her voice and made a meme out of her. But she didn’t let Internet bullies destroy her dream of becoming a musician, and her EP “RE / BL” is quite good, as far as mainstream-sounding electropop goes. She definitely can hold her own with the likes of Lorde and Billie Eilish. Some of her production was handled by Finneas, Eilish’s brother and producer, and a lot of that shows through as well.
• The Steven Universe soundtracks are so amazing and oh right, that’s a big part of why I loved that show so much
• Solid Ground by Maps & Atlases is something that was in my library from the SXSW 2011 Showcasing Artists collection, and it took this long for me to hear it, so, please welcome Maps & Atlases' full discography to my library (note to musicians: please offer full-discography purchases on Bandcamp, it makes this much easier!) (note to fluffy: you should have waited for Bandcamp Friday you silly goose, you have a reminder list for a reason)
• Is Blue Van Gogh still around? Man I was really into them in the mp3.com days, and hearing (part of) swELL come up after all these years was a flashback to happier times. It looks like they haven’t been active in ages but their frontman still has a charmingly 90s website which I’ll have to look into

This is of course only a small amount of what I’ve listened to. I’m actually finding that listening to music so much is almost a bit tiring, and I kind of want some silence now to decompress. I’m definitely going to try getting back in the habit of voracious audiophagy, though.

How to listen to music like fluffy

Here’s how I manage my music selections in iTunes²:

1. iTunes is set to shuffle by album (in the Controls > Shuffle menu)
2. I have the following playlists set up:
   1. A standard playlist called “Mobile Play”
   2. A smart playlist called “Entropy Source,” with the following rules:
      • Last Skipped not in the last 1 months
      • Any of: (get a rule group by option-clicking the + button)
        • Last Played in the last 1 days
        • Last Played not in the last 3 months
   3. Two smart playlists, “Entropy Home” and “Entropy Mobile,” each with the following rules:
      • Playlist is Entropy Source
      • Playlist is not Mobile Play
      • Limit to 25 GB selected by random
3. I occasionally sync my iPhone to my computer, remove the played stuff from Mobile Play, and if the Mobile Play playlist is getting small, I replenish it:
   1. Open “Entropy Mobile”
   2. Select-all and delete (to force it to actually pull in by album — for some reason the initial population is track-shuffled, usually in some incomprehensible fixed order)
   3. Select-all and drag into “Mobile Play”
   4. Optionally remove things I know I’m not going to want to listen to
4. When I’m listening at home, I open “Entropy Home,” and clear it out if it’s also in a weird track-shuffled selection. Then I just listen to that playlist. If there’s something coming up I don’t want to hear I remove those tracks from the playlist.

This setup makes it so that I can easily get a bunch of queued-up random albums that I haven’t heard in a little while, and by excluding “Mobile Play” from my “entropy” lists I’m also not likely to hear something that’s already cued up on my phone.

Of course, what would make this setup even easier is if synchronizing playlists to an iPhone weren’t so annoying. iTunes Match purports to support cloud-based playlist sync, but I can never get it to work. Syncing my iPhone to my computer is an annoying multi-step process, because Apple’s privacy stuff makes it so that I have to re-establish the trust relationship between my computer and my iPhone multiple times before the sync actually happens.

I miss the days of just being able to plug in an iPod and everything Just Working.

But as bad as it’s gotten on macOS/iOS now, it’s even worse on Android. Back when I used Android I “fixed” the awful music player and playlist sync… by just carrying an iPod with me.

If I were to ever switch back to Android for some reason, I still have a bunch of classic iPods.

Incidentally, the iOS app “Albums” also purports to work the way I want it to, although I’ve not managed to get it working reliably either (mostly because the actual library sync and iTunes Match and so on are just so awful).

I wish Apple still cared about having a good personal music experience instead of just trying to shove everyone over to Apple Music. But unfortunately that’s a very common form of enshittification in music listening, and honestly is also probably a big factor in why I just stopped listening.

But anyway, it was nice to get my earholes satisfied today. I’ll have to do more of this.