busybee fluffy rambles

I also ended up adding a couple more songs to Deadnames; since I had the “Plus 5” version of 120 MPH I decided to also remaster-ish the original version, which is janky as heck and not helped by the fact that I don’t have the original recording anymore, just the Song Fight! submission which is 64kbps mono and also compressed to oblivion. But Deadnames isn’t really meant to be a thing that people want to listen to, just a thing that folks will reference to hear the originals and whatnot.

And similarly, I added in Listen Close because, sure, why not.

I also finally made its album art:

This is, of course, a visual reference to Pointed Little Quill, the first album I put out way back in 2000, and the only one under the moniker of “fluffy porcupine,” which a lot of Song Fight! people insist on still calling me by even though I HAVEN’T RELEASED A SONG UNDER THAT NAME IN TWENTY FUCKING YEARS which made the title of the album even more relevant, I think.

I also realized while doing this that the last “old” song on Transitions (Five Minutes) was also the last song I ever released as fluffy porcupine, which makes it all the more fitting given its subject matter and why it ties so well into this album oops actually the last song was Run Faster, what a weird brainfart, I think what I meant to say was it was the last song to not have already gotten an album release and then I got my wires crossed.

Anyway. Even with my fibro flare resolved (for now), I’m still having some other fun chronic health issues. In particular, my vertigo’s been kind of meh lately, but also I’ve been having really bad tinnitus as of late, and I’m positive those things are linked. Research continues to indicate that it could be Ménière’s, which would be devastating if so, but thankfully I recently learned that it could also just be my TMJ issues causing inflammation of my eustachian tube, which is super treatable if you can find a doctor who actually gives a shit about treating it. So I hope it’s that last one.

Or maybe I just need a good ear cleaning. Who knows.

I wish it were easier to get a doctor appointment right now.

Anyway. Remember how much trouble I’ve historically had with iTunes but I kept sticking with it because it was the only player for macOS that lets me listen to music the way I like to? Recently I decided to give PlexAmp a try, since I already have a Plex server setup for my *ahem* totally legitimate media *ahem* and have also been backing up my music collection to it anyway, and I’m already totally in love with it.

For starters, by default it has a playback mode that is exactly what I want it to be!

And the free version supports CarPlay, and will intelligently precache a bunch of music, so I don’t have to do any playlist management on my own! And it works great, and also works well on all of my other devices!

And it’s free!

Well okay it’s $5/month if you want the advanced features and at some point I might spring for a subscription since some of the advanced features seem kind of interesting, but I don’t really care about any of them.

For now I’m still using iTunes to organize my library on my desktop and then syncing it to my Plex server as a backup, but at some point that’ll probably change.

The only thing it doesn’t seem to have (even in the paid version) is the ability to do whole-house streaming via AirPlay (which it doesn’t seem to support, despite claiming to on its website), but that was getting super janky in iTunes too, and I can probably use AudioHijack to give me that functionality anyway.

Or maybe I could go back to how I did it in grad school and just have an FM transmitter connected to my computer and then have some FM radios nearby. No tech like old tech, right?

Anyway, here’s my TODO list:

• Finish recording Transitions (Sunny Again, Paper Cuts, Five Minutes, Material Change)
• Polish the heck out of it
• Finally make the actual album art
• Schedule some promotional concerts in VRChat
• Also actually practice my choir music on my own rather than relying on weekly rehearsals for everything oops
• Also practice the cello part for Repair My Heart because I’ll (hopefully) be playing it with a piano quartet live in a couple weeks and oh god I am so out of practice, there is a reason I’ve been using a sampled string quartet on Transitions instead of trying to play the real thing, oh god I am such a fraud
• Finish my new music website

So yeah I’m a bit busy.