busybee fluffy rambles

There are so many things I’d like to be doing with my time, except every time I start on any of them I get a major pain flareup. And that makes it really hard to get into what I’m doing, and then the moment I have any minor setback (such as a problem with the tool I’m using) that just makes the pain explode even further and then all I can focus on is how much I’m hurting.

I’d love to be making 3D models for VRChat or drawing comics or making music, but all of those things just feel so inaccessible to me right now. And even playing games hurts, and even hanging out in VRChat can be pretty painful too because even standing up for an hour at a time is awful (and doing VRChat while sitting down has its own share of issues).

I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about money so much, but gosh, there’s more to being productive than making a living. Quality of life is important and that feels just so lacking right now.

I just feel like so much stuff is locked inside my head and screaming to get out, and I sure wish I could just like. Not be like that.

Previously I’d posted about an update to Native Instruments' Komplete Kontrol plugin wrapper that made it no longer work with Intel plugins on Apple Silicon machines. After I’d posted that, Jeremy from Native Instruments posted a link to download Komplete Kontrol 2.7.2 which can be used as a temporary workaround to fix the issue, with a warning that it’d be better to update KK and then run Logic under Rosetta instead.

I failed to notice this update from them since NI’s forum never manages to actually send me notification emails for some reason, but in any case, this is a nice solution to keep things working until Reaktor and Battery get updated for M1 (hopefully in just a month or two).

Anyway, hopefully this is helpful for folks who need it.

Song Fight! Live 2022 is a go, happening October 8 at 6 PM Pacific/9 PM Eastern on YouTube:

Some time later, my set alone will be available on my YouTube channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to my channel to keep the algorithm from eating your soul.

Several years ago I tried using Qrates to do a pressing of Refactor. Unfortunately it didn’t hit the minimum preorder size, so the project was canceled.

Recently someone at Qrates reached out to me and was enthusiastic about the idea of me giving it another try, and since Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To has somewhat broader appeal, I decided to give it another shot.

So, if you would be so kind as to visit the Qrates crowdfunding page and maybe even consider buying a copy or two or ten, it would be greatly appreciated.

So, within a day of the Bandcamp announcement, several folks had already started building their own tools for escaping from Bandcamp. Of particular note (and brought to my attention many times) is one called blamscamp, which is a web-based GUI that builds a web player bundle for itch.io.

This tool definitely has a lot of merit, but in the near term it only handles one specific use case, namely taking a collection of already-encoded-for-the-web mp3s and turning it into an itch previewer. The player itself is nicely-written, but this isn’t the sort of tool which works well for me.

So, I adapted the player engine into my own version, which is a CLI tool. Feed it a JSON spec, audio files, and ancillary data (album art and lyrics and such), and it automatically encodes and tags the album for MP3 preview, high-quality MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC, and builds a web player (based on the original blamscamp’s although it’s diverged quite a lot now). And, if you install butler, it can also automatically upload these bundles to your itch page!

Here is the first public demo of it.

With all that said, I do still intend to keep using Bandcamp as my primary music distribution platform; it’s been very good to me over the years, and just because they’re being bought out by a questionable company doesn’t mean it’ll actually go downhill. But diversifying my offerings is always a good thing, and by posting my music in both places, I get even more of a potential audience. Plus, the satisfaction of owning (a big part of) my own delivery pipeline.

The pyBlamscamp pipeline can also be adapted to anything that takes a bundle of files; it could also be used, for example, to simplify the process of posting albums on Gumroad.

At present the main difficulties of it are that it’s a Python application and that it relies on external encoders. One of my potential change sin the future is to have it self-host the encoder libraries which would make a lot of things easier, and would also make it more feasible to provide a stand-alone application.

It’d also be really handy to have tools that make it easier to create and edit the .json file. That’s definitely a rough edge that’s not suitable for general end users.

There’s also a heck of a lot of things that still need to be done even for my own uses. But for now, this tool is at least ready to get started with.

EDIT: god damnit I should have called it “bandcamp” aejrklajrlajlajla i’m not gonna rename this twice in one day