A fair independent streaming platform

Over on my music site I wrote a bit about the current state of streaming providers, specifically to encourage people to go back to buying their music and listening on local devices.

The problem with this line of thinking is that people really want the convenience of being able to listen to all the music, all the time, anywhere.

A thought’s been pinging around in my brain for a while about how this could be done differently, without falling into the trap of having a single service for people to have to subscribe to and put their trust in: what if we could make an IndieWeb-style streaming platform?

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So tired

I’ve changed my Lyrica dosing schedule to take it all in the evening, which has helped a little with my fatigue but I’m still just so very tired throughout the day and can barely get anything done.

I’m also still in a lot of pain and can barely get anything done because of that, too. I feel like what few responsibilities I have these days are falling by the wayside and I feel awful about it.

In particular, I have a few pieces of music I need to get done soon and I want to get done but I just can’t work up the energy to do so. Plus I still want to finish the basement reorganization project and that just feels Bad right now.

This weekend was also pretty draining, from Song Fight! Live (which went well but which I have some Thoughts about which aren’t suitable for sharing in public), and then yesterday my ADHD support group had a somewhat-impromptu meeting at Cal Anderson which was a bit of a nightmare to get to and not worth the energy expenditure given how few people actually came.

I’m just so tired of being tired.

I FOUND IT

I finally found the song I was looking for: it was “Lolita” by Moneyshot off the album Bliss.

Which I CANNOT FIND ANYWHERE ONLINE. Spotify doesn’t have it, iTunes Music doesn’t have it, Musicbrainz doesn’t have it, even Discogs doesn’t have it. CDDB probably has it (given that I’m sure someone submitted it when they ripped the CD back in the day) but they don’t make it easy to search. And FreeDB doesn’t.

But anyway, mystery solved.

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Building a lyric search engine

Y'all probably know that my views on AI are somewhat nuanced. I’m not 100% “AI BAD!!!” but I’m also hesitant to rely on AI for a lot of things, and generally do not care for generative AI or any situation where you need AI to “reason” on things.

But, recently I’ve wanted to remember the name of a song that I listened to a lot, and where the lyrics I can remember don’t come up in any of the major lyrics databases. I listen to a lot of obscure indie music that tends to get lost by the major platforms, and I’ve been packratting music for decades now.

Further, it’s only fairly recently that music started to get lyrics embedded into the id3 tags (thanks to bandcamp really pushing for that) and even the streaming platforms have taken forever to pick it up. So a lot of the music I listen to has never had its lyrics entered in any sort of machine-searchable way.

But, hey, there are plenty of AI models for vocal extraction and text transcription… so why not actually use them?

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Furality, and other upcoming musical engagements

Hey y'all, the Furality dealer’s den is open early this year, and this year it’s also free to the public. It’s a pretty incredible world and I’m glad to be a part of it!

If you visit the dealer’s den a all, please be sure to come by booth 816 at some point. During the show itself (June 5-8) there’s a chance you might find a certain critter playing piano nearby, as well.

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