busybee fluffy rambles

Transitions is (finally) almost done. There’s just a couple of little tweaks left to do (like, super duper minor things, decibel-level adjustments and slight timing tweaks and a little bit of vocal tuning). It’ll be really nice to finally have this album done after all this time. The oldest song on this was first recorded in 2001! And my first attempt at making an album of this stuff was back in 2003! This album is legally old enough to drink in the United States.

I’ll probably stick to my original preorder release date of November 20, 2024, as that’s Trans Day of Remembrance. Deadnames has also been done and ready to release for a while, and it will also be coming out on whatever day Transitions comes out.

These are the release dates for Bandcamp/itch/mirlo; streaming will come later, as a proper streaming release has a two-week lead time. So it’ll probably be November 29 for those platforms. (Streaming users can wait, anyway. Anyone who’s following me closely knows to buy my music, right? Right.)

I’ve also written some fun visualizer code which will be used to put a full-album video on my YouTube channel. Audio visualizers are super annoying and awkward on every code platform I know of these days, so I just went to Get It Done by modifying Wavemaker, a tool built by my friend John. Someday I want to build a better framework for this stuff but Good Enough is good enough.

Well, this is silly: I just discovered that Bandcrash doesn’t properly escape HTML entities in the web preview player. Or rather, it didn’t. It does now, as of v0.7.9.

So yeah I’m deep in a pain flareup right now. I made sure that all of the critical bugs in bandcrash are, to my knowledge, fixed, but I just am not in a situation where I can really work on stuff right now due to a massive pain flareup.

I was just starting to work on some music for a game jam game and Novembeat but I don’t think that’s really in the cards for me this year.

And of course now that I’m in agony, suddenly a lot of folks want to interview me for engineering roles that I’d normally be very interested in, so, thanks for twisting the knife on that one.

At least choir is going pretty well and gives me stuff to look forward to.

So hey, the Bandcrash GUI is finally, finally in a working state! You can now use it to easily encode a bunch of wav files into mp3/ogg/flac and make a web preview, and optionally upload it all to itch.io automagically!

Also, I’ve released prebuilt macOS and Windows binaries over on itch.io. I’ll probably do a Linux version as well at some point, although Linux users are likely much better-equipped to just build-and-install it themselves.

To that end, I used it to upload one of my older albums to itch, and I gotta say, having a GUI to set it up is actually a lot nicer than doing it all from the CLI with hand-written JSON files? Weird.

There’s still a lot left to do on it but what is there right now is Good Enough for now.

That said, I’m hopeful that bandcamp remains viable for the long term, but now it’s a lot less necessary to worry about a single platform like that.

As mentioned earlier today, the pyBlamscamp name was incredibly confusing and needed to be changed. Thankfully, blackle mori (who made blamscamp in the first place) came up with a much better name suggestion, “Bandcrash.” I have now renamed pyBlamscamp and its associated Python package appropriately. The blamscamp pypi project now just exists as a thin wrapper around bandcrash and its usage should be discontinued.

Existing installations should continue to work (and might even pull in future updates!) but it’s highly recommended that any scripts, venvs, etc. that rely on it be updated with the new package.

And of course this gives me even more of an impetus to finally write that damn GUI.