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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Concert time polling

Hey y'all, it’s been a little while since I’ve done a VRChat music performance, and I have a hankering to try out my new performing gear. Please vote in this poll so I can figure out what the best time is for a show!

(Don’t worry about the name you put in, and I’ve also set it to hide responses from each other. Strawpoll doesn’t have any “allow anonymous responses” option for time polls, unfortunately.)

Song Fight! Live(stream)! Last night!

Hey y'all! Song Fight! Live(stream) has gone really well. A bunch of us learned a lot about live streaming online and I’ve picked up many more tricks for the future. And maybe we’ll be doing more of this stuff!

In the meantime: tonight is going to be the live fight (where people can vote in real time for their favorite new song), and I have a song in it. ANd it starts in about 20 minutes from the time of this post! Please show up and show your support.

I also had a lot of fun being background support on night 4, and it was also a thrill to be involved in the Seth Gibbs tribute and for my set to be so well-received on night 3.

It’s actually pretty cool how this whole thing is accessible to everyone in the world (who’s awake at this time, anyway) and not just being limited to people who could physically come, and I hope even post-pandemic we’ll keep doing online events like these.

But anyway. All that said I’m glad this event is soon to be over with: I need some heckin' sleep tonight. (And I start my new job tomorrow!)

Song Fight! Live: Social and Distanced 2020

Every year, Song Fight! does a live show where a bunch of folks come from all around the world to perform for a couple of nights. Of course, because of current events this year’s show had to get canceled.

But this was the 20th year, so we couldn’t let such an important milestone go. So instead we’re doing it online.

I didn’t perform on night 1 but I was interviewed by Glenn Case, which was a lot of fun.

On night 2, I produced the stream and video (and did a bunch of simple bumper animations, which was fun!) and also one of my music videos got played. And it was cool to see responses to it from people who hadn’t seen it before!

Anyway, I have recorded a live set along with most of the other members of Sockpuppet, and hopefully that’ll get broadcast this week on night 3. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Audio Hijack is good, actually

I’d bought pretty heavily into the iTunes ecosystem primarily because it gave me a good listening experience, but also because it had good interoperability with Apple’s AirPlay devices. But ever since upgrading to Catalina, AirPlay has refused to work for completely inscrutable reasons. I’d kind of given up on whole-home music streaming (and was thinking of getting a small FM transmitter and an analog tuner, like I did back in grad school) but then I remembered that I had a generic Bluetooth receiver that I’d bought for use in my previous car.

So, after a little bit of setup and verifying that my desktop could actually communicate to it from across my home, I was going to do the obvious thing and just set up a multi-audio output device to pipe Music.app through.

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