busybee fluffy rambles

Last night’s show went really well! There were a bunch of technical hitches and I made a bunch of mistakes and so on but it was a good time and it was great to get a lot more people hearing my music. Hopefully I’ll be able to do more of these things.

Anyway. I have a few listening parties scheduled for the album release:

• Bandcamp on November 18, 2024 at 7 PM PST (with text chat)
• YouTube on November 22, 2024 at 1 PM PST (with text chat)
• VRChat/live stream on November 24, 2024 at 3 PM PST

For the VRChat one, my plan is to perform some of the songs from the album live before we listen to the full studio version, but we’ll mostly play it by ear.

And, of course, I have my TDOR choir show in a few hours (and another one next Wednesday evening), both of which will hopefully be livestreamed.

There’s been a schedule change with Aga’s Toys for Tots event, and I will now be going on at 2 PM Pacific. Also it seems that I’ll be performing from an instance where I can invite a small audience to join me, so I hope to see folks there! The instance will be owned by my VRChat group. I was misinformed about this! Please join Corbelle’s group.

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.

Hey everyone! On Friday, November 15, at 2:30 PM PST I will be performing a live set in VRChat for a charity fundraiser, benefitting Toys for Tots.

The show will be hosted by Corbelle’s music events group, so join that VRChat group if you’d like to see me in-world. Otherwise, you can watch it being streamed on twitch. I hope you’ll be able to come!

Okay my gut feeling was at least agreed to by a bunch of other people: Material Change will not be going onto Transitions, and instead the chamber pop version will be something I do for a later album, named “Misfits,” which I already have so many ideas for.

Any attempt at forcing Material Change to fit into Transitions would not serve the album, at least not in the modern landscape of how music is distributed and listened to, and as always, I make up my own rules for how I do my music.

It’s funny how much more important and urgent things feel at 1 AM.

So, today Apple unveiled the new M4 Mac mini, which seems like a perfect upgrade for me! Except… they did something really asinine:

They put the power button underneath.

This means that you have to physically pick up the machine to turn it on, or to force-reboot it. Those are rare occurrences, but they’re enough of one that this becomes a problem.

Why’s this a problem? Well, part of it is that the mini’s maximum storage configuration is pretty small, and upgrading the storage is stupid expensive, so pretty much everyone who’s using these for doing, say, audio and video work is going to need an external drive enclosure. And external drive enclosures tend to have very short, fixed Thunderbolt cables, and managing those cables can become very tricky even when you don’t need to move your device around.

This will also be a big problem for people who want to rackmount or monitor-mount their devices; as far as I can tell from various photos, there isn’t really much of a gap/lip under which you can place a finger. Maybe people will start making custom button-pressing tools or something, I dunno. I guess that wouldn’t be too hard.

But still, it’s annoying that Apple would make this change.

(Hopefully they at least put it under the front corner, which would at least be livable! None of the photos I’m finding show which corner it’s under though.)

Another annoying thing is that while there are now five USB-C ports (three of which are Thunderbolt), there are no longer USB-A ports, so at least for my setup I’d need to run everything through a Thunderbolt dock, and finding one of those that’s both reliable and provides the ports I need is troublesome at best. Also, in my experience, you really want a dedicated port (rather than a docking station) for an external monitor, a storage enclosure, and an audio interface… and that’s all three Thunderbolt ports right there. So then my keyboard and mouse would have to plug into one of the USB-C ports in front, and that gets really messy really fast.

So anyway, power-wise the M4 mini would be a huge upgrade for me, but for the physical and connectivity requirements of my recording studio, it doesn’t seem like a good fit.

Maybe I’ll get an M4 mini for my home office and then move my M1 Max Mac studio into the recording studio. Or maybe I’m fine with the hardware I have already.