Everything started when I got a great little videogame known as Hades for the Nintendo Switch. It came with a neat surprise, a code to redeem the official soundtrack on Bandcamp. Since I love to get stuff for free, creating an account there was worth it, and I ended up finding a whole new world…
Since then, I’ve decided to support creators there whenever I can, I won’t deny I still get some music from other sources, but if I can find it on Bandcamp, I will often get it from there— though sometimes Steam or GOG have the soundtrack for much cheaper. If I like the artist a lot I actually don’t mind to pay the extra, especially when they get a bigger cut when acquiring music from there.
My first purchase ever was the whole soundtrack of 1000xRESIST, because it’s some of the best music ever, and right after that? Well, the score for Hollow Knight and Silksong of course, because they’re some of the best music ever.
One of my favorite finds also has to be Natsu Summer. I love City Pop, and I love what Ryusenkei has done—Tokyo Sniper is such wonderful album—and when I saw these albums on Bandcamp I simply had to get them. I’ve struggled to find other original City Pop artists on the platform—I don’t really care about the remixes that mess with the tempo and such—so, if you know artists that make original music with that style, definitely let me know.
Now that Bandcamp Friday is upon us, I thought I’d share some of the stuff I plan to buy right after I publish this blog!
Fixer’s Song [darkmode] EP by sunsetvisitor - This song from the original game was remixed for the release trailer for other consoles (it was on Switch and PC only at first) and I think it is amazing! However, please play the game itself. I am begging you. - It’s on sale on Steam right now…
Q-UP OST by kariomart - Probably my most random pick, this is a videogame soundtrack for a game I haven’t even played, but I have heard so much praise for it from Brendon Bigley that I was very interested. I checked out a couple songs and yep, it’s amazing, buying. It feels like elevator music but hyped up to the extreme and I love it.
Into The Breach Soundtrack by Ben Prunty - This is from a game I really like, although I really have to return to it one of these days. Still, the soundtrack is pretty chill and it makes for great background music while focusing on work or writing blogposts like this one!
Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid by dracula9antichapel - This artist has many other arranged tracks from old games I love, and I really enjoy them. I may snatch up the rest of them as they are free to get, but I’ll definitely send a couple bucks. These are from 2017 or so. I have to admit, I feel iffy about modern remixes because it could be made with AI. I highly appreciate the work put into these arrangements and I’ll be happy if you know real artists doing stuff like this nowadays as well.
Feel free to check my Bandcamp profile, if you want to see some other stuff I bought before. I gotta reiterate about my request for more City Pop style music! If you know some artists who sell their work on Bandcamp (or in other sites that offer DRM-free music), I’d be happy to check them out!
This is day 29 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This is inspired by a post by Axxuy, although I went ahead and added a bit more than he did, just because.
All the music with a little spark emoji (✨) are completely new for me this year, and the rest are just regulars that keep showing up, I include the emojis for electronic music (🤖), videogame soundtracks (🕹️) or with singers as well (🎙️). I hope you enjoy some of them!
Most of the stuff I listened to this year is from the same genres I’ve listened to for a few years now. 70s and 80s J-Pop (or City Pop as is known today), Videogame Soundtracks, and Electronic Dance music. I mostly enjoy the chill, jazzy and funky vibes of these over other genres.
Some random musical things I’d like to mention that aren’t as formal, I guess. Songs I saw from movies, or only once, or some random sound or jingle that got stuck, and the like!
I listened to a lot of albums from start to finish this year! Here are some of them I’d like to highlight. I may have selected others if I thought more about it, but decided to just share as they came to my memory.
Reminder that these are not based on stats or scrobbling or anything (even though I have the actual stats on my Listenbrainz, although incomplete).
Some of the names were mentioned already but hey, they may have a lot more great music besides whatever I mentioned.
There you go, that’s a decent summary of the stuff I listened to throughout the year! Some of it is definitely among my favorites, some of it I just consider to be worth sharing, and even if I only played it a few times, they were in my memory for a reason, I’d say.
Either way, this is plenty already! I hope you find something that fits your taste, or at least fulfills the curiosity you may have had regarding my musical taste.
]]>For a while my music listening mostly consisted of putting all my music on shuffle, or creating huge playlists of a music genre or artist, and put that on shuffle.
This wasn’t always the case. When I was a child my parents would just play music from CDs and cassette tapes on the car’s music player, or one of those portable ones with a handle to carry it around. Music would play in the order it came and that was it.
I grew up, and I finally got to have my own phone, which had the epic feature of playing music! I don’t even remember how I got it on there. I didn’t have enough local music of any specific genre and I didn’t download full albums either, I would only get MP3 songs I liked from random places. Streaming was not an option growing up.
When I finally got access to things like Spotify, I was able to look up pretty much every song ever and add it all to playlists, depending on the genre. I started to treat music as separate things to be enjoyed individually.
I remember playlists with every Coldplay album at the time, one with my favorites from Daft Punk or one for relaxing music from videogames and such.
This stayed more or less the same when I got into City Pop. I was not familiar at all with artists or albums of the genre—yeah I only knew Plastic Love and Stay With Me—so I just searched for playlists from Spotify, took the songs I liked from those and made my own.
Eventually, I stopped using Spotify and streaming for the most part, and now that I have local music again. And that I am not limited by storage like on my first phones, I just started to get the full albums downloaded to my phone, I am kind of iffy about not having everything in full I guess.
As an aside, a caveat of no longer using music streaming is that I don’t have any sort of “Yearly Recap” with cool graphics, but I guess ListenBrainz’ stats suffice.
Back on topic. I am not fully sure when I actually went back to listening to full albums again, but there are two occasions that come to mind.
First would have to be Love Trip by Takako Mamiya. I was amused by this album and I listened to it all on a YouTube upload. It was the only album she ever released. Once I got it locally, it didn’t make sense to shuffle a single album, so I just always listen to it in full, and it has been a joy every single time.
Another case has to be Daft Punk’s Alive 2007. Since it was a live concert recording, the cheering of the audience is heard throughout all the tracks. Listening to a single track of that makes no sense, there would be noise and cheers fading in and out without any context at all. But once you play the entire album in one go, it’s an experience like nothing else.
Eventually, those moments made me realize the value of going through the order intended by the artist, and I did that with more and more albums. I listened to Discovery and Random Access Memories from start to finish, I even re-discovered some songs that I somehow forgot existed, like Within in RAM which never got much attention from me, I was too busy playing Instant Crush on repeat during high school I guess.
I still use playlists in some cases like the “music to relax and study to” kind of stuff. And again, sometimes I still just like one song more than the others, so I’ll have that on a separate playlist for my favorites. In a sense, they are just custom albums. You can piece together songs that fit a theme or some other criteria. However, I’ll admit I haven’t tried to create a playlist with intent other than Select Album > Add to Playlist—maybe some other day.
These past few weeks, I’ve purchased the videogame soundtracks for Hollow Knight and Silksong, as well as Celeste, Hyper Light Drifter, Jet Lancer, not to mention the music of 1000xRESIST I got earlier in the year. All of them are great, and listening to those albums in one fell swoop has been very fun, so that’s what I’ve been doing for a while.
And now after watching the fantastic TRON Legacy—and the not so fantastic TRON Ares—listening to those soundtracks has been awesome too.
My podcast listening has lowered a bit compared to last year too, so I guess playing full albums instead of shuffled playlists has made me listen to more music overall.
And how can it not? I say.
Listening to the full album provides a different experience, each song connected to the next, even those that aren’t that great on their own are heightened by the way they fit like a puzzle piece among the others, and when you get to the ones that are really good by themselves, they’re improved by the whole journey further more.
I guess that feeling is not universal for some people, but well, it’s how it is for me and the music I listen to.
So, in short, I like listening to full albums now, it’s pretty cool I think ;)
And now I’ll read Ariadne’s original post, you should too! I’m sure it’s good, she never dissapoints :P
]]>To this day I think it is a great video, showcasing some great Cardistry flourishes, a hobby I quite enjoyed practicing—and watching—at the time.
Ever since the video came out, people have been leaving the same comment over and over again, asking for the song name. As recently as last month! Not bad for a decade old video I would say.
Keep in mind we are talking about a Spanish audience here, for the most part, and I for once didn’t know English back then. Even today I still struggle to get some English lyrics from many songs and genres, it is just much harder than normal speech.
Anyway, I tried to look up the song using different platforms like Shazam, Soundhound, and whatever alternatives and browser plugins I came across—with no luck at all. I did so many times over the years, and an actually correct result never showed up.
As I mentioned, I didn’t really get the lyrics back then. But this year, I decided to try again, and I posted about it on the Fediverse. Thankfully, many friends over there decided to take upon the task of helping me find the song. After many failed attempts, two people at once finally found it, using a particularly archaic method—looking up the lyrics online.
You may ask, why didn’t you think of that sooner?
Well, first off, last time I tried to look up this song was in 2018, six years ago—dude, I’m old— and I still didn’t grasp as many English words as I do today, I don’t think I even tried I probably just left a comment in the video lamenting the lack of the song name and didn’t really search for it.
This time around I did write some of the lyrics in a text file, but I only pasted them directly, the whole transcription, which had many bits wrong for sure, why didn’t you try verse by verse? phrase by phrase? I don’t know maybe I am just lazy! If I am so lazy, why did I mistranslate the whole song instead of you know, only translating a couple lines? right? I don’t know!!! I am also not very smart.
Regardless, since I looked for the wrong lyrics, I didn’t find the right song.
So, who discovered the song?
At last, it was both @bbbhlz and @simon who ended up linking the same obscure music video and shared it to me.
The song is titled Parent’s House (Emil Heró Remix),and it is a remix of this song by Colleagues. It is no wonder that I was completely unable to find this song on any song recognition platforms.
You see, as of the upload date of this post, the Colleagues YouTube channel only has 729 subscribers and the video around 41K views, meanwhile the remix barely reaches 4.2K views and the channel has 113 subscribers. I think both versions of the song are quite good and they deserved more recognition, so go give them some love! Neither channel has shared any videos in years, which is a shame, I can see these songs still being quite popular if they appeared in some random famous TikTok, ngl. I know TikTok is evil and all that but that platform has a way of making random songs take off which is kind of great, if annoying sometimes.
I was seriously so very happy, about such a mistery being finally resolved, but I have mixed feelings about it. It feels like closing a kind of random—but intriguing—chapter of my life finally coming to an end. So, I am sad that it is over—but I am grateful that I lived to see it…
This is day 15 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I just had some free time during Eastern which were quite relaxing. I don’t know if I’ll write everything I did but you can get an idea out of this summary.
I listened to a total of 82 hours of podcasts, I would say a fair bit of that was while I slept, since I tend to leave them playing for a while with a sleep timer.
Other podcasts that got at least 3 hours of playtime were Retro Game Time Machine, Self-Hosted, Escape Pod, Trash Taste and Destination Linux.
Gurren Lagann: I heard this one was some people’s favorite anime, so I decided to give it a watch, right now I am at episode 9, and I kinda like how its going. It is a Mecha anime with big robot fights and quite an interesting world to explore, the plot is interesting and characters are a bit of a mixed bag, however I am interested on what’s going on and the stakes and hype is real.
Dead Mount Death Play: I don’t know much about this one, I went pretty much blind, its a fantasy manga that starts out with the Demonlord and the Hero’s final encounter, after an incredibly well animated fight scene, the villain casts a spell that ends up breaking the barrier between dimensions, and clashing with the real world as we know it (reverse Isekai stuff but don’t skip it because of that). I don’t want to say much more, it seems really, really interesting.
One Outs: As I said, after watching the anime I have read some of the manga, but I still don’t reach the point where the anime stops, still, its fun to see the story being told in this medium.
Heavenly Delusion: I had started this one a while ago, I am not sure why I stopped reading it, I realized an anime came out this season, so I decided to keep reading it a bit rather than watching it, even though I have heard a ton of good things about it.
Kingdom: I am still up to date on this one, some heavy stuff is happening right now, you better start this one already before it reaches 800 chapters!
Like last month, gaming took over a bit of my life again, I kept playing Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, Freedom Unite and I also played quite a bit of Minecraft on some my personal server and other SMPs
I used my computer quite a lot less compared to last month, with a total of 135 hours of screen time.
Also, the browser extension for ActivityWatch recently got accepted on the Firefox Add-on store again, so I managed to record a couple of stats from it.
I used my phone for a total of 199 hours, this was quite a lot more than previous times, oops.
I actually got an internship now, I took my time huh, I will probably be unable to blog as often, but maybe since my time will now be shorter, I will actually decided to write quick blogposts instead of playing videogames for 3 hours straight, I recently started watching some videos from the QSMP, a minecraft series featuring creators speaking Spanish, English and now Protuguese, it is pretty fun so far. Until later guys!
This is day 46 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This month I listened to 103 hours of podcasts. Here are some new additions to my feed.
The Ten Minute Bible Hour is an interesting bible study that looks at the Bible, chapter by chapter in little more than 10 minutes per episode. It sounds boring to some, but the host manages to keep it fun and its also not focused on preaching or forcing ideas on you, so atheists and non-religious people rejoice. I have listened to 48 episodes.
Other than that, I’ve mostly listened to the next episodes of Podcasts I’ve mentioned already.
Manga is really fast and easy to consume, it’s one of my favorite ways of entertainment lately xD
Blue Lock: This is not your tipical soccer manga, and its not your tipical sports manga either. Blue Lock is a special training program made for the specific purpose of making Japan win a World Cup, by developing a single player out of 300 high schoolers, who will lead them to victory, a striker.
Someone who is not just all “let’s all team up and work together”, someone who uses his teammates to satisfy his own ego, someone who does not want to be famous or rich, but has his sight set on being the best in the World. This manga is so good, I feel like its impact will actually change the way Japan’s soccer’s played in the future.
I’ve read up to chapter 110.
The Way of the House Husband: A fun slice of life manga starring an ex-Yakuza guy who met a girl and now has decided to dedicate his life to (insert manga title here). Very funny moments and charming characters. Not as ground breaking as the latter, but nice nonetheless. I’ve read up to chapter 41.
I am still catching up with a lot of the manga that is still being published, which I’ve mentioned in previous summaries.
I watched the new Minions movie with my family, it was kinda funny and I appreciate it being an hour and a half, if you got kids or something I recommend it. Nothing too special to be honest.
I recently went local with my music, and I do scrobble it to ListenBrainz, but I haven’t changed my consumption that much.
I can recommend the album Love Trip by Takako Mamiya, which I recently added to my playlist.
Due to school, the time I watched videos got significantly reduced. Due to social service, the time I read manga, got quite high too.
I had setup activity watch on my laptop for a while, but I had not added good categories to have it working nice.
So yeah that’s pretty much it, expect me to play a lot more Minecraft soon since I got a server now.
Read Blue Lock, read Eyeshield 21, they made wanna play sports again.
]]>Then I realized something that was quite revealing.
I don’t have a mobile data plan, and the wifi at school and most public places, sucks.
That’s a very valid question dear reader, but does it make sense for me to do it? My music collection is not that big, yeah I do have some flac files and others are just mp3, but the truth is I don’t even reach 10GB in total.
Besides, navidrome music clients, while quite good, are still not as feature rich, and navidrome itself limits the customization a lot, I would have to upload music to my server already fully tagged and such, since write access is not allowed, its a good security measure, but annoying when I realize I made a mistake when tagging my music and details like that.
Jellyfin is not much different, basic things like playlist creation tend to fail even with clients such as Finamp. The functionality is better when online, but since I would normally just download albums and create/edit playlists on the move (offline), its not really a good experience.
Well, first of all, back it all up properly. I already did a big mess one time where I lost like a fourth of my collection because of symlink shenanigans.
I decided to go with Syncthing, because its the best thing ever, and I will have 3 separate copies of my library. This means more storage is in use, but I don’t really have a problem with that, after all, if you don’t have 3 copies of something, it doesn’t exist, right?
Besides, this means any changes I do to the files from one device will reflect properly in the other 2, so I can use something like Kid3 or Picard on my desktop and make my phone pickup the metadata pretty much inmediately.
I can also make a decent folder structure, since I hate having a single Music folder with all the music all over the place, please don’t do that, but if you do, unsubscribe from my RSS immediately.
A neat feature that both Jellyfin and Navidrome had, and that I use during some of my Monthly Summaries is music scrobbling, which means keeping track of listened tracks. I was wondering if it was possible to do the same thing, and I realized that its actually really easy!
Installing Simple Scrobbler from F-Droid did the trick, I use Listenbrainz to track my music consumption, it works quite well.
For listening to my music, I use Retro Music Player, its pretty much the best looking player on F-Droid, and it also supports editing opus files. Phonograph Pro is another great option, but I could not edit opus files there, the interface is starting to look outdated to me too.
On my desktop, I am using Elisa, which is the default music player in KDE Plasma, which I am using on Fedora. It does not seem to recognize opus files as music files though, so I am looking for other options. I don’t really play music from my computer though.
Editing metadata is done, as I mentioned, with Kid3, but there are tons of other programs too, or just use the music player itself, as I do on Android.
I am pretty happy with my setup right now, it works, it backs my data on multiple places and keepts it synced, and the experience of playing music has improved a lot.
Once again, Syncthing comes to the rescue, one of the things I have doubts about is how much does it affect the performance and lifespan of hard disks. I hope not that much, its not like I’ll add music every day, I should probably pause the folder from time to time and just have my phone and laptop exchange data, since I download music from my computer most of the time anyways.
One last question remains: how do I get music? Well, I don’t know what to tell you, I usually seek into my soul to find the music I need. I’ve gotten music on Bandcamp too, ripping it from CDs a couple times, or using something like SpotDL may be up your alley if you don’t care about the quality as much.
]]>I decided to try and do the same. Streaming my own music has been something I’ve wanted for a while. I looked around for ways to achieve it and I found a blog by Joran Schrijver2 where he shares the solution I chose to follow, and that I am going to share here, as well as some troubleshooting I had to go to get this working. You don’t even need to have MPD installed on your desktop!
Now, we first need to install MPD itself, you can find it here. We also need a client to play our music from. There are many options, MPDroid is one of them, it has not been updated in a while, but its interface is still decent if you want it. MAFA is the solution suggested by Joran, but it is paid, and I am not sure if it’s FOSS, but if you don’t mind, go for it. HexDSL however, suggested M.A.L.P and it’s actually a really good FOSS option too, which is a little more recent, since its last update was 4 months ago.
So, before we configure MPD on your client device, we have to setup a server. The way Joram did is with a quick Python command.
python -m http.server --directory ~/music 8000
I assume you can setup any other way you like.
Up until now, you could say I am just stealing Joram’s blog, but here is where things change just a little bit. By following it, I got a bit stuck, so I went to the Arch Wiki3 for help with this problem.
First things first, create a text file and name it mdp.conf and put it in Android’s home directory (/storage/emulated/0/mdp.conf).
After that, you have to add the following lines to it. I got this additions from the wiki
# located at /storage/emulated/0/mpd.conf
music_directory "http://desktop_ip_address:8000/"
database {
plugin "proxy"
host "desktop_ip_address"
}
audio_output {
type "sles"
name "Any name you want"
}
In order to know your PC’s IP address, just run ip address on your terminal and look for it, It should be something like 192.168.0.x
Now just run the MPD app, there might be some exceptions or things that look like errors on the log, but as far as I can tell, it should be nothing serious. Make sure to look for a line mentioning the loading of the config file, you might have not placed it correctly, or have some mistake.
Now, you have to set up the Music player. Depending on your app, there might be some different paths to take. These are the settings that show up by default (and it works), so I just want to share them to make sure we are on the same page.
Go to Settings -> Connection Settings -> Default Connection Settings.
127.0.0.1 (I assume it could be any localhost address).66008000You can play around with the settings. Also, there is a dark theme and you must enable it.
You can go to Profiles, and set up the same things. However, there might be one already setup for you.
In both cases you will be able to see the output with the same name as the one you gave to it in mpd.conf
nmap with Termux on Android and it still didn’t show up until I added the network again).If you did everything correctly, your music app of choice should begin to load your music library, and you should be able to play it with no problems.
Once again, I am not here to guarantee that this will work. You can check the footnotes for more help if you still did not manage to get your MPD streaming working.
The caveat of this, is that you have to keep your machine running that pyhton command. But you could figure out a way to make this better, the Arch wiki has some suggestions that you might want to take a look at.
This has been day 31 of #100DaystoOffload