I’ll replace the Refactor videos with the new ones on Monday because they new ones are way better and that album is pretty special to me (and I’ll just delist the old videos rather than delete them outright), but I think I’ll leave Radio Ready and Instrumental alone.

In any case here’s my current tentative YouTube album rerelease schedule:

which would actually cover my entire back-catalog, aside from Wiener Dog on a Motorcycle (which I still want to do a full music video for instead of a visualizer release) and pointed little quill which is still available on YouTube Music.

Of course this is subject to change due to any number of factors, especially if I actually manage to get one of my backburnered albums out in the interim.

My current plan is to do two releases per week; on Mondays will be what I consider my “real” or “authored” albums, and Thursdays will be what I consider “jam” albums. The categorization of these is a little wishy-washy, but for example, things I’ve done for Novembeat and Strawberry Jam are “jam” albums, while things like Refactor and Songs of Substance are “authored” albums.

Release schedule (intended)

This is my current release schedule plan:

There’s a bunch of albums not yet on that list and I’m not sure if I want them to have YouTube rereleases just yet. I’ll probably use the empty Mondays to release them, possibly in groups (for example, several of the game jam OSTs are quite short).

Some technical details

To actually make the videos I’ve finally wrapped my head around how FFmpeg filter graphs work, and I’m building up a little repertoire of visual hacks that let me make the various things look nice.

For example, here’s the Novembeat 2020 video setup files, for those who are interested. FFmpeg scripts aren’t super easy to comment, but probably the trickiest thing is the way the remap filter works; basically, the X and Y channels must be in 16-bit grayscale mode, and directly reference pixel coordinates, but it’s not super easy to set up colors like that in Affinity Studio (my graphics editor of choice) so instead I draw things as a grayscale ramp (which end up with values 0-65535 in the 16-bit mapping) and then scale it down to try to map them to 0-255. Buuuuut Affinity also ends up dithering gradients regardless of colorspace or settings, so there needs to be a bit of fudging there too. (In retrospect this is something that would have probably worked better with GNU IMP, which has native support for 16-bit grayscale images.)

Update: Nope GNU IMP’s UI is still complete garbage for this and wouldn’t have improved things. I guess in the future I’ll just want to, like, write code.

As far as uploaading the videos goes, I wrote a Python script which is rather involved in its setup (since it requires setting up a Google developer account and a “cloud application”) and which I can only run a few times a day due to the somewhat annoying way that YouTube’s API limits work. But my process is basically:

1. Encode all my videos (using the Bandcrash FLAC files as the input source)
2. Drag them (15 at a time) to the YouTube uploader
3. Add them all to a new playlist
4. Download the playlist metadata
5. Reconcile the playlist metadata with my Bandcrash album data to automatically generate titles and descriptions
6. Apply that new data to the YouTube videos and simultaneously schedule them for publication on release day

It’s a bit annoying but not nearly as annoying as having to hand-edit the descriptions and post schedule.

Some future things

I really want to do a proper music video for Wiener Dog on a Motorcycle. I’ve had a very strong image in my head for how it should look. If any animators are interested in taking it on as a gig, let me know. I need to at least do a storyboard and possibly an animatic myself, I think.

On top of all this I still have so many backburnered album projects, and of course I still have 25 days of Novembeat left to do…

1. This would be a music-only release, rather than the existing music videos playlist which has a bunch of non-music stuff in it and is missing the last track, which currently only appears in the full video. ↩

2. This will also coincidentally be the same intended day as the album release of Novembeat 2025, but that will already have been on YouTube since I’m using that as my primary incremental release mechanism. ↩