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. ↩

Music distribution stuff

While it took a bit longer than expected, the removal of (most of) our music from streaming services has finally mostly gone through in most places.

To that end, we are finally starting to upload individual tracks to YouTube, although that process is going to take a little while. Rather than just put a bunch of boring thumbnail-and-audio videos up, I want everything to have at least some amount of a visual element. For Transitions it was easy enough to do visualizer tracks since those had already been done for the full album video, and of course I’d already done this for Novembeat 2021 and 2022 as part of the production of those albums, but for the other albums I’ll probably just be doing a simple waveform plot like I did for Strawberry Jams I Ate since that’s easy to automate.

Anyway, in other distribution news, a while back, I started drafting a specification called Canimus (the name is a Latin word that broadly means “we make music”) to allow music providers to syndicate their music easily, and I’ve been working with a few other folks to try to work out some of the hairier details. As it stands the protocol is ready for my own use case and for anyone who is just interested in publishing a feed to the public Internet, but of course there’s going to have to be some long-term thoughts around some of the trickier legal things to deal with. But there are also folks already building player engines, and Sockpuppet’s full catalog is available for streaming, at least.

Unfortunately the actual conversation is scattered between a few different spots, although it’s mostly being discussed on Mirlo’s Discord with some other conversations happening over on The Social Music Network, which is also a great community to join if you have any interest in talking about the future of independent music on the Internet. Ideally discussion about the protocol itself will take place on the Canimus GitHub discussions board.

Other musical projects

As far as music production goes, we are currently busy with the following:

• Actively working on the soundtrack for a video game
• Making music for a couple of ongoing clients
• Preparing for Novembeat

And the following album projects are currently on the backburner:

• The next album of Song Fight! and Song Fight!-adjacent songs
• An album of covers of other peoples' music we’ve done over the years
• An album of reimagining a bunch of our old songs into new styles or with updated sensibiliies
• A jazz album

As you might imagine, every member of the band is quite busy!