YouTube self-management update
If you follow my YouTube channel you’ve probably been at least somewhat inundated with a bunch of videos on your feed with my music reposts. I’ve finally figured out a process I’m more or less happy with, and am figuring out the best cadence for doing things.
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:
| Week | Monday release | Thursday release |
|---|---|---|
| 11/10/2025 | Refactor | strawberry jelly :9 |
| 11/17/2025 | foodsexsleep | Novembeat 20211 |
| 11/24/2025 | Love and Monsters | Novembeat 2017 |
| 12/01/2025 | Radio Ready | …Or Die Trying OST2 |
| 12/08/2025 | Instrumental | Novembeat 2019 |
| 12/15/2025 | Songs of Substance | Novembeat 2023: Pawmune and Friends |
| 12/22/2025 | Transformative Instrumentals, vol. 1 | Novembeat 2018 |
| 12/29/2025 | Novembeat 2016 | |
| 01/05/2026 | s7rawberry |
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:
- Encode all my videos (using the Bandcrash FLAC files as the input source)
- Drag them (15 at a time) to the YouTube uploader
- Add them all to a new playlist
- Download the playlist metadata
- Reconcile the playlist metadata with my Bandcrash album data to automatically generate titles and descriptions
- 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…