Goings-on in the Sockiverse
Hello! I think it’s been a while since I’ve talked about what’s going on with the band and what sorts of things are happening. So here’s a casual collection of updates along those lines.
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!