The assumption some people have is that I got a whole bunch of people together to perform in sync, but that is absolutely not the case. Instead, every single critter, and many of the visual props you see, are on their own separate chromakeyed layer, composited using DaVinci Resolve, each one acted by me personally.

I had learned a lot of lessons from the video I produced for Furality Somna; for that one I just recorded a simple looping scene with a fixed camera, and played every single character in it, and again composited everything in DaVinci. I ended up making it all up as I went along, which was fun but also added about 3x as much work as it normally would have taken, and this year’s video being much more ambitious I knew I needed to do way more planning for it to come out well.

(The music in last year’s video, incidentally, is a lo-fi version of Material Change.)

Here is a video showing some of the stuff that I’ll be describing in further detail:

Music production

I wrote and recorded the song up-front, and used that to plan the visuals as I figured out which musical genres to use. Some of it I had planned out ahead of time but some of it I figured out what made the most sense while I was recording the music. As usual I produced the music in Logic Pro, and I made heavy use of the folder stack functionality to keep my project organized. Each genre was recorded on its own separate set of tracks contained within a folder stack.

I did end up making some changes to the music during production. The jazz segment in particular changed a few times, both to improve the lyrics and the vocal delivery.

I went with a tempo of 128BPM, because the video is one minute long and there were exactly 128 beats in it. Sometimes you don’t have to overthink it.

Locations

After getting the music arranged, I wrote up a simple shooting script to plan out the scenes, and did a lot of location scouting to find places that would work well. My main criteria were:

• It needs to have decent performance (so I could record at a steady framerate)
• It needs to be possible to turn off post-processing (so that it doesn’t interfere with VRChat’s stream camera green screen)
• It needs to be somewhere that’s recognizable to folks who are in my orbit

The locations I ended up choosing were:

• Community Open Mic (pop)
• Piano Lounge Freude (jazz)
• Trans Academy (choral)

The first two are venues I’ve performed at many times, and Trans Academy is an organization I volunteer for so it’s special to me.

Originally I was going to record the first segment in Transitions Club, where I’ve also performed many times, but unfortunately there’s no way to turn off the camera postprocessing there, which I only realized after doing a test recording and discovering that it affects the green screen.

Avatars

All of the avatars I used were my own; in particular, I made several versions of my standard critter base with different instrument setups, and also a specific drummer version of the Critter Junction resident base.

The guitar, electric bass, keyboard, and drum sticks were my own models. I also modified the following meshes (all of which are free to use in this way):

• Instruments: Violin / Piano / Double Bass by Tom Zimmermann (for the violin, viola, and double bass)
• Cello by VM-Models
• Drum Set by zaurian868
• Violin bow by CharlotteMeehan

All of these were extensively modified for my purposes (particularly to make them VRChat-compatible).

I also created a simple green screen avatar for part of the compositing workflow.

Recording layers

VRChat has a camera dolly system which allows you to set up and replay a camera path, but it doesn’t provide any real built-in synchronization mechanism. To keep things in sync, I did the following:

1. Created a basic lead-in click track (I used Audacity for this, but any music software will do)
2. Split the music into sections for filming
3. Downloaded sendosc to trigger the dolly camera
4. Wrote a basic Powershell script to synchronize everything up

$click = New-Object System.Media.SoundPlayer 'click.wav'
$player = New-Object System.Media.SoundPlayer $args[0]

.\sendosc.exe localhost 9000 /dolly/Play b false

echo "Playing click"
$click.Play()

Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 5000

echo "starting dollycam"
.\sendosc.exe localhost 9000 /dolly/Play b true

Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 1000

echo "Playing song"
$player.Play()

Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 16000

In order to film a pass, I would then invoke the script with a command like:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File play.ps1 ".\1 pop.wav"

I kept a single powershell instance open in the foreground so I could just press up and enter every time I wanted to film a take, which was quite often.

Anyway. This script will play the click track for five seconds, then starts the camera dolly path, then one second later starts the music playing, so that I could then perform my choreography in sync with the audio track.

I did several takes of each layer, and also kept an eye out for obvious rendering hitches during it, since those often cause the camera path to fall out of sync and cause other visual artifacts in the composite. Unfortunately, VRChat’s dolly system is a bit limited when it comes to synchronization.

As far as synchronizing things in the timeline go, I found that there were 21 frames of latency between the display capture and the audio output capture from my headphones, and I used the click track to line the clips up in the composite.

Dolly management

I made heavy use of DollyManager to manage my camera paths, which was super useful whenever I had to do reshoots (which was often). Unfortunately, Camera Dolly does not store a bunch of settings when you export so I still had to make notes of a lot of things. And also it does store a bunch of settings that you don’t actually want it to store, such as the green screen color. And the in-game editor is kind of a nightmare to actually use, especially for keyframes that are out of reach.

Basically, the camera dolly as it stands right now is kinda half-baked. Hopefully VRChat improves it over time.

Dealing with in-world props

Most in-world props do not appear on the green screen, which is why I created the green screen avatar to mask those out. For those render passes I disabled the camera green screen, and stood behind the prop while recording another pass. This usually required a lot of extra work to make a clean plate in DaVinci, but it was worth it.

The rock/pop scene

This scene I ended up redoing multiple times while I figured out the workflow. Fortunately it was the simplest of the composited scenes, so it was well worth the time spent experimenting so I could make the later scenes go more smoothly.

There are “only” seven layers in this composite:

• Background
• Drummer
• Drum kit (world prop)
• Backup vocalist
• Bass player
• Lead critter
• Microphone (world prop)

I recorded this in three separate shots each with their own camera path; I ended up only using two of the shots.

During the first shot with the sweeping camera pan I had to do multiple cuts within the layers to change their ordering, which you can kind of see in the timeline:

I added a bit of blur to the background layer, mostly to hide some annoying aliasing artifacts from the render since I had antialiasing disabled in VRChat to get the maximum possible framerate. Lens blur hides many sins.

The studio scene

For the scene where I’m in the studio I just found a world where there was a chair I could sit on, disabled fullbody tracking (so that the chair would work right), and lined myself up over a photo of my actual messy studio. Pretty straightforward. In the composite I added some extra thick cartoon outline and some film grain to make things match a bit better. I also spent way too much time figuring out how to post-process a shadow onto the seat cushion, which mostly got covered up by the speech bubble. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.

Incidentally, I am not singing along with the lyrics there, and instead am saying “Why isn’t this working?!” which is a common utterance from me whenever Logic is misbehaving.

The pixel art scene

This was another super-complicated composite. DaVinci doesn’t really have any good way of doing pixel-precise positioning or scaling, so what I ended up doing here was to draw every layer at 320x180 with things lined up how I wanted them in the frame, then scaled those layers up 6x with nearest-neighbor filtering (using ImageMagick) and then did the composite in DaVinci.

The note lanes for the rhythm game in the background were just drawn as sprite layers which I moved in sync to the music, and I did a Fusion composition to extract the few rows of pixels where those notes hit the bottom edge of the controller sprites and then applied a ridiculous glow with a directional blur to them.

The bouncing coin is something I quickly modeled and rendered in Blender as a 6-frame sequence. I looped that sequence in DaVinci and then gave it a simple motion path, synchronized with the beat.

Each of the performers was multiple layers, typically a base sprite, a sprite for the instrument, and any additional sprites for hand positions (which I moved in 6-pixel increments using “step” interpolation) and so on. The falling sprites were done separately, of course.

When the entire stage falls apart, I just applied some simple motion paths to them and went with what felt right, rather than anything physically accurate (but it was fun to make the trellis bounce off the floor, a decision I came up with on the spot).

The main composite is around 20 layers, and many of those layers are also compound clips with 3-4 layers of their own. There’s a lot going on. Watch it a bunch of times!

The cartoon critter head

That was all just traditional hand animation! I made a layer for the head, the blinking eyes, and a bunch of mouth shapes, and then I did the usual thing one does. Resolve, incidentally, is not particularly great for animating this way, but it worked well enough. For a longer animation I’d definitely want to use something else though.

The best thing that came out of this was when I was drawing the base layer and doing a symmetry check:

The big grid of games and videos and such

The Undertale-style critter sprite was a modified version of the one I drew for the Undertale memories microsite that went up for the 10th anniversary of Undertale’s release.

The footage all came from things I’ve worked on. Most of it was games I composed for:

• Ass Without a Trace 2 by HoggTied (NSFW)
• Psycho Burst and Airship Chef by Yamatsu (both NSFW)
• Snack Stacker by Mitha
• Pawmune by SundewBry
• Treestoration by rtwfroody
• Currying Flavors by chinniedraws
• Magnolia’s Early Morning Walk by Definitely a Fox (NSFW-ish)
• The Balance of Sappho by The Firecrackers
• Hallowed Grounds by Paxton
• The Herbal Spice Problem by Glass Dragon Studios
• Admiralo Island Witches Club by cloverfirefly
• Brickris Tetout by Bamboy
• Elevate by Kamil Bazydlo
• Haggle Waggle: Duck & Doge by z0lly
• Spooky Sushi by Spectronaut
• Refactor, Colorful Critter¹, and CATcher by fluffy (that’s me!)

But I also included two of the sillier videos from my random crap channel:

• jukka wins it all
• critter dance (a test of my customized Winterpaw rodent avatar)

To actually animate the grid I just made two compound clips, each with its own 5x3 grid of cropped videos, and then scrolled each one across the screen. For most of the videos (which were 16:9) I could size and position them consistently by zooming them to 0.3333 and giving them a left/right crop of 384 (to make their effective resolution 1152×1080, the horizontal resolution being 1920×3/5, trust me this all makes sense mathematically). Horizontal positioning was in multiples of 384 (1920/5), and vertical was in 360 (1080/3). There were a couple of non-16:9 videos which I also had to deal with separately, but it was basically the same process, just with different numbers.

The jazz club scene

There wasn’t anything particularly different from this vs. the rock/pop scene, but in this case I recorded the background and microphone plates with postprocessing enabled, since Piano Lounge Freude’s lighting is all done in the postprocessing step. For the microphone I was able to clean up the postprocessing glow well enough, mostly using the “despill” function built-in to 3D Keyer.

Oddly enough, the stage mic in Piano Lounge Freude does appear on the VRC stream camera’s green screen, somehow. I assume there’s some specific render tag set on the object. As a result it appeared in my avatar video layer. However, it was still good to have the properly-lit microphone to composite on top to improve the look. To account for the postprocessing-based lighting I used DaVinci’s color grading to make the avatars look appropriately-lit in the composite.

On the background I was originally thinking of using a green screen and then tracking it to put some of my other random videos in the space, but I decided that would have been too much work and also too visually-busy, so instead I made a quick-and-dirty plaid background video to run in a loop and then composited in the one shot from last year’s video more traditionally.

The choral scene

The choral scene was a nightmare to record and composite; in my Resolve project this clip eventually got the name “the shot from hell.” The final composite had around 35 layers! These are due to the following:

• There are 16 critters (11 in the choir, 4 in the string quartet, and the conductor)
• Because of the sweeping camera motion I needed to change the composite order of many of the critters in places and it was easier to do that in additional layers
• Because the critters are partially obscured by the fountain I needed to make a greenscreened traveling matte of it
• And of course the website that appears in the background is another layer

If you step through that scene frame-by-frame you will possibly notice some things sliding around a little weirdly, because VRChat’s framerate is also not in sync with OBS’s. I had OBS recording at 60 FPS, and VRChat generally renders at 75 FPS on my system, so it was the luck of the draw as to whether the frame timing would perfectly line up. Fortunately it’s Good Enough. In future projects I will definitely try running my headset at 90 FPS to see if that helps any.

There were also some movements that fell out of sync due to render hitches, and for those I mostly fixed them in post by adding additional motion pathing to the layers. I didn’t get them all. There’s also a visual quirk in how the cellist’s tail hangs through the floor but remains visible. Ideally I’d have added a floor collider to the avatar to prevent this, but perfect is the enemy of done, and you probably didn’t notice those issues until you read this text.

Some chromakey tips

Most of the chromakeying was just using DaVinci’s basic “3D Keyer” chromakey. In some spots I had to mask some things in separately from how I masked them out, because of color clashes between avatar parts and the key color. (This was especially problematic for my main critter’s colorcycling-rainbow material, as well as my collar which is green in most forms.)

In a couple of spots I did find it useful to use “magic mask” as a pre-filter for 3D Keyer, but most of the time it was much easier to just do combinations of 3D Keyer and use its built-in garbage matte.

Also, while you can change the green screen color in the VRChat camera, you have to remember to set it up before you set up a camera path, or edit the saved path JSON. Fortunately, VRChat’s green screen is a single solid color with precise values so you can generally get away with having a green object on a green background as long as you set the key mode to “tight,” although some of the mask refinements will still require extra work.

That halftone wipe transition

DaVinci doesn’t have a built-in halftone wipe or any sort of built-in halftone functionality at all, so I had to roll it myself. I approached it from a graphics programming perspective. You can think of a halftone as being similar to an ordered pattern dither, where the threshold pattern is given by:

\[ u = k(x\cos\theta - y\sin\theta) \\ v = k(x\sin\theta + y\cos\theta) \\ t = (\sin u + \sin v + 2)/4 \]

So, what I did for this was to generate a halftone screen function (I used a procedural texture in Affinity Photo for this but I could have probably figured out a way to do it all in DaVinci) and then merged it with a gradient with an additive blend, then applied a threshold filter to that, then used the resulting image as the blend mask to overlay the incoming clip over the outgoing clip. Animating the gradient’s start and end points to sweep across the frame generated the wipe transition. Easy.

(Someday I will release this as a template for others to use, because it’s a really cool effect!)

Some basic statistics

• Amount of raw footage recorded: 5 hours, 36 minutes and 25 seconds
• Amount of time spent working on the music: around 14 hours, apparently (it sure didn’t feel like that long though)
• Amount of time spent editing video: I have no idea because it turns out Time Sink wasn’t running on my editing computer this whole time, oops, but I’d estimate probably 40-60 hours?

So this video took around 70-80 hours of work altogether. If someone wanted to hire me to make something like this it would probably cost around $5000 at a highly-discounted rate, or $8000 if I actually valued my time, which I clearly do not. Hopefully I get at least $5000 in music sales out of this. (Mirlo and Bandcamp are probably the best choices for that.)

1. Technically Colorful Critter doesn’t have music, but it does have (minimal) sound design, and it’s one of my favorite little game-toy things so I don’t regret including it here. ↩

The big one is that now all of my albums are available for sale on Ko-Fi, and I’ve also restructured the “buy box” under the player preview to better show what the various icons even are.

I’ve also refreshed the website stylesheets to hopefully make them more maintainable, but in doing so it’s possible I broke something. Please let me know if you come across any issues like that!

Why aren’t you on…

Spotify? All I can find is The War Machine

All of my reasons for not being on Spotify aside from The War Machine are explained in The War Machine.

If you want a bit more detail, read this older blog post.

Tidal?

I actually am on Tidal, but their artist management is currently broken in such a way that most of my releases don’t appear on my actual artist page. Hopefully this gets fixed at some point, but in the meantime you can check this dumping ground where most of my stuff seems to end up (along with a few other artists who also release as “Sockpuppet”).

[insert other streaming provider]

I try to keep my stuff on as many streaming providers as possible (except Spotify, for the reasons explained above), but not all of them accept my music for various reasons. If there’s a specific one that you’d like to see it on, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

One of your releases isn’t on streaming

I’ve been slowly rebuilding my streaming catalog after having an issue with a previous distributor. I’m focusing just on making releases available that I think people will actually listen to; if there’s something I’ve released that you want to hear on your streaming provider of choice and which isn’t there, please let me know!

What the heck is your avatar?

I’m a critter!

What’s that?

It’s an anthropomorphic human.

Oh. … Wait, what?

Don’t worry about it.

There’s a lot of music here. Did you make all of it?

Unless otherwise specified, yep! Most of my music is my own original work, with a small handful of covers and collaborations.

Where do I even begin listening?

Over on the releases page you can filter by genre, instrument, and topic, which might help.

What software do you use?

For music I mostly use Logic Pro, which I started using in 2004 and has been my main DAW since 2005. I also make somewhat heavy use of Native Instruments instruments.

For video editing I mostly use DaVinci Resolve although for some things I still use Final Cut Pro.

For artwork I generally use Affinity Studio although I’m not super thrilled with the direction it’s going in so I’m likely to switch back to Krita, especially now that 6.0 is out.

What instruments do you play?

Piano, cello, violin, viola, drums, guitar, bass, hand percussion, and a few other things to varying levels of proficiency.

What’s your live VR performance setup like?

I have a whole article on that.

When/where can I see you perform live?

I try to keep my live performance calendar up-to-date (and there’s also a calendar you can subscribe to via Google Calendar/iCloud/etc. if you’re so inclined), and also try to remember to post upcoming shows to my VRChat group. Past recordings usually show up on my YouTube channel.

I’m also sometimes found doing karaoke or open mics with VRelium and Moonlit with Trans Academy.

How else can I keep up with you?

You could always join my Discord community. This site also has feeds you can subscribe to via your favorite feed reader, via Mastodon/Fediverse/etc. at @sockpuppet.band@sockpuppet.band or at @fluffy@plush.city, and via Bluesky at @bsky.sockpuppet.band.

Subvert is getting a lot of hype because it’s new but I don’t see it as my long-term solution for music sales. I’m not sure what I’d consider to be my primary platform right now (probably Mirlo), but in the long term I think the future is self-hosting and self-distributing.

The current state of things

So, right now there are a whole bunch of indie music stores. The ones I currently have a presence on include:

• Bandcamp
• itch.io
• Mirlo
• Subvert

And additionally when I want to put stuff into streaming I have to also upload it to

• Symphonic (for the mainstream platforms)
• Bandwagon (to get it on TheIndieBeat and other things)
• KVRR

That’s a lot of things to have to upload my stuff to, each one requiring separate metadata setups and agreements and so on, and frankly, it’s super tiring.

Canimus

What I really want is a future where people can self-host their stuff with their publishing engine of choice (Faircamp or Publ or whatever), trivially sell their downloads, and from their own site also get their stuff circulated in the various discovery feeds out there.

This idea was the impetus behind Canimus, a protocol for sharing collection metadata in a lightweight, platform-agnostic manner.

Basically, the idea of Canimus is the following:

• Music publishers can provide a collection (also known as a “feed”) as a simple JSON format that includes albums, tracks, titles, purchase links, and streaming preview links
• Music collectors can provide an access-controlled collection
• Listeners can link their player application (web-based or otherwise) to multiple collections
• The player application can also provide feeds of peoples' listening activities and use that to build federated discovery and recommendations (by people following each other there as well)

And all of this just lives natively on the web.

Right now, Fairplayer is a thing that’s in development that shares many of the same goals as me. They’re working on specifically supporting Faircamp websites as a streaming music source, but I’ve also been in communication with them regarding Canimus, and similarly the folks behind Mirlo also share these goals. We’ve been talking a lot about some of the ways that things can move forward.

This website already has a Canimus feed. I also added one to Song Fight!. At some point I want to make a plugin thingy so that FairCamp users can easily add a Canimus feed to their sites (although maybe the Fairplayer folks are already working on that? I need to touch base with them).

Funkwhale and ActivityPub and such

Whenever I talk about this stuff I always get people insisting that I should really be looking into ActivityPub and specifically Funkwhale. The promise is always that ActivityPub is somehow a magical protocol that solves all these issues, but only with a lot of hand-waving. The thing is that ActivityPub doesn’t actually solve any issues; it just pushes them down the stack, in ways that are even less approachable for everyday people.

ActivityPub things don’t just naturally interoperate. Heck, Funkwhale 2.0 won’t even talk to Funkwhale 1.0!

In order to actually build interoperability between things, the process involves building a FEP, a process that is arduous and results in a specification at the end that is very difficult to navigate or even find. Supposedly there are existing FEPs for music sharing and discovery, but damned if I can find any of them myself! They’re all just opaque numbers.

And everything ActivityPub seems to really want to use push-based notifications for all data exchange. Forget about backfilling, as well. It turns everything into a stream of ephemera, and requires two-way handshakes and peering relationships and, in many cases, PGP key exchanges. It’s a mess and trying to support anything in ActivityPub on a static website is pretty much a lost cause. Also the idea of being able to move to a new domain, or host the same site on multiple domains, is a lost cause. And every single means of interacting with ActivityPub stuff requires building yet another identity on whatever single-purpose service consumes it. Like, it’s not like it makes any sense to follow a Funkwhale user from a PeerTube user. You can do it but what information gets exchanged?

Basically, ActivityPub is full of a bunch of empty promises, and in order to fulfill the promise you have to write another protocol on top of it, get everyone to agree to that protocol, and fit it into a shape that might not work for things to begin with.

I just really don’t see what it brings to the table, in any practical terms.

The future is indie and distributed

Right now things are such a mess. Fragmentation of streaming services, the downplaying and outright dismissal of the idea of owning music, myriad platforms that want to be the only platform that anyone uses for all the things, and everything being funded by the endless churn of venture capital and rent-seeking.

And musicians end up needing to spend so much time trying to feed these platforms.

We each only have so much time to spend here on this Earth, and personally I’d rather not be spending it on repetitive tedium like having to re-upload and re-format my music based on the historical artifacts of a dying industry.

My vision for the future of how people publish music:

1. The musician posts the music on their website using whatever tools (Faircamp, Bandcrash, etc.) and payment mechanisms (or lack thereof) work best for them
2. The music goes out in their own sharing feed
3. Their fans listen to it, buy it (or otherwise send payments to the musicians they want to support), add it to their collections, populate it into whatever distributed discovery mechanisms emerge, use whatever compatible player/receiver/streaming service makes the most sense for them

There is no need in this world for investors or rent-seeking platforms that exist to be The One And Only Thing. Protocols emerge and evolve and change and adapt based on the actual needs as they shift. People can focus on being creative and finding things they love, and not have to worry about where they’re doing it.

The web itself can be a perfectly good platform for all this stuff. Let’s try to make it happen.

Fortunately, it’s all just data, so I was able to scrape the interface in order to get their current (as of March 19, 2026) genre and subgenre list.

This is subject to change, of course.

I am not interested in discussing the merits of these genres (or anything missing from the list) or how they’ve opted to categorize them; I’m just the messenger.

• Alternative
  • Alternative (1)
  • Chinese Alt (118)
  • College Rock (119)
  • EMO (120)
  • Goth Rock (121)
  • Grunge (122)
  • Indie Egyptian (499)
  • Indie Levant (500)
  • Indie Maghreb (501)
  • Indie Pop (123)
  • Indie Rock (124)
  • Korean Indie (125)
  • New Wave (126)
  • Pop Punk (127)
  • Punk (128)
  • Turkish Alternative (502)
• Anime
  • Anime (129)
• Arabic
  • Arabic (130)
  • Arabic Pop (131)
  • Dabke (507)
  • Islamic (132)
  • Khaleeji (133)
  • Khaleeji Jalsat (504)
  • Khaleeji Shailat (505)
  • Levant (506)
  • Maghreb Rai (508)
  • North African (134)
• Audiobooks
  • Arabic (130)
  • Arabic Pop (131)
  • Dabke (507)
  • Islamic (132)
  • Khaleeji (133)
  • Khaleeji Jalsat (504)
  • Khaleeji Shailat (505)
  • Levant (506)
  • Maghreb Rai (508)
  • North African (134)
• Blues
  • Acoustic Blues (135)
  • Blues (2)
  • Chicago Blues (136)
  • Classic Blues (137)
  • Contemporary Blues (138)
  • Country Blues (139)
  • Delta Blues (140)
  • Electric Blues (141)
  • Traditional Blues (4)
• Brazilian
  • Axé (143)
  • Baile Funk (144)
  • BH Funk (525)
  • Bossa Nova (145)
  • Brazilian (142)
  • Carioca Funk (523)
  • Choro (146)
  • Forró (147)
  • Frevo (148)
  • Mandelao Funk (524)
  • Melodic Funk (526)
  • MPB (149)
  • Pagode (150)
  • Samba (151)
  • Sertanejo (152)
• Children’s Music
  • Children’s Music (5)
  • Lullabies (153)
  • Sing-Along (154)
  • Stories (155)
• Chinese
  • Chinese (156)
  • Chinese Classical (157)
  • Chinese Flute (158)
  • Chinese Opera (159)
  • Chinese Orchestral (160)
  • Chinese Regional Folk (161)
  • Chinese Strings (162)
  • Taiwanese Folk (163)
  • Tibetan Native Music (164)
• Christian & Gospel
  • CCM (166)
  • Christian & Gospel (165)
  • Christian Metal (167)
  • Christian Pop (168)
  • Christian Rap (169)
  • Christian Rock (170)
  • Classic Christian (171)
  • Contemporary Gospel (172)
  • Gospel (173)
  • Praise & Worship (174)
  • Southern Gospel (175)
  • Traditional Gospel (176)
• Classical
  • Art Song (177)
  • Avant-Garde (178)
  • Baroque Era (179)
  • Brass & Woodwinds (180)
  • Cantata (181)
  • Cello (182)
  • Chamber Music (183)
  • Chant (184)
  • Choral (185)
  • Classical (85)
  • Classical Crossover (186)
  • Classical Era (187)
  • Contemporary Era (188)
  • Electronic (189)
  • Guitar (190)
  • Impressionist (191)
  • Medieval Era (192)
  • Minimalism (193)
  • Modern Era (194)
  • Opera (195)
  • Oratorio (196)
  • Orchestral (197)
  • Percussion (198)
  • Piano (199)
  • Renaissance (200)
  • Romantic Era (201)
  • Sacred (202)
  • Solo Instrumental (203)
  • Violin (204)
• Comedy
  • Comedy (205)
  • Novelty (206)
  • Standup Comedy (207)
• Country
  • Alternative Country (208)
  • Americana (209)
  • Bluegrass (210)
  • Contemporary Bluegrass (211)
  • Contemporary Country (212)
  • Country (6)
  • Country Gospel (213)
  • Country Hip-Hop/Rap (503)
  • Honky Tonk (214)
  • Outlaw Country (215)
  • Thai Country (216)
  • Traditional Bluegrass (217)
  • Traditional Country (8)
  • Urban Cowboy (218)
• Dance
  • Afro House (419)
  • Amapiano (435)
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Here’s a quick review of the experience so far.

The good

The price is pretty good. $20/year, similar to many of the other distributors.

They care a lot about metadata, and allow you to enter existing ISRCs and UPCs if you have them. (Which I technically do but I can’t be bothered to look them up or deal with their bad user interface, but more on that in a bit.)

They also allow people to declare their use of generative AI, so if people are insisting on using that stuff, they can be filed appropriately. (And hopefully those of us who have nothing to lie about won’t be penalized for the quagmire that techbros with deep pockets and shallow thoughts¹ have unleashed upon us.)

The bad

The UX on the uploader is pretty terrible. It tries way too hard to be “app-like,” but also has so much negative space and no visibility into the item you’re working on, so the UI has a lot of scrolling and clicking.

You also need to individually specify a lot of metadata on a per-track basis; there’s no way to just, like, apply the same performer/writer credits to all the tracks on a release, or things like recording year, recording country, etc., and a lot of the UI elements have these awful custom controls with a very slow/annoying search mechanism and piss-poor defaults. (Why does it default to Aaron Copeland for every credit?! Aside from him being alphabetically first in their database, of course. You’d think they’d only be drawing from names that I’ve already submitted things with. You’d think.)

The actual upload flow is also a bit confusing and weird, and of course it doesn’t try to take in the existing metadata from my FLAC files, even though they’re all already perfectly tagged with the majority of the information they are looking for.

Every single track edit is its own little tiny usability nightmare, and it makes my chronic pain flare up very quickly. And I have a lot of tracks to get through if I’m going to make all my stuff available again.

Ideally I could just upload, like, a bunch of .flac files and a JSON/CSV/whatever file with my metadata. I can handle that just fine. Let me write a trivial bandcrash-to-whatever converter and call it a day. But no, everything has to be built the long way around.

Of the points on my classic rant about web usability, they have violated at least seven of those principles, although at least they provide some amount of keyboard accessibility. Not enough, mind you, but at least an effort was made.

The ugly

When you first sign up you have to declare your label name up front, and the UI for it makes it very easy to make a mistake. And it can’t be changed once you’ve signed up.

Also, the way referral links work are kinda bad from a privacy standpoint. Let’s just say I wish things would let you use a preferred name and leave it at that.

Yet another side rant about AI

As an independent musician with accessibility needs, I would absolutely love it if AI could help me with the parts of the process that are physically painful for me to do. The tedious, mechanial parts, like formatting my upload metadata and submitting it to the system (with my oversight, of course).

But no, all of the AI bullshit out there is working on replacing the parts that I enjoy doing, and the parts that make my stuff unique.

Music/AI tech people, do better. Focus on solving the problems that need to be solved, please.

Conclusion

Anyway. I sent them a support request asking them to make a better bulk-editing interface, because as things are it’s kind of untenable from a usability standpoint. But nobody ever gives a shit about people with chronic pain disabilities or motor issues, I’ve found, and that’s a bigger rant about the usability of the web itself at this point.

It’s a bit sad that of all the distributors I’ve used, Distrokid with its straight-from-1998 Extremely Web 1.0 interface is the only one that doesn’t make me want to gnaw my own foot off while using it. (But then again, I feel like Web 1.0 actually had pretty good usability from the get-go.)

But anyway. If you don’t care about (or are willing to deal with) the UX issues, it might be worth a try. Also, if you sign up with my affiliate link you get 25% off your first year (a savings of $5), and I get $10.

(And please, if you run into a site which is difficult for you to use, please let the people who run it know. So much of the modern web was built by people who have never heard the first thing about accessibility.)

1. Credit to my friend Cial for coming up with that expression. ↩

Of course, if you’d prefer to support me on a platform other than Bandcamp, the same discography is available for about the same price over on Mirlo, and also my artist page on Subvert has recently been activated as well, although my entire discography is not up there just yet.

And if you prefer physical media that can be arranged, and if you want to go a bit more analog, there’s a place for that too.

Anyway, this month I actually do have a new release, although it isn’t much of one, and it’s also pay-what-you-want-including-$0.

As far as other stuff goes, I unfortunately haven’t made any progress on the next album due to some ongoing health issues, but those seem to be resolving (or at least abating) so hopefully I can spend some time in the studio again.

Briefly, here’s what’s going on:

• We are finally working on recording Misfits, our next album. The overall theme is “children’s music, but for grownups.”
• We’re also working on some game music, as we’ve been approached by three separate teams working on games for Strawberry Jam 10 (hey, that’s another one for the success list)
• And of course we’re doing some VRChat performances
• fluffy’s also been busy editing some past live performance videos
• Also as a reminder, we are totally an actual band with so many people in it and not just fluffy pretending to be a bunch of people through clever production tricks and writing in the third person plural for some reason

Anyway. No idea when Misfits will be done (Strawberry Jam 10 has the time-based priority, of course), but it’s been a long time coming. If you want to track its progress, feel free to follow the Patreon or whatever.

So here’s how my performing setup works!

The hardware side

Previously I was using an amalgam of the built-in mic on my headset, the line input on my onboard audio, and VoiceMeeter to tie everything together. Unfortunately, this setup had some pretty severe limitations, especially when it came to managing latency (particularly with backing tracks), as well as being able to add live effects to the signal chain. It also led to some embarrassing situations where my audio would go haywire due to a connector coming loose or the like.

A few years ago, I upgraded my recording studio from a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 to an 18i20, so I had this spare 18i8 just sitting around. I was using it on my office computer (where I do my video editing and programming), but it was massive overkill for those needs, and I came to realize it works much better for my performance setup instead. So now I have a plain old headphone amp in the office, and the 18i8 is on my VR computer.

The 18i8 has a handy feature where you can set up multiple output/monitor submixes, so for example you can have different audio levels of different things going to the headphones, the line outputs, and so on. It also has a built-in “loopback” interface, where you can give it a monitor mix that then appears as a standard audio input to the computer. These features are extremely useful for this use case (as well as any other live performance or studio recording situation).

I have the following connections:

• Front input 1: My microphone (I currently switch between an MXL condenser mic and an Electro-Voice dynamic depending on my mood and what’s sounding better at the moment)
• Front input 2: My guitar signal chain
• Headphone output 1: a LEKATO Wireless IEM system (which in turn connects to some old 3.5mm Apple earbuds, which give me a nice balance of size and audio quality; there are better ones to buy new but I had these lying around from some old iPhone or something)¹
• Headphone output 2: my tiny lunchbox amp
• My reverb unit, with its inputs on the 18i8’s Line 1-2 outputs, and its outputs on the 18i8’s Line 5-6 inputs
• Front input 3 and 4: Available for other instruments (sometimes I plug my digital piano in there, for example)

I have the reverb unit set to 100% wet, so that it is only being used as a bus send. I also have a bypass toggle pedal so that I can cut to a purely dry signal when needed (such as in A Long Plastic Hallway, which uses lack-of-reverb as an effect for emphasis).

Mix setup

First, I use the multiple input functionality to provide Windows audio devices for all of the necessary channels.

Windows 10 and 11 also have a feature where you can assign arbitrary labels to your audio inputs and outputs; I use this to give the following names to the playback channels:

• Playback 1+2: Playback
• Playback 3+4: Game audio
• Playback 5+6: Control room

and I also set labels on my VR headset’s microphone and speakers, just to make them easier to keep track of.

In Focusrite Control I have separate submixes for all three of the outputs, as well as the loopback interface.

Headphone 1 gets the monitor mix that goes to my IEMs. It receives all of the input channels, as well as all three² “Playback” channels (which are used to route multiple separate software outputs into separate mixes).

Headphone 2 gets the same, minus the microphone (to avoid feedback), and is connected to the line input on my lunchbox amp.³

Line 1-2 (reverb send) gets just the instruments; I bake the reverb into my backing tracks.

Loopback gets the mix that goes out to the stream and/or world.

Software setup

Unlike before, I do not need Voicemeeter, and I do not even have it installed anymore, as all of the audio that goes to the stream is now handled by the 18i8, and I do not need to mix anything into or from my VR headset.

I have configured VLC (which I use for playing my backing tracks) to output to the Playback 1+2 device by default.

OBS setup

OBS allows you to set up multi-channel audio recording. I set OBS to use channel 1 in the stream, and to record all 6 channels to separate tracks in my local recording. Then I have the following audio input sources:

As well as the following audio output captures:

Finally, I have a bunch of visuals set up; mostly this is Spout2 to capture my in-game streaming camera, and Waveform to let me do various audio visualizers in varying combinations.

Mic boosted performances

When doing a mic boosted performance, I set my system audio output to Playback 3+4 (Game Audio) and VRChat’s audio input to Loopback. This way, my full final audio mix goes to my VRChat microphone, and I hear the game in my IEMs. My backing track works the same as anywhere else.

The one downside to this setup is that my lip sync will also follow my instruments and backing track, but there’s not a lot I can do about that aside from adding face tracking to my VR setup.

If I want to record my performance, I launch OBS and set it to record. OBS is not involved in the signal chain going to the world at all.

Streamed performances

Most streamed performances involve a Discord voice call for coordinating between the show runners and the performers. This is where the “control room” channel comes in; I set Discord’s voice to use my VR headset’s microphone as input, and Playback 5+6 as speakers. This way the voice chat only hears my voice (rather than all of my instruments), and I can hear anything they say on my IEMs. The Discord call gets recorded to track 5, with the left channel being me and the right channel being everyone else.

Otherwise, my audio setup is as follows:

• System audio to Playback 3+4
• VRChat microphone is the VR headset mic (so it gets clean lipsync)
• And I set VRChat’s “microphone output level” to 0%, so that my camera can see my lips move but the audio doesn’t go out into the world⁴

As far as running the stream itself goes, typically I stream either to my Owncloud instance or to VRCDN depending on the needs of the show. Larger shows provide their own streaming ingest.

• Owncloud lets me serve an absolute crapton of viewers (thanks in part to my overly-complicated CDN setup), but it’s not allowed as a stream source by default in VRChat so people need to enable untrusted URLs. It also tends to be pretty high in latency, usually on the order of 6-10 seconds.
• VRCDN limits me to 40 concurrent viewers, but the latency is pretty low (usually 1-2 seconds). This is fine for smaller shows, and many showrunners will restream my VRCDN stream into the world with their own visuals overlaid on top anyway, which also adds some latency.
• Larger music festivals (such as VRelium) will provide their own ingest server and stream management.

Editing recordings

And now the really nice thing about this setup is that I can do some audio editing and remixing in retrospect. I do most of my video editing in DaVinci Resolve, which has pretty good multichannel audio support.

By default, the video will be pulled in with the following stereo audio tracks:

Typically what I’ll do is separate out the audio tracks from the video, and I’ll shift track 6 back to compensate for the latency between me and the audience. For mic-boost performances this isn’t much (usually under a second) and can usually be ignored, but for streamed performances this will be multiple seconds (often on the order of 20 or more!) and this is especially important during those magical times when people either respond to my banter or sing along with me! (The latter happens with the call-and-response bits in Safety In Numbers, and it fills me with warm fuzzies every time.)

If the track 1 (live mix) audio is fine, I’ll use it and track 6 directly, and mute the other tracks. However, sometimes I need to get fancy and change the mix in retrospect. In that case, I’ll change my audio tracks as such:

• Audio 1: Stereo, using channels 1+2 (live mix)
• Audio 2: Mono, using channel 3 (voice)
• Audio 3: Mono, using channel 4 (guitar)
• Audio 4: Stereo, using channels 5+6 (reverb, and piano if I happened to use it)
• Audio 5: Stereo, using channels 7+8 (backing track)
• Audio 6: Stereo, using channels 12+11 (game audio, swapped to present it from the audience’s POV)⁵

In this situation, I’ll mute tracks 2-4, and use track 1 to line up tracks 5 and 6, which will have differing amounts of latency. Then I’ll mute track 1 and unmute 2-4, and then adjust my recorded mix as necessary.

Track 6 in particular needs to be lined up pretty carefully, as OBS captures outputs with no latency at all, but inputs get about 300ms of latency due to limitations in Windows audio. In theory I could have OBS add 300ms or so of latency to the output capture, but it’s fiddly and I’d still need to adjust things anyway, so I’d might as well just do it once when I edit.⁶

Backing track/playlist setup

When I’m performing there’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. If I’m only doing 1-2 songs I can load the .wav files into VLC and it’s no big deal, but many of my shows are much more complicated and my ADHD brain can only hold so much stuff in my working memory.

So, I have a Final Cut Pro library that contains all of my backing tracks; some songs have multiple versions available (e.g. with and without guitar mixed in, or album vs. live versions). In the library files I also have brief version notes and the dominant key signature, and with this I can quickly put together a set list with a reasonable progression and fitting the time constraints.

A few of the songs also have a lyric display baked in, because try as I might, I just can’t memorize every song⁷. For some songs I’ll use Croonify to prepare a synchronized lyric display (replacing Croonify’s stem-separated audio with my own clean backing track), but for others I’ll just put up some basic text with the necessary cues to keep me from messing up too badly.

When I prepare my set, I’ll also put in a bit of visual stuff for my own reference, such as having it display the title of the next song or little notes like “2 songs left” or specific banter points I need to hit.

When I encode the video I’ll just use Final Cut’s “Export File (default)” to do a quick lossless encode and then I’ll use FFmpeg to encode the final video at a more useful bitrate, with:

ffmpeg -i "2026-02-30 example.mov" -b:a 320k \
    "~/Sync/backing tracks/shows/2026-02-30 example.mp4"

Finally, I use SyncThing to automatically synchronize my ~/Sync directory between my various computers, which is super handy. (It’s also a lot easier than dealing with network shares!)

When it’s time to perform, I’ll use SteamVR’s desktop overlay function to float my VLC window in the world with me, and so then I’ll always have my visual reference where I need it. (So if you see me looking downward a lot, it isn’t just me being introverted.)

When it comes to actually performing, I make sure that VLC has keyboard focus and then I can just press the space bar on my keyboard to start and, if necessary, pause the backing track.

Doing sound checks

Sound checks used to be rather difficult; previously, I’d do a laborious process of recording the loopback interface into Audacity while performing parts of my set, listen back afterwards, and then try making incremental adjustments. This process was super annoying.

Nowadays I’ve found a much better way; basically:

First, I open two instances of VLC:

• The first instance gets my backing track (and continues to play to Playback 1+2)
• The second instance is set to play to Playback 5+6, upon which I “open capture device,” set to the loopback audio with a 10-second caching delay.

Then, I can unpause my backing track player and perform for 10 seconds, then pause the backing track while I listen to how it sounded. This gives me a much faster means of iterating on my adjustments and getting things sounding really good.

1. Props to Niko Fox for turning me on to this specific wireless IEM unit. ↩

2. I actually have all four going to it but Playback 7+8 isn’t used for anything. Someday I might figure out a way of using it for a click track or additional audio cues, though. ↩

3. I don’t usually have the amplifier’s speakers on when I’m performing but it’s nice to have when I’m practicing. Additionally, the amplifier’s line output and instrument input are no longer connected to anything, as they are not needed in this setup. I do still use the amplifier’s power bus for my pedal board, however. ↩

4. Note that other people in the instance won’t see the lips move, though, although for me it’s most important that my local camera does. If you need the lip movement to be visible to someone else (for example, someone else recording/streaming you directly), set your microphone output level to 5%, which will broadcast your visemes to others while keeping the audio level as low as possible. ↩

5. Or I could try to remember to set my VRChat camera to “audio from camera” mode and pass the stereo through normally, but I usually forget to do this. It also makes communicating with others on stage much more difficult since consciously overriding the incorrect positional audio cues is super hard to brain. ↩

6. In theory one could use ASIO to mitigate the latency (via the respective OBS plugin), but there’s still going to be some latency, and I err on the side of pragmatism since I’m going to have to adjust things anyway. Also, even if the latency can be eliminated from OBS’s point of view, it’s still going to be present for VRChat, so it’s going to need to be adjusted between the visuals and the audio, and that is, in my experience, much harder to do well. ↩

   There’s also the issue of ASIO often requiring exclusive access to the device, which means it might not even work in this situation to begin with.

   So basically, ASIO might work but I haven’t tried it nor have I seen any compelling reason to.

7. Although I’m proud to say that most of the songs I perform I do have completely memorized, and the more I perform songs I’m not off-book on yet, the closer I get to getting there. Assistive technology FTW. ↩

Success updates

First, here’s the criteria I laid out as what I’d see as feeling “successful.”

• The amount of income I get from my music would be sufficient as a living wage

  This is still incredibly far away, and I’m not sure it will ever be achievable with the way the music industry is, especially for independent musicians. It’s also kind of a low priority for me, though, as my other sources of income are sufficient for now.

• Any time I release something new, I have a fanbase that acquires it without prompting

  This isn’t something I’ve really had a good measure of, but I will say that this still hasn’t been the case for my two releases this year

• Any release pays for its own production costs within its first month of release

  I’d say I still haven’t hit this benchmark just yet. Neither of my releases this year cost in terms of software or equipment (in that I didn’t have to buy anything new for them), but like, I’m still super far in the hole in terms of my startup costs, and even distributing The War Machine to streaming cost $5 which I haven’t yet recouped.

  strawberry jelly :9 has made around $94 this year, though, and I also got a job out of it, so, that’s worth something.

• I have enough fans that YouTube actively tries to retain my content rather than treating my channel as a liability

  This still hasn’t quite changed, although I’m starting to feel it turn a corner, especially with my move to self-administering my videos. (On that note, gosh, I’m falling behind on that project…)

• Any release I put out gets visibility in the various streaming platforms' algorithms

  Nope, but also I’ve decided to just not care about streaming for now, which feels like a much healthier solution to the problem.

• People approach me to express interest in hiring me

  This is something that’s changed! In that, as mentioned, some of the work I did on strawberry jelly :9 got me hired as the composer for a small game. It isn’t much, but it’s something.

• Concert organizers approach me to express interest in me performing with them

  And this one I can happily say has definitely been satisfied; quite a few of my VRChat performances have now been things where people approached me to play at them, instead of me needing to seek out and apply for things.

• I am approached with offers for representation, either via an agent or a record label

  I am still not signed with a record label (and at this point I’m not sure I even want to be), but I do have a booking agent for my VRChat shows! And she’s the one who approached me with the idea, after having booked me for a couple of events.

• I have people trying to interpret my songs on their own, whether correctly or incorrectly, and reading their own meaning into them regardless

  This has happened a little bit. So far as I know nobody’s yet to submit their own interpretations to Genius or whatever, but people have asked questions about some of my lines, and that’s a good first step!

Also, here’s a thing I didn’t think of on the original list but which is something that I feel is very much worth celebrating:

• People start to recognize me for my music

  And this is another cool thing that’s been happening. The performances I’ve done in VRChat have led to people recognizing me as a musician in random places and folks will even compliment me on my music. More than one person has even had a favorite song of mine! (It seems to be tied between Freak Flag and Material Change.)

  I also got a surge of interest and recognition after my presence at Furality. (Also a nice little spike of streaming playtime, which unfortunately didn’t last long.)

  It’s still only something that occurs in very small pockets in VRChat, and is often intertwined with the work I do for Trans Academy, but it’s been super gratifying and feels great.

The year in review

Here’s a breakdown of some of my activity:

• Released one single and one album
• Got hired on a game OST as a result of the album
• Finally got a bunch of my albums re-released on CD
• Did a bit more Novembeat than last year, and ended up writing a few new songs for an upcoming album as a result
• Performed a bunch of shows, mostly in VR but one in real life as well
• Made about $450 on Bandcamp, $30 on Mirlo, and $3 that I’ll never see on streaming platforms
• Also got a decent chunk of change from the Internet Archive show (which I really need to get around to posting, oops) — I can highly recommend the experience to anyone who’s interested in applying!
• Revamped my YouTube channel and got a lot more visibility as a result
• Completely changed the way I do my live performances, including producing a bunch of backing tracks to add to the experience

Looking forward

In 2026, as usual, I hope to get a couple of albums done. Here’s what’s on my current backlog (which is, regrettably, nearly the exact same backlog as I had for 2025):

• The next collection of random unreleased songs to be released (including a bunch of Song Fight! and some other random things I’ve had sitting around for ages)
• A self-cover album, where I want to revamp some of my older songs based on how I perform them today
• A jazz album!
• An album full of covers of more famous/popular music (this one will be tricky and expensive to get all the proper licenses for it)
• And of course, the full OST for the game I’m working on

I also want to get the rest of my back-catalog up on YouTube, which would be a lot easier if I stop thinking that I need to go overboard on the visualizers, and I also want to get some work done on a Canimus-enabled player of some sort. Which isn’t super relevant to making music, but it’s very relevant to helping musicians to be heard in general.

Finally, my plan for performing has been to do 1-2 bigger shows a month, and I’m pretty sure that’s something that I can make happen.

Website

I’ve been slowly working on fully tagging all of my releases. At this point it’s at about 90% coverage, with nearly everything having genre tags and most things also having instrument and mood tags.

Novembeat

Some years I produce a lot of music for Novembeat. Some years, not so much. Usually it ends up with an album at the end.

So far I’ve made 10 tracks (all posted on the YouTube playlist) which is on the low end but it’s been fun to play with things all the same. I might do more this month although I haven’t been super motivated. The last few tracks I worked on I at least streamed live on YouTube which was a lot of fun.

Some of the tracks I’ve made so far are ones that I definitely want to revisit as full tracks and don’t want to do a half-assed release at the end of the month, and the other tracks are ones that are fun as tooling around but nothing I am really super inspired to release on an album, so I think this year I’m just going to limit it to the playlist (same as I did last year) and treat it as a fun exercise instead of it being A Thing. Especially since I no longer really feel the pressure to feed the streaming algorithms.

New music

I’m still working on the soundtrack for a game, and it’s coming¹ along nicely. Our goal is to release the game in 2026, although there’s nothing more firm than that which I can disclose publicly.

I’m also continuing to work on music for some other clients, and collecting more ideas/gumption for whittling down my album production backlog.

Performances

I’m excited for two performances, Skyline Aurora Fest this Friday and the Trans Furs Support System anniversary show next Saturday. I’ve upgraded my performance setup even further to make these the best shows I can. Some highlights:

• I’m now using backing tracks combined with live instruments, and many of the backing tracks are specific to my live performances with new arrangements
• I have a pretty complete pedalboard that gives me much more control over my live sound, including a proper reverb setup
• I’ve switched to using some wireless IEMs that give me a lot more freedom within my VR playspace and cuts down on the fragility of my monitoring setup

I’m also trying to get in on the beta for the EOZ immersive gloves in order to get proper hand tracking while I perform, although it’ll still be some time before that happens. Right now it’s definitely the most promising option that’s coming to market in the foreseeable future.

YouTube channel update

Switching to self-administered releases on my channel has been the best decision I’ve made, for unexpected reasons.

Normally, when releasing music to YouTube, you have to go through a distributor, i.e. the same companies that put music on services like Spotify and Apple Music. Technically, YouTube Music releases are separate from regular YouTube, and the “official artist channel” function is just a way of getting YouTube Music releases to appear on the “releases” tab of the official artist website.

The plus side to this method is that all music listened through YouTube Music gets administered like any other music stream, and YouTube pays out around half a penny per play, which isn’t nothing. And it’s also nice that these releases show up on the release tab, and have all of the necessary metadata for music business things. But it has several downsides as well:

• There’s basically no control over what appears on the video description
• There’s no control over what the video content actually is (generally it’s just a static image of the cover art)
• There’s no way to directly provide synchronized lyrics/subtitles, auto-captioned or otherwise, unless it’s a feature provided by your distributor (and setting that up at the distributor side is a pain in the butt)
• The artist has absolutely no control over how anything is organized
• YouTube Music plays do nothing to help with discovery within the greater YouTube algorithm and doesn’t affect the artist’s YouTube watch stats
• Listeners aren’t actually directed to the musician’s channel (at least, not reliably) and there’s no real integration between YouTube Music and general YouTube following
• The artist doesn’t benefit from any of YouTube’s copyright tools beyond what their distributor makes available (usually at great added expense and with exceptionally poor granularity)

And none of these are issues for self-administered videos! So far I’ve had the following benefits already:

• People have discovered my music through the regular YouTube recommendation feed
• I’ve hit a new watch time milestone which is good for the ol' dopamine factory
• I’m having a lot of fun figuring out various forms of audio visualizer on the videos
• I am able to do my own copyright administration based on my own preferences

It isn’t perfect, of course. Since I’m going through regular YouTube plays, I don’t automatically get paid for listens (not that I was making that much to begin with), although hopefully I’ll hit a monetization threshold at some point. Also, if someone does get recommended a song through the feed, they’ll just get it on its own with no link into its respective playlist (although I suppose I could at least put a link in the description). Also there’s no way for me to organize playlists into groups; I think that feature does become available to larger creators, but I haven’t hit whatever threshold is necessary for that just yet.

I could do more whole-album videos to preserve the album-oriented listening experience, and I’ll probably get around to doing that when I’m done clearing this reupload backlog.

But anyway

I am a busy bee and I still have to manage my energy and chronic pain (and being up this late to blog about it certainly isn’t helping). But things are feeling pretty okay right now.

1. heh ↩

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. ↩

Hey y'all! As you might know, I coordinate an annual song-a-day challenge called Novembeat, where in November you try to make something musical every day. Several of my albums have been produced that way, and last year, in lieu of doing the traditional challenge (aside from a handful of low-effort experiments) I mostly used the month as a push to finally finish up Transitions.

I’ve always found Novembeat to be a very helpful thing for feeling unstuck with my own musical pursuits, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a bit more practice with any aspect of the music creation process.

My suggestion is to only do it to the level for which you feel it’s helpful. Don’t burn yourself out on music trying to produce something if it isn’t flowing; the point is to challenge yourself, not to push yourself to the breaking point. Most years I haven’t actually done something every day, and getting anything done means there’s now more music in the world than there was before, and that can only be a good thing.

Anyway, think of this as an invitation to join in. Or if a weekly-ish cadence is more your speed, check out Song Fight!, which I wrote about recently.

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!

My first batch of CDs from Kunaki arrived today, and here’s a brief review of how they turned out.

(Short version: They’re great!)

I ordered a set of one of each of my first 12 CDs that I had set up with them, namely:

• foodsexsleep
• Love and Monsters
• Radio Ready
• Refactor
• Novembeat 2020
• Songs of Substance
• Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To
• Original Soundtrack
• Pawmune and Friends
• Instrumental
• Notions
• Transitions

I placed the order on October 13, and the order was shipped out the very next day, and arrived just two days later, even though they were shipped USPS Media Mail. They came direct from Kunaki’s manufacturing facility in Sparks, Nevada.

Every single CD came shrinkwrapped and felt very professionally-assembled. The print quality is also quite good, much better than from the other short-run manufacturers I’ve used. The downside is that they only support two-panel inserts, so for some of my legacy releases I had to scale back the artwork; this was particularly sad for Refactor and Love and Monsters, both of which I had a full spread set up, and on this rerelease I had to pare it back considerably.

But the color quality is great and it turned out exactly as I’d expected. (It looks much better in person than what this picture from my unsteady phone camera would indicate.)

Also, because of the minimal insert capabilities, on some of the releases where I didn’t have better ideas of what to put inside, I opted to squeeze all of the lyrics onto a single panel. While you’ll probably need a magnifying glass to read it, it’s still perfectly sharp and readable.

The only complaint I have is that the layout teplates Kunaki provided were very minimal and it was difficult to get an idea of where the bleed/crop/trim/bend marks would be, and they don’t seem to be symmetrical. As a result, the spines are a bit inconsistent and not quite up to professional standards:

But it’s Good Enough for now and it’s only the back-facing spine that seems to be affected. I’ll definitely be tweaking my layout templates going forward, though.

Anyway, the other thing I was concerned about was the print quality for the CD labels themselves, and I’m happy to say that they look fantastic.

As far as the actual CD replication goes, I was impressed to see that even though they’re burned CDs, they look just like a pressed CD to me. And of course, the CDs play just fine in both my Playstation 2 and on my Windows computer with its external optical drive.

And, thanks to the gapless mastering from Bandcrash, the tracks all flow exactly as they’re intended to, with no extra gaps. The albums that I uploaded using Kunaki’s per-track uploader do have two-second gaps between them, unfortunately, but going forward I’m always going to use Bandcrash for my CD authoring, because it Just Works and is a hell of a lot easier to deal with anyway.

So, anyway, yeah. Kunaki’s output is great and while I wish they had a four-panel insert option and slightly more flexibility in their authoring process (like supporting CD-Text and such), their output is professional and I absolutely recommend the service to anyone who’s interested in short-run CD manufacturing and drop-shipping.

If you’ve poked around this website you probably know that I wrote and use Bandcrash to build the embedded players for the music previews. You might also be aware of it as the tool that I use to publish my albums to my itch.io page as an alternative to Bandcamp. But I also use it as a tool for a bunch of other things in my music — including part of how I publish things to Bandcamp and other storefronts.

Here’s some ways in which I use it.

Improving my production workflow

By maintaining my albums in Bandcrash as I work on them, it gives me a nice local player that lets me preview how the music is going to sound in context, since it can help me maintain my track ordering without having to do a lengthy/slow upload process or deal with playlists and libraries in VLC or iTunes or the like. It also gives me a place to edit and preview the liner notes and lyrics sheets.

Also, it’s easy for me to upload the previewer to a website and have other people do test listens.

Improving distribution to other platforms

When it’s time to upload to the various services, it acts as a force-multiplier in a few ways:

• I can encode the whole album as FLAC and then easily drag-and-drop the files to the mirlo uploader, which then parses all of the tags and gives me the correct track ordering, genre tags, and lyrics
• I already have edited plaintext lyrics and liner notes that I can easily copy-paste into the Bandcamp editor
• The FLAC version is also much faster to upload to Bandcamp than the WAV version, and since I already have my track order set, I don’t need to think about things a whole bunch
• The butler integration with itch.io automatically uploads all versions there with no real effort on my part
• The pre-built .zip files are super easy to sell or distribute on other platforms, such as Patreon, Ko-Fi, and Gumroad

Authoring and uploading CDs for manufacturing

Kunaki’s standard album uploader is a pain to work with and results in albums with forced 2-second gaps between songs. With the brand-new CD authoring flow that I released yesterday, it is now much, much easier to publish an album to Kunaki, as now there are only two files to upload (the .bin and the .cue), and everything turns out exactly as it does when played in the local player with gapless transitions.

Also, external authoring tools are the only way to support more than 25 tracks on a single album with Kunaki, and I couldn’t find anything else that works nearly as well for this, which is why I added this functionality to Bandcrash to begin with.

Any service that can take .bin and .cue files would be able to use this, and even if you just want to burn a bunch of CDs on your own, you can use these files with cdrdao or ImgBurn or any number of other tools that take bin/cue files, and not have to worry about setting up a bunch of stuff.

And, as a bonus, you’ll get CD-Text¹, so your titles and genres and such will Just Work™ on fancier CD players and peoples' computers.

Game OST workflow

I compose music for games and this usually means producing both BGM (looping backgroud music) and OST (downloadable soundtrack) versions of things. While I work on the soundtrack for a game, I maintain separate Bandcrash projects for each of these, and then I use Bandcrash to encode the looping versions into .ogg format so that I can share them with the game designers easily.

In some rare cases I also use Bandcrash’s “itch channel prefix” functionality to simultaneously upload both versions to the itch page, so that both versions are separately available.

[ADVANCED] Maintaining this website

This website runs Publ, a blogging platform I designed a while back. When I do a release, I run a few scripts to populate the information onto this website:

1. A script that converts Bandcamp’s JSON-LD data to Publ pages for the album, tracks, and lyrics (so that my URL structure matches the Bandcamp structure and uses the same slug generation), using Bandcamp’s embedded player
2. Another script that runs Bandcrash on the album, uploads the preview player to my CDN, and then switches my own embedded players over to the Bandcrash player

Also, for the spots where my liner notes had more advanced Markdown in them than what Bandcamp can display, I can also copy-paste the Markdown from my Bandcrash liner notes, and this would be super easy to automate as well.

These scripts are super specific to my own setup, somewhat janky, and probably wouldn’t be super useful for others, but at some point I’ll probably opensource them along with the Publ templates for this website, because it’s nice to provide people with more options for how to maintain their online presence. Even if it can be a bit technical.

In conclusion

Bandcrash is a pretty useful tool, and since its file format is just JSON files you can probably come up with some even more interesting use cases for it as a data editor.

It’s also pretty rough and could use a lot of improving; fortunately, it’s open source, as is its player component, and of course I welcome contributions, in both the “code and issues” sense as well as the financial sense.

Anyway, if you’re someone who makes music and publishes it online or on CD, check it out. Maybe you’ll find it useful too!

1. Depending on the manufacturer. Unfortunately, Kunaki does not have any way to support this. ↩

So, for now I’ve come to a compromise: if you want to buy just the CD of any of my albums, you can do so directly through Kunaki. Note that these versions do not come with downloads, and more importantly, since I’m only charging minimal markup over my own costs, I ask that you only buy the CDs there if you’ve already bought the album digitally (including via one of my discography bundles).

Using that link will give you the best shipping rates (especially if you buy multiple albums at a time or are outside the USA) and is also a lot less hassle for me, so it’s a win-win.

On that note, if you want to buy a CD for an album you don’t own just yet, it’s actually a bit easier and cheaper for everyone if you buy the album digitally and then use my Kunaki store to get the CD. Or, you could buy just the CD and rip it yourself like it’s 2003, and then send me a few bucks some other way to make up the difference.

Anyway, now you have choices for obtaining more collectible forms of my music without it being super expensive.

Thanks for listening!

I definitely want to put Novembeat 2020 on CD but unfortunately that will require some extra process, as it has 29 tracks and Kunaki’s online tool only supports up to 25. There’s a workaround for that but unfortunately it will take some time to figure out how to actually do it suitably.

On that note: If anyone knows of any good DAO authoring tools, ideally which run on a Mac, please let me know! In the meantime, Kunaki does have a somewhat roundabout approach which involves me burning a CD-R and then ripping it back with their own software, but that’s… fraught, and I’m not sure I even have any viable CD-Rs anymore. (I somehow doubt the big cheap spindle I bought on clearance from CompUSA is still any good…)

Update: I ended up just doing it myself, and this functionality is now part of Bandcrash. Also my big cheap spindle was still good!

But anyway, there haven’t been a lot of responses on the poll and I’m holding out optimism for the idea that it’s just because people haven’t made up their mind yet and not that nobody wants to buy anything.