Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 41

Updating a Personal Music Collection

This is a continuation of my last post. Since I’ve been rebuilding my personal music collection in 2018, I thought this would be a good place to share where I find new music. This seems obvious, but I think it’s the main reason so many people’s collections got abandoned in favour of streaming services. If you don’t regularly add music, your collection will get stale, and you’ll end up enjoying your favourites a lot less.

Obviously that’s no true for everyone. You might like hearing the same songs over and over. And if you do, consider yourself lucky. This whole thing is a lot easier for you. But if you’re like me, you like to hear new stuff a lot, but you also like your favourites to pop up on occasion.

Spotify

From 2011 to this year, I went full on with streaming. Starting with Rdio and then Spotify (with a quick dabble in Apple Music, which seems great but doesn’t suit me), subscription streaming became my main source for finding new music. Rdio was better at this. The whole site was designed to be a pleasure to navigate, and it had a “game loop” of sorts. You start with an album you like. Below the album would be reviews by other Rdio users. You could then follow those users, and you could see what they’d reviewed and what playlists they’d shared. This would lead to finding new music, which you’d add to your playlists and review yourself. It was the closest thing I’d found online to the fun early years of mp3 blogs.

It’s still disappointing how difficult it is to do this on Spotify. You can do the same thing, but there’s no reviews, so you don’t get a sense of the user’s voice and taste. But for a few years, I tried my best to swim through Spotify like I had with Rdio before giving up and using it like Spotify wants.

The Spotify “game loop” is really more of a single action: you tap “browse” and pick a curated playlist based off a theme. You can do other things, like save songs to your collection and make playlists and follow users, but those actions are rarely rewarded with any kind of positive feedback. Spotify wants you listening to those playlists. So, that’s what I’ve been doing. They’re good. They do a good job at this. But it’s not good enough to be my only way to find new music.

Radio

Weirdly enough, I still find a lot of my stuff while passively listening to curated radio.

I listened to Soma FM in the 2000s all the time, but had forgotten about them, along with mp3 blogs, around the time I moved to Rdio. But in consciously trying to listen to music from more places, Soma became my default radio station. It helps that Soma has great apps on iOS and Roku. Indie Pop Rocks is basically the soundtrack playing on our living room and bedroom TVs.

I also find myself enjoying the music sections of Monocle Radio. The radio station plays a lot of talk shows, but their music shows focus on world pop, and it’s been a great source of European, Korean, and Japanese stuff I’d probably never hear otherwise.

There are two other radio stations I’ll turn on from time to time. I think a lot of people don’t realize this, but Beats1 on Apple Music works without a subscription. It’s pop and top 40 as hell, but as a sometimes food it’s more than good enough for me.

Indie 88 in Toronto is the most traditional thing here, as it’s a traditional FM station. But since I don’t drive a car and don’t own anything with an FM receiver, their online stream basically makes it an internet station for me. While they’re often indie in name only, I’ll usually hear something good the one or two hours a month I’ll tune in. The local Toronto flavour of it helps with concert news, too.

MP3 Blogs

I wrote about mp3 blogs already, but this is really the thing that’s made music in 2018 more fun. I’m still surprised they exist at all, and it’s been a fantastic way of bolstering my library and finding new stuff. Hearing why someone likes something still has so much value.

Adding songs to your personal collection through piracy and taping

I think the thing that’s fun about music collecting today is the bevy of options, but also that none of the options have really gone away. If you want to buy everything on vinyl, you can do so today easier than ever. If you want to legally purchase everything, that’s easy too. If you want to record online audio, rip audio from Spotify or YouTube, that’s so easy now. Digital music showed up at the exact same time as pirated digital music, so it’s always had this stigma, and in many cases the 2000s had this fear that if you pirated music the government would come after you. I think we’re clear of all that now. Streaming music stabilized the music business, and now everyone is a lot less worried about piracy ruining everything.

I’m not saying you have steal your music. I’m saying you should buy vinyl and pay for Spotify and send Soma some money and buy a shirt and a cassette at a local show, and if you download an mp3 or two on top of that, everything will probably be okay. I know people who are hardline anti-pirates who scoff heavy when I mention that I grabbed some mp3s. Everyone has their own dial. But piracy is harder than paying ten bucks a month, so I think we’re at the point where the people are mostly doing it out of habit or spite.

So why do I do it? Habit probably has a lot to do with it. My first piece of music equipment was a double cassette fm radio player that had a record button. It was absolutely designed for mixtapes. I DJ’d for several years and that required a large library of remixes and mashups, all of which existed under grey-area legalities. I like to mess with music tracks, and to do that you need the file. I’m the early days of streaming, bandwidth was expensive so I’d record an hour or two overnight and listen to it offline. I’ve been a taper, remixer, mixtape-making punk for nearly 30 years. It’s hard to change.

One big reason is trust. Like I said, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve seen several big music services fail and just vanish. From Zune to Rdio and all the way back to Sony’s stuff in the early 2000s, all that work I put into making libraries on those services just vanished one day. It’s hard to not want something out of that relationship.

Yeah yeah, piracy is wrong. But I don’t know how music works without it.

When I log into Facebook, I see Facebook. When I visit your blog, I see you

One of the best arguments for blogging today, from Jason Kottke’s latest “Noticing” newsletter:

Kari has kept her blog for the last 15 years. I love what she wrote about why she writes:

I also keep it out of spite, because I refuse to let social media take everything. Those shapeless, formless platforms haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it. I’ve blogged about this many times, but I still believe it: When I log into Facebook, I see Facebook. When I visit your blog, I see you.

I hope you see me here. If you don’t, that’s okay. I see me here.

Keeping a Personal Music Collection

My personal music collection history is fraught with poor choices. But I’d like to think it’s less because I’m an idiot, and more because I’m in search of the best solution for how I like to both listen to music and manage a collection.

In terms of hardware, I began with tapes and CDs in the 90s, moved to digital with a Sony minidisc player in the early 2000s, upgraded to iPods in 2005, switched to Zunes in 2009, Windows Phones in 2012, and then iOS devices in 2015.

Alongside the hardware, I would switch up where I found music. In the tapes era, I recorded a lot of fm music and made mixtapes. With CDs, it was with money at stores. Minidiscs were usually filled with ripped CDs and Napster grabs. The iPods and Zunes were mostly filled with collections from mp3 blogs, torrents, and podcasts (remember music podcasts?). When I moved to Windows Phone, I began using a combination of my personal collection (using the stellar Zune software) and a service called Rdio, which was Spotify but better.

I loved Rdio, but I never used it as my personal collection. I still kept a library in iTunes. But when Rdio shut down, I changed not only which devices I used to listen to music, I tried to simplify. So in late 2015, I went all-in on Spotify. I tried to accept that things wouldn’t be exactly everything I wanted as a compromise for simplicity.

Earlier this year I became frustrated with Spotify for how it treats your metadata. Spotify lets you do exactly two things with its collection (very important to remember that it’s Spotify’s collection and not yours): you can “save” a track to “your” collection, and you can add a track to a playlist. Unlike iTunes, there’s no way to heart or rate songs in Spotify. There’s a check mark or there isn’t, and it’s in a playlist or there isn’t. There’s also no way to know if a song is in a playlist unless you try to add it again (it’ll ask if you want duplicates).

These limitations aren’t deal breakers. I’ve asked almost everyone I know about this, and I’m the only person I know who rates their own music in any way. Most of them don’t even “save” the song. Most people don’t think about this. But this is the Internet, so of course I’ve been able to find deviants into this.

What is a deal breaker is that Spotify’s collection isn’t set in stone. Songs and albums leave the service all the time. What’s most annoying is that albums will disappear and then re appear, but your “save” information isn’t there anymore. So you can go to Artists and click on Heartless Bastards and find that you only have five songs saved when a month ago you had twenty.

And because songs will leave the service, those songs also disappear from your playlists. I have playlists for my novels—songs that inspired characters and plots, and every now and then, these playlists just get a little smaller. Something’s been removed, but you’re never always sure what.

But this is my fault. I’ve been using Spotify wrong. It’s best to think of Spotify as a Netflix of music, and not as a replacement for a fiddly personal collection. And much like how Netflix is good enough for most people because they don’t keep a personal and fiddly movie collection, Spotify is good enough. It just can’t do the thing I want.

I’m not leaving Spotify. What it does do well is curated and algorithm playlists that help you find new things, and it does that better than any other thing. Discover Weekly is still magic. But good playlists aren’t enough for Spotify to be my only thing. I’m demoting it to the same space Rdio used to occupy: the first place I look for new stuff.

So I’m back to using iTunes (and most importantly, iTunes Match) and I’m rebuilding my personal library. After a few years away, it’s so refreshing to see data. Date added. Date modified. Last played. Last skipped. Stars!. You have to go into settings and enable Stars, but they’re there. Smart playlists! I missed those the most. There are third party sites that try to do smart playlists with Spotify but none of them work the way you want.

Now, if only the iPhone music app was any good.

More Things April 06, 2018

With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.

I’ve been saving articles for the last month, so this is a big one. Expect future posts to be more succinct.

Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.

How will you react when a loved one tells you they are a furry? 
7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design
Ezra Koenig on His New Anime Series and the Next Vampire Weekend Album
Amazon’s Patriot is a messy, bloated antihero drama I couldn’t stop watching
Breaking Monopoly
The right way to tag everything in iTunes
Lifts Up The Lowly: The Angelic Ezra Furman
How the Nintendo Switch finally turned me into a gamer
Tools and Creative Permission
I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories
It’s Time To Stop Acting Like Nobody Watches Anime
‘Florence’ Is a Heartbreakingly Familiar Story of Everyday Relationships
Valley Forged: How One Man Made the Indie Video Game Sensation Stardew Valley
A fundamental ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ reading list
The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall
The “Introvert Hangover” Struggle is Real. How to Beat It.
How To Design For Everyone, In 3 Steps
Apple AirPods: the audiophile review
It’s Too Hard to Manage Music Now: Why It’s Okay to Miss the Old iPod
The Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson Used Gay Provocateur Buddy Cole As an Essential Megaphone
10 years later, Braid remains the definitive indie game
What Redbone would sound like while you’re making out in the bathroom of a house party
‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages
Teenage Vandals Were Sentenced to Read Books. Here’s What One Learned.

I know your real name now - thoughts on chapter 3

So, chapter 3 is the shortest first draft so far (1500 words as opposed to 2500 for the others). It’s the first chapter with a real plot point, and it’s a big world-breaking one. I wanted it to be punchy and explosive, so I wanted to keep it brief.

One of the reasons I’m writing these “thoughts” posts is that when I go back to these chapters for a second draft, I want to remember my motivation for decisions.

So, like, the fact that the chapter starts with the characters sneaking out for a couple of smokes, I think that conveys the late-90s era really well. The big cull of smokers hadn’t quite happened yet. I wanted one character to have drugs, but because they’re high school characters I want to keep it vague as to which drug. And I wanted Ram and Fourth on the opposite side of the room from Hall and Banks when the plot point occurs. It’s important that Ram and Fourth don’t actually see what’s happening.

Something I might go back and add is Ram and Fourth leaving the room during the plot point. Ram is trying to get Fourth up on the roof and has this scheme, but the plot point gives her an opening. But that might also be something I put in chapter 4 or 5.

I read a portion of this chapter back in November, and it played well. It’s almost a comical over dramatic way of doing what I want to do. I could very much see it get muted into something more realistic in subsequent drafts. But for now, I’m enjoying the over the top of it all.

Fran’s Not Here 23 - You’re Being So Season One Right Now

We did our first live episode or whatever!

Fran’s Not Here is a show about Toronto, co-hosted by Robert Pilgrim. Subscribe via RSS, iTunes, Overcast, Pocketcasts, and Soundcloud. Listen to older episodes on Mixcloud.

Morning Pages April 02, 2018

Fourth followed behind us, and said “I’m going to find my big strong woman.”

She did what everyone did at least once during a dance: make an entire circle around the room looking for one person, then turn around and find they were right behind you. And then, there she was.

“I missed you,” she said to Ram. Ram kissed her, picked her up and said “my plan is going so well.”

Fourth asked about spiking the orange drink. “No, I didn’t do that.”

She asked about distracting the chaperone’s. “No,” Ram said.

“Did you get the roof key from the janitor’s closet?”

Ram shook her head.

“Then how is your plan going well?” Fourth asked.

“You’re right in front of me, and you love me,” Ram said. Fourth melted.

“Aw.”

“Everything will work out,” Ram said. “You can’t force these things.”

Ram dropped her jacked on one of the tables near the edge of the room and took Fourth’s hand. “I hope it’s a slow one.”

Morning Pages March 31, 2018

I loved the smoker’s pit. It was far and away my favorite spot on the entire school grounds. I made all my friends here. Every major connection I had with people I loved began here. Located just outside and around the corner from the outside cafeteria exit, the smoker’s pit was actually a pit. The land sloped down towards this tree. Picture a small baseball diamond, except it all goes downhill and the tree is home. Fourth called it Deku after some Zelda thing. You could duck at certain spots and nobody looking out from the cement around the school could see you.

I wasn’t in school to excel. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t an academic. I wasn’t much of anything. But I could smoke, and I could crack jokes. That’s pretty much all I wanted to do, and thankfully I wasn’t alone with that goal.

It was normal for everyone to go outside every now and then at these dances, even the people who didn’t smoke. Fresh air was a necessary respite from the fog machine and orange drink sweat. I’d been waiting to see Banks move out so I could talk to her away from it all. She’d gone out with all her girlfriends, but that was fine. I’d just interrupt everything.

This blog is for me

This doesn’t mean you can’t read it, or shouldn’t read it. I hope you like it! I’m weirdly wrapped up in it, perhaps more than ever. Maybe it’s all the trouble Twitter and Facebook have gotten into the last few years for ruining society, or maybe it’s that Tumblr’s blogging tools haven’t improved in ten years, but returning to the simplest possible kind of blog has lit a fire under me. I want to do this every day. I have a Streaks goal for it and everything.

But who am I doing this for? Who’s my ideal reader? This is going to sound myopic and horribly millennial, but it’s pretty much myself. Hopefully I read this post again in a few years and it makes me happy, because writing it made me happy. Posting it made me happy. Sharing it with the world, but knowing that maybe I’m the only person reading made me happy. I’m at the point where I’m at peace with that.

I used to crave an audience. And then I sorta got one, and it freaked me out. I couldn’t handle it. And maybe I was micro-famous for the wrong thing. But last night I got on a stage and did an act and didn’t feel even the slightest bit of anxiety I’ve dealt with my whole life. It was huge for me. And this blog is huge for me. It took 35 years but I think I can handle everything that comes with this now. It felt great. This feels great. But more than anything, it doesn’t feel like an elevated me. I don’t need to come down from this. This is it now. And that’s the best feeling.

Morning Pages March 27, 2018

I like to think of major problems as mountains to climb. There’s the obvious reasons like how things get more challenging over time, and how it’s best to prepare as much as you can ahead of tackling the problem. And there’s the practical everyday advice of taking things one step at a time instead of being intimidated by the overall goal. But the mountain metaphor works on all kinds of levels. The mountain is only something to climb in your head. Not everyone sees the mountain as an obstacle. The mountain doesn’t really care if you climb it or not. And most potent, climbing the mountain does not defeat the mountain. After you’ve reached the summit, climbed back down and gone home to find peace, the mountain is still there.