Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 68

Life Without Metadata

When you send me an album without proper metadata for the tracks, this is what I do:

I unzip the archive.I load it into VLC for a quick listen. (Recommendations for alternate, elegant, quick-listen apps on a Mac appreciated.)I notice the tracks have little if any information — and may even be in the wrong order.I pull up AudioRanger, which is the software I use to edit the metadata of audio files. (If other tools are recommended, please lemme know.)I see in the grid what is missing. The main things I look for are:

Title (track)
Artist
Album (title)
Track number
Release dateI proceed to fill those in manually. The biggest hassle is the track title information.I then locate the album’s cover, either in your .zip file (thank you!) or on your Bandcamp page. Sometimes I can’t find it. I then attach the image to the files, again using AudioRanger.Then I save this material.Then I load it into my digital jukebox (I use Plex).Often these promotional .zip archives don’t actually include the press materials. Easily some 75% of the time, I create a .txt file and copy and paste in the background information, and then I save that in the folder with your audio files.

Think of how much easier it would be for the people to whom you’re sending your music if you just took the extra step to edit your metadata. On a positive note, something about Bandcamp’s audio hosting process generally seems to ensure that all such information is in the right place (sometimes excepting the press information).

Scratch Pad: Whistle, Wenders, Whitehead

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ There’s this kid who can’t whistle but sure practices a lot who walks by the house every morning on the way to school and it is the best thing ever

▰ Due to the fairly intense wind outside (30 MPH gusts), in the building where I rent a tiny office the skylight is making a buzzing that sounds like there’s a fly here the size of an avocado

▰ Working through 7th chords (major, dominant, minor, diminished, half-diminished, minor flat 5) during guitar class felt somehow like sorting through pages of D&D rules

▰ Thought some random tab on my laptop was playing a drone album, but it’s the bathroom fan

▰ Afternoon trio for laundry machine spin cycle, passing jet plane, and low level electric hum

▰ My email inbox would seem to suggest that more records have been released in the first two weeks of March than in all of 2023. It’s sort of out of control, but hey, worse things than an embarrassment of riches.

▰ The March 14 Strands game on the New York Times’ website was particularly fun

▰ Alert! Wim Wenders Criterion Closet! He says he’s the first person allowed to enter it twice. Last time was 11 years ago, before he had Blu-ray. He spies Until the End of the World on a shelf and says he thinks it may be the best thing he ever did.

▰ I finished reading several books last week, including my eighth novel of the year, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, which is up there with other favorites I’ve read in 2024 (Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours, and Alastair Reynolds’ Permafrost). Lively and personal, and so smart, especially how it threads in the characters’ personal histories. I also finished the first proper non-fiction book I’ve read this year, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America, and I’ve read a ton more of the manga series The Fable (about a hitman who is required to take a year off), by Katsuhisa Minami, which I’m now up through volume 16. It’s always interesting how, when you read a few books proximate to each other, connections surface. The Whitehead and Desmond both deal with the invisible and visible boundaries of class and race, the Whitehead and Minami deal with hitmen, and all three deal with characters/individuals whose lives are significantly constrained by societal forces. That statement isn’t to excuse the murderous occupation of the main character in The Fable, more to point out how difficult it is to properly hide oneself when one has been a killer for so long.

Chords

When I’m not working, these are the forms I spend time filling out

Disquiet Junto Project 0637: Right (2 of 3)

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0637: Right (2 of 3)
The Assignment: Record the second third of an eventual trio.

These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.

While this is the second part of a three-part project, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which will occur over the course of three consecutive weeks, starting last week. 

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0636). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Important: Leave space for what is yet to come.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from (47 as of last count). All but one are in this playlist:

One additional track is on the Lines discussion board:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0636-left-1-of-3/66416/2

(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist and discussion. Things are fluid on the internet.)

To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.

Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece (more on this in Step 5 below).

It is strongly encouraged that you look through the discussion thread for the previous project on the Lines forum because many tracks include additional contextual information there:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0636-left-1-of-3/

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right. 

To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track you selected in Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do two this time. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet. I will keep an updated list in this Google Drive document of what has been utilized:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kDorIMT9j_nQQPXACYpMPe4B86T2QD5Xvv98XAOS4UE/edit?pli=1#gid=0

The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0637” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required).

Share: Post your track and a description explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0637-right-2-of-3/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Stick close to the length of the track yours adds to.

Deadline: Monday, March 18, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s required for this sequence of projects to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 637th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Right (2 of 3) — The Assignment: Record the second third of an eventual trio — at https://disquiet.com/0637/

End of Day

Screen Time

Love my neighborhood. Bonus points for that Morvern Callar score.

Turning Solos into Duets Toward Trios

As of this morning, Tuesday, March 12, we ended up with 47 tracks in the first part of this three-part sequence of projects, over the course of which the Disquiet Junto community will eventually produce numerous trios asynchronously. All but one of those 47 tracks (see the spreadsheet) are in the SoundCloud playlist. There may still be a few stragglers, which is fine, as always. If you’re familiar enough with the Junto, let alone an old hand at this, then you know what the next project’s instructions will be, because we’ve been doing this trio sequence for several years. That said, if you can wait until Thursday, please do, as there will be specific instructions in regard to anyone looking to do a second or third track in the second week, when we turn the solos into duets, in advance of potential trios. Almost all Junto projects state to just do one track, but for the second and third of this sequence of three projects, you’re be able to do more than one. The hope is that as many as possible of the solos at least get to become duets, if not proper trios. More details to follow. Instructions will go out on Thursday via juntoletter.disquiet.com. This trios sequence is a great way for people to work together, to get to know each other, to potentially hear their own work in different contexts — and to record with a larger sense of purpose, knowing that one needs to leave space for others, and use the space provided to one by others. The project isn’t just about collaboration. It’s also about process, and planning, and patience. People have mentioned, in the past, that leaving room for others has led to them leaving more room in their own work, and to them thinking more thoroughly of the various parts of their own recordings as distinct yet interrelated elements.

Why I Am Not Using “Notes”

Posts&
Notes&
Threads&
Chats

A few people have asked recently why I don’t post any “Notes” on Substack from This Week in Sound, my newsletter. “Notes” are a feature of Substack, the tool I currently use to publish This Week in Sound. I moved my newsletter over from TinyLetter after I maxed out that service’s subscriber-count ceiling, all for the best since TinyLetter was finally, at the end of February 2024, shut down by MailChimp, which had purchased it a year or so after it was created, well over a decade earlier. 

The question about my Substack Notes non-activity makes sense, as I am active (on weekdays) on social media, and Notes is, in essence, a social media platform. There are two main reasons I haven’t used Notes yet: focus and confusion. 

First, focus: A newsletter is, to me, a distinct form of communication — from blogs, from social media, from podcasts, from freelance journalism, from book-writing, etc. I also happen to think it’s an optimal one, perhaps because I came of age in an age of print periodicals. (I started my first email newsletter, epulse, in 1994, when I was an editor at Tower Records. It ran, with some interruptions, for a decade.) When I signed onto TinyLetter, having previously mostly used Majordomo and the bcc line for newsletter publishing, it was, to me, a classic mode of one-to-many communication, essentially a form of broadcast. When I later went looking for a new newsletter tool, having foreseen the end of TinyLetter, much of the competition provided much more than a newsletter. Many newsletter tools essentially wanted to take over the concept of me having a website. I elected to use Substack as a singular tool, one among many, my other main one being WordPress (on which Disquiet.com is published). 

The Notes tool within Substack strikes me less as a tool for people on Substack to use to communicate with their readers and each other, and more as a tool for Substack to evolve a system that locks in its users, who will eventually find their varied forms of communication (Substack also hosts podcasts) all not just in a single basket but intractably intertwined. 

Along those lines, I discerned that several readers wanted nothing to do with Notes. They just wanted to read a newsletter. Perhaps they are in the minority, but I feel an affinity with their disinterest. To post Notes on Substack seems to send a signal to newsletter readers that they’re missing out if they don’t read the Notes. As a kind of reverse of that, I make a habit each Saturday of posting, on Disquiet.com, and in reduced form the following Tuesday in This Week in Sound, what I wrote the week prior on social media. I call this my Scratch Pad, as that is how I see social media: as a scratch pad where one works out ideas in public. I later repost, in collated blog/newsletter form, the material for several reasons, one being that my knowing I will do so keeps a bit of a self-editing damper on my activity, the other being that readers won’t feel like they’re missing out on stuff if they don’t participate in social media.

Second, confusion: Substack didn’t merely add Notes to its core utility of sending newsletters — which it calls “Posts,” despite that being a word more closely associated with blogging (though you could argue it has an association with the idea of “post”ing a letter). Substack also has “Chats” and “Threads.” I will state now that I remain perplexed by the differences between these — and if I can’t comprehend the distinctions, then I can’t make creative use of the platforms. 

It says something about seeming fungibility of Substack’s various sub-platforms that the site dedicated a page to distinguishing them from each other (actual post title: “What is the difference between Notes, Chat, and Threads?”). The piece reads a bit like the Taco Bell menu: similar ingredients, different proportions, questionable health benefits. For example, per that actual Substack help page, Notes are “published to your Substack profile and shared with subscribers,” whereas Chats is for “private messages sent only to subscribers” and Threads are “discussion threads to help tap into the energy of your readerships.” Suffice to say, that doesn’t exactly clear things up. 

Substack isn’t alone in being linguistically confusing. Certainly, the terminology splatter of online communication has gotten especially absurd in the past year. Meta, for example, introduced Threads, which despite its name seems largely populated with single posts — and, in fact, isn’t particularly adept at threads, at least compared to Mastodon. As for Mastodon, its own app uses the term “reblogged” when you “boosted” or otherwise “shared” someone else’s post, meaning they’re employing the sort of language from back when what came to be called social media was still called “microblogging.”

Substack’s original introduction of Notes referred repeatedly to the “attention economy” (more like the distraction economy), which it criticizes. Their description of Notes comes across a bit like a car manufacturer noting, in appropriately solemn tones, its concerns about driving under the influence of alcohol — and then explaining that the cup holder was designed to keep bottles cool. Actually, that’s not a fair comparison, because Substack never even makes a clear case that Notes are anything other than another way to earn the attention of one’s readers. How many people publish — not merely write, but publish — without the desire to attract and retain a reader’s attention. Certainly the so-called attention economy has its demerits, but the idea that Notes is apart from it doesn’t seem to hold water. 

So, no, I don’t have any immediate plans to add Notes to my social media activity. I already post to Mastodon, and (often in a shorter version determined by their respective constraints) to Bluesky and Threads, and less frequently to Facebook, which I use mostly to communicate with friends and family who don’t really care about (or, frankly, for) my interest in sound. I’m pretty active online, but I’m not “always online” let alone “extremely online.” I don’t do social media between dinner and breakfast. I take weekends off. And I try to use my tools intentionally and selectively. 

On Repeat

A habit I had fallen out of and need to get back on: I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Gorgeous litle bit of laptop synthesis from he_nu_ri:

▰ Ritual: The first in a planned year-long series of albums being released by Sadnoise (aka Femi Fleming), toward his academic thesis work — exuberant, glistening granular noise-making

https://sadnoise.bandcamp.com/album/ritual

▰ Formula Fiction 3: Live synthesizer work from Kamran Sadeghi, an artfully unsettling rhythmic excursion

https://kamransadeghi.bandcamp.com/album/formula-fiction-3

▰ Critical Path: From Andrew Land (aka Bailrigg), a submerged ambient track plus an even more subtle and aqueous reworking

https://marenostrumlabel.bandcamp.com/album/critical-path

Scratch Pad: Reuse, Unicode, VLC

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ Lunchtime trio for space heater, microwave, and passing bus

▰ I do write liner notes. I only write them for records I really like a lot. Not just like, but like a lot. I try to be as polite as possible — and to do so as concisely as possible — when I express disinterest in requests to write liner notes for records I don’t, myself, appreciate sufficiently.

▰ Oh very cool. A musician friend asked awhile back to use one of my field recordings on an upcoming release, and I just got an advance listen. It sounds great. I’ll share when it’s up.

▰ I must be being punished for something, because I found out about the new DJ Krush album (再生 – Saisei) just before I have to go into a long meeting. Getting a quick listen in the few minutes I have.

▰ The Duet Display app has retina mode, making my cheap Android tablet a fantastic portable second screen for my MacBook

▰ You know it’s gonna be a banger when the name of the ZIP archive includes the phrase “Unicode Encoding Conflict”

▰ My CPU use case for a laptop is pretty simple: how long does it take to launch VLC when I click an album’s worth of ALAC (or WAV or FLAC) files?

▰ Among the most popular Disquiet Junto music projects each year is the “trio” sequence. One week after another, musicians around the world collaborate to record trios. Folks are uploading the first third of future trios right now.

▰ This seems to have elevated quickly

▰ I finished reading two graphic novels this week: Julia Wertz’s Impossible People, a somehow quite funny exploration of her battle with alcoholism (tears of a clown), as well as a collection of short pieces, The Swamp, by Yoshiharo Tsuge (b. 1937), a mix of fatalistic ninja, detective, and other comics, with an informative introduction by Mitsuhiro Asakawa. One thing that the Tsuge translation did for me was reinforce my sense that maybe sound effects shouldn’t be translated. I’m still on the fence about such an editorial decision, but the elegance and “fit” of the originals rarely seems equaled by the translations. I spent many years working in manga, at Viz Media, but not on comics like these.

▰ I finished reading one of the two long novels I’ve been deep into, my first David Mitchell book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the story of a Dutch East India port in Japan, starting at the very end of 1799. I’m not sure what makes it, per the cover blurb, a “masterpiece,” but it’s a well-written yarn. I vote that next time Neal Stephenson co-writes something, it’s with Mitchell (an idea suggested both by the historical fiction detail, and an instance when a character says something about how “science itself is in the early stages of becoming sentient,” despite this all taking place at the very dawn of the 19th century).