Karel P Kerezman @greyduck@x0r.be

Welp. Festive blinkenlights strewn on the deck once again. Timer's set. The show should begin around nightfall. There are lasers!

Ha ha, whoops, MusicBrainz didn't want to tag that album's files because they're all version one-point-zero of the Ogg Vorbis codec.

Time to re-rip some more CDs!

Ugh, I need to go on a MusicBrainz Picard tear through my library and I don't WANNA because I'm going to have to argue with it a LOT. ("No, the new Jessie Ware album is not from an LP, you morons.")

It's got a silly name, but BUTT does the job. I couldn't get a working audio stream setup going without it. (I tried using EdCast-to-Icecast2 directly via MediaMonkey plugin but that... didn't go well.)

Ooof. Linkin Park? What's that still doing in there, Me?

Ah, The Men's "Church of Logic, Sin and Love". The lack of Oxford comma in the title is probably why they didn't hit bigger than they did, am I right?

(Narrator: "He was not right.")

I'm gonna need to make a "killer b-sides" playlist somehow, some day. Maybe just use "mood" tagging like I do for BGM tracks, dunno.

(This message brought to you by Genesis' "Feeding The Fire" coming up in the random stream.)

Another streaming-test milestone achieved: Confirmed that the "what's playing" text-file generator script in MediaMonkey is correctly dealing with double-byte characters in song tags (by basically punting to a "can't read these tags, sorry" output).

I really need to redo a lot of those Japanese tags to 'romanji' versions some day...

Never mind the collision of bouncy J-pop with goth metal. I mean if it was Babymetal or Band-Maid that'd be one thing, but it wasn't, so.

Future runs of this sort of test will involve slightly more... curated... selections. Fully random playlists lead to trainwrecks, after all, such as cramming Stabbing Westward's "What Do I Have To Do?" up against Queen of Hearts' "Overcome By The Rhythm."

Whoopsie.

OK, it's time for a long-duration torture-test of the streaming-audio thingy. Enjoy 9 hours-ish of random stuff from my MediaMonkey library as a US-Turkey-Day treat. Load up the XSPF at https://earworm.me and let me know how it goes, eh?

Yesterday: "Okay, I finally updated the out-of-date plugins on all of the WordPress sites.

Today: *gets alerts that the plugins all need updating again*

FFS.

@djsundog Because of my environment and because I desperately wanted to make MM the source driver for this whole thing, I am running MM -> VCABLE virtual audio device (so I'm not doing the "stream every noise my damned PC makes" thing) -> BUTT -> my Icecast2 server located at https://earworm.me and... damn me but it's kinda mostly working.

Tell MediaMonkey to give me a workday-long random playlist. An hour and a half in, I get a block where three out of four songs are all by KONGOS.

I mean, cool, I love their stuff, but I would PAY for a proper artist-separation plugin for smart playlists, dammit.

I know I'm hardly a judge of musical excellence, but for me, the finest Gorillaz moment is the existence of "Tomorrow Comes Today."

My tests came back good. Very good. Reassuringly, encouragingly good.

I just need to keep on as I've been doing with the meds & diet & exercise to maintain this, and hey, that's doable.

I guess I'm fortunate to be at the clinic getting blood drawn for diabetes reasons than being here for COVID reasons, yeah?

Look, I know that in a better world I'd be doing all of this in Linux, but you know what? If I have to be in Windows-land, at least I have the Swiss File Knife utility.

'sfk.exe list -late=1 -pure c:\ ssacli.exe'

That gets me the latest installed (because yes, techs are lazy and don't follow HP's instructions to remove old versions first) version of the HP array utility CLI executable so I can save it to a variable for status-check RMM-tool scripting purposes.

Aw yeah.