Karel P Kerezman @greyduck@x0r.be

Got holiday bonus, used part of it to replace my lemon of an S5E Samsung tablet (the entire line is citrus-y, due to a physical design flaw where touching the edges can short out the WiFi). So, Happy Holidays to ME.

The whole point of having the option of sick days is to bail on work if you feel like garbage, right?

(I have to remind myself of this because of my jerkwad of a brain being all, "you don't feel THAT bad, buck up, do the work!")

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."