Category: music
Yes Thursday Music
- Mirror to the Sky, by Yes: new Yes in 2023. So far sounds really good.
- The Yes Album, by Yes: old Yes in 1971.
- Clockwork Angels, by Rush: Probably the last Rush we’ll ever get.
- Noise Floor, by Spock’s Beard
Gretchen, Stop Trying to Make ALAC Happen!
I have a bunch of FLAC files from an album I bought, it was that or low-quality MP3. iTunes (“Music.app”) doesn’t read FLAC, even tho it’s the industry standard for lossless audio.
So I fought with ffmpeg (each “f” stands for “fuck you”), and it converted about half of them into usable files.
Eventually I found XLD X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X
Had to right-click, Open to get past Mac Gatekeeper, ugly little program, been in development forever, but it works perfectly. Converted a directory full of flac into m4a, then just dragged them into iTunes and now have music where I want it. If I’m real excited for it, I could downgrade them to AACs, but eh good enough for now.
Everyone be sure to tell Apple that ALAC is stupid and not going to happen.
(the ffmpeg I did was:
for f in *.flac; do
echo "$f"
ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a alac -c:v copy -acodec alac "${f%.flac}.m4a"
done
but now I really don’t wanna hear about how to fix that.)
Angry Wires Monday Music
- Chasing Ghosts, by Stabbing Westward
- MMXII, by Killing Joke
- Full Spectrum Dominance, by Killing Joke: video from new EP
- More to Hell, by Psyclon Nine: new to me, but they seem angry. Later: Meh, butt-alt-rock. I’m an atheist, and still think “there is no god!” is overly whiny for a chorus lyric. Dude, we know.
- Dark Skies, by Kevorkian Death Cycle: Later: Quite good! I should listen to more of KDC.
- Mechanical Soul, by Front Line Assembly
- Last Station, by Leæther Strip
Twin Peaks Tuesday Music
Krautrock Friday Music
Someday soon the Machines may be making music instead of Humans. Until then, here’s some Machine-like music.
Sing
Rather than my longer music playlists, I often just sing one song to fediverse, like this. It’s a slightly manual process, but I have part of it automated:
nowplaying.applescript
#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Music"
set t to current track
set msg to (t's artist & " " & t's name)
msg
end tell
urlencode
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import urllib.parse
for line in sys.stdin:
line = line.rstrip()
print(urllib.parse.quote(line)) # unquote for the urldecode script
sing
#!/bin/zsh
q=`nowplaying.applescript|urlencode`
open -a Chromium "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!yt+$q"
open -a Chromium "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!genius+$q"
Then I just type sing
, it pops up Chromium (my garbage media browser), I pick the best YT video and paste that, grab some lyrics and paste them, I have o/
bound as ♫ in Text replacements, and add a #music tag.
I suspect I could automate it a bit more, pick the first result on Genius and YT, but I trust neither to be right. Apple Music would be easier, but not everyone has it. I could grab cover art and paste that and a template into my appdot.net toot box. Anyway, it’s the post-Human touch that shows I care. It’s amusing that I have three scripting languages to get one thing done (urlencode/urldecode scripts date back to the ’90s).
Building the Perfect Wednesday Music
Still Rockin’ Saturday Music
- Permanent Waves, by Rush: 1980
Begin the day with a friendly voice
A companion unobtrusive
Plays that song that’s so elusive
And the magic music makes your morning mood - Flying in a Blue Dream, by Joe Satriani: 1989
- Shapeshifting, by Joe Satriani: 2020
- Hall of the Mountain Grill, by Hawkwind: 1974
- Somnia, by Hawkwind: 2021
- The Grand Illusion, by Styx: 1977
- Crash of the Crown, by Styx: 2021
Back to Posting Friday Music
Haven’t done a music post in a while. Lotta new music to cover, and I’m angry at how stupid people are, so great combo!