I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ The funny thing about the marine layer is how you hear foghorns on sunny days, because the bay is filled with fog while the city skies are clear. Funnier still — odder still — are the days when it’s incredibly foggy out, and yet you hear no foghorns.
▰ The thrill of entering an auth-code while the number is red
▰ Morning trio for dishwasher, shower, and [some sort of sidewalk repair being done by the city involving trees and concrete].
▰ In the center lane of a three-lane street, with a school bus to the left and a city bus to the right, the car’s windows down, and it felt less like real life and more like I was in a THX audio demo
▰ The Disquiet Junto is two weeks from the 666th consecutive weekly project. You might say it’s an omen.
The Assignment: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0664: Mother Beat The Assignment: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time.
There is just one step to this project: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time.
Background: This project was proposed by Jason (Bassling) Richardson and his son, Oscar. The inspiration for the time signature that we’re employing is the track “Strong One (Masked Man),” used for the final level of Mother 3, a 2006 Game Boy Advance video game created by Shigesato Itoi. The complexity of the music increases throughout the game, with players finding that the rhythm-based combat system rewards those who can understand the musical patterns, and this allows them to complete encounters more easily. There are some differing opinions online about the specific time signature, but for the sake of this project we’re going with 29/16. Certainly feel free to come to your own conclusion.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0664” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) 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 664th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Mother Beat — The Assignment: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time — at https://disquiet.com/0664/
Another day, another trivial yet time-consuming conundrum with playing digital audio files at home. Today there were two odd issues:
The first is a persistent matter that dates back to the earliest experiences I had trying to store albums as audio files, which is the given system doesn’t recognize the files as part of an album. I had a three-track recording, the wav files of which I downloaded, along with cover art, from a music publicist’s Dropbox folder. When I loaded them into Audio Ranger, which is the software I use to edit metadata, only the track file names appeared. The rest of the fields were blank. This lack of data is, unfortunately, quite common with promotional audio files from publicists. I added all the requisite fields, and associated the cover art with the files, and it all looked fine. In fact, when I loaded the tracks into the VLC audio player, it all worked fine. However, when I copied the files to the external hard drive that I use for my Plex jukebox system, only one track was considered the “album,” and the other two tracks were listed as unidentified standalones. I tried to fix this various ways, and in the end the only thing that worked was downloading the album as FLAC files (instead of wav ones).
The second issue was quite odd. A publicist sent me a download link to an album. It seemed vaguely familiar, but the release date was recent, so I just downloaded it, confirmed the files had the metadata (they did, because they were housed on Bandcamp, which seems to routinely handle metadata well, at least for albums with a single artist), and moved them to the external hard drive. However, the album failed to appear in my Plex system’s list of recently added recordings. I tried a few things: I noticed some non-Western symbols in the title, and so I removed those, but to no avail; then I deleted the files from the drive and retransferred them; then I deleted the files, re-downloaded them, and retransferred them. None of these approaches worked. Then I noticed something: the album seemed familiar because I already had downloaded it and saved it to another hard drive in the same Plex system. But the system didn’t alert me to the duplicate copy because I had two sets of files on different drives. The closest it came to acknowledging the issue was by failing to display the new album on the “recently added” playlist.
