Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Life Without Metadata

Or #blogworldproblems

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 date
  • I 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

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

Disquiet Junto Project 0637: Right (2 of 3)

The Assignment: Record the second third of an eventual trio.

/ 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.

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/