Tag: music

Recap | May 2025

6 June 2025 / Sinead

May was much busier than April, partly for fun reasons – going to more events and seeing friends more – but partly for unexpected work busy-ness and family illness.

Fun

Music

When trying to pre-order the upcoming GoGo Penguin album from Rough Trade, I found that Totorro would be playing there on May 23rd. I quickly signed my friend Josh up to attend with me, using our usual “I’ll pay for the tickets if you do the driving” system. (I hate driving to new places but don’t mind paying for things, while he enjoys driving but likes saving money).

I’ve never been to a gig for an instrumental band before, and have been curious about how different it would be from the rock gigs I’m used to. I also wondered where the audience focal point would be for a band without a singer; turns out that my default focus was on the guitarist on the left.

Totorro had a really fun energy on stage, with the band members having non-verbal in-jokes such as miming playing tennis with each other via the headstocks of their guitars while still being note-perfect. The support band, STEALTH CAT, were also good, but only had a 5-song setlist to show off in. We had a great time, especially as it was such a small gig that we had personal space and could go outside between sets to cool down and chat about music. For me, gigs of about 100 people are the perfect size.

Other

I finally had some in-person Magic: The Gathering sessions with friends after months of us not having the time to meet. The others were being responsible adults and, in some cases, parents, so I can’t blame them!

I had forgotten just how long our games tend to last, especially when we are rusty on the timings and effect resolutions. One of the games definitely lasted over 3 hours. In one match I tried to use the Murders at Karlov Manor deck I picked up at EGX last year, but struggled to get the commander’s effect to kick in or to summon any stealth face-down creatures, so ended up conceding. My faithful Chatterfang squirrel-token deck did claim one win, which I was happy with.

Games

The list of games I want to try has increased, as always, but I’ve fallen back down the Two Point Hospital rabbit hole so very little else is being played. However, I did try out some new demos on both Xbox and Steam, and I also wrote mini-reviews of the demos I tried in April.

Technological Overthinking #3 | Retiring Last.FM

24 December 2023 / Sinead

This installment of overthinking yet again revolves around music, but this time it’s about keeping a long-term record of what I choose to listen to over time. (This was partially inspired by wanting to have my own version of a Spotify Wrapped that didn’t require Spotify!)

A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to keep a consistent play count and record of what I’d listened to over time, that wasn’t solely dependent on my PC. I’ve reinstalled Windows, corrupted things in Windows, and changed hard drives out frequently enough in the past that I’ve had to recreate my music library data quite a few times before. Also, I don’t only listen to music on my PC, so using an external source that could collate data from my PC, my phone, and any manual additions, seemed to be the best approach.

Last.FM was the main tracking service I’d heard of, and it seemed trustworthy because of having been around for such a long time, so it felt like a good choice. I signed up for Last.FM in December 2021 and, at first, I really liked using it. My media software of choice, MusicBee, has a built-in Last.FM feature, so automatic scrobbling (the Last.FM term for ‘keeping track of a song being listened to’) from my PC was easy. I enjoyed the recommendation mix and radio, as they gave me a way of discovering new music that wasn’t attached to a streaming service.

The listening statistics were also fun to use, as they covered both global and personal stats. Being able to look up an artist or album and see which of their albums and tracks had the most listeners was interesting. But being able to click on an album and view my play-count of each song from that album, and to click on a song and see each time that I had scrobbled it, was a whole new level of data to enjoy.

Technological Overthinking #2 | Sony Walkman Album Art

4 June 2020 / Sinead

One recurrent technological question I have is why my MP3 players never display album artwork consistently. The issue often seems random; when I get some albums working, others are blank in their place. So I wanted to figure out what the problem was and write solutions down for future reference.

As I’ve used Sony Walkman MP3 players since about 2008, I initially checked posts and articles about Sony players. However, this problem applies to multiple brands of MP3 players and to other devices like digital photo frames.

Many people with Sony Walkman players have posted about cover art issues on Sony’s support website. But the official replies just tell people to transfer songs using Sony’s Content Transfer software, without explaining why the issue exists. I wanted to fix the issue within the music programs I already use (MediaMonkey and Mp3tag) instead of adding another program into the mix.

After looking on multiple sites, subreddits and software forums, I found three essential criteria for making album art and other tags show up properly on Sony MP3 players. (These criteria may apply to other MP3 players as as well, and the “baseline” JPG criteria may resolve issues with car infotainment systems and digital photo frames).

1) Every song must be tagged using ID3 tag version 2.3.
2) Every song’s artwork must be embedded into its ID3 tag.
3) Every artwork image must be a JPG. More specifically, it must be a “baseline” JPG rather than a “progressive” JPG.

Now I’ll explain what all of those words mean, and the steps that I followed to make my song files and cover artworks fit these criteria. It’s important for me to clarify that each individual criterion was figured out by someone else; I’m just putting them together so that I can show the steps in one place.

Technological Overthinking #1 | Music Library (2023 version)

4 June 2020 / Sinead

I can understand why streaming services have become so popular: being able to access a large library of familiar and new music that can’t be erased by a faulty hard drive or a wrong button-press is appealing. But, like most techies, I lean towards the “control” side of the convenience-control spectrum in many situations.

For music specifically, I prefer ownership over streaming. I like being able to buy albums from multiple places, store them and back them up wherever I wish, and play them on software I already use, rather than being restricted to specific marketplaces or software clients. (I would also rather rely on my storage and backups than on the unbelievably complex licensing arrangements between streaming services and publishers). For me, staying on team “offline library” was the obvious choice.

Investigating an issue with my MP3 player last year led me to an interesting program called Bliss. In short, Bliss manages your music library based on rules that you define. You set rules about how you want files to be labelled, named, and organised, and Bliss either highlights files which don’t fit the rules so that you can edit them, or adjusts them to meet the rules automatically.

Although Bliss is overkill for my relatively small and wholly-offline library, I really liked its rule-based approach. So I’ve taken the rules I decided on within Bliss and recreated them inside my desktop software of choice, MusicBee.

Dissociation and Gigs

18 November 2017 / Sinead

Gigs are a confusing place to be when you experience any form of dissociation. For me, there are two likely outcomes. Sometimes I feel the barriers between me and everything else reduce, so I feel closer to seeing the world as a typical person does. But sometimes I instead feel more aware of the dissonance between what I’m perceiving and what I’m experiencing, and so I notice those barriers more acutely.

This isn’t an aspect of dissociation that I’ve talked to anyone about before, but it’s been on my mind recently while I’ve tried to figure out which elements make the good outcome more likely.