I Made a Music

ok, so here’s what happened

I had been sharing snippets of audio with friends as mp3 files.

My recording process is this -
In Syntə:

record name_of_wav

Then once I have finished the session and quit, Syntə drops a wav into the audio-recordings directory.

This is an undocumented feature, which is because it isn’t rigorously tested and the wav encoding is pretty janky. I chopped the header (an array of bytes) out of a wav and that just gets slapped on to what is recorded (which has been written by the sound engine as a series of little-endian bytes - which simply means the bytes (8-bit chunks of data) are reversed in order for each 32-bit integer). Don’t worry if that all sounds a bit intense, trust me it’s just jargon - no more complicated than the numbers you started writing down in primary school 😊

So, anyway. After that, I can convert the wav file to an mp3 file using audacity (which I’m trying to find a replacement for). I usually also boost the output by about 4dB with a limiter too.
I could add a secondary brickwall limiter to the output section of the sound engine. But it’s not essential and tbh I don’t feel I’m quite good enough at designing compressors yet - after only nearly two decades of trying…
And really, I’m quite proud that Syntə can spit out lovely recordings as-is :)

and then what

So there I was sharing these snippets about. But after a while it became a bit inconvenient. That’s when I thought about uploading them somewhere, so I could just send a link instead.
I’d heard a lot about bandcamp, it seemed like a popular platform. I had reservations due to it being sold twice and the potential for enshittification. Since taking the leap I was reassured by the Not A Diving Podcast episode which interviewed someone from the site. Surprisingly enough, for a smaller player (compared to say, spotify) bandcamp has disbursed over 1.4 billion to artists so far. So it’s quite a healthy business.
They also seem to have retained a consistent ethos.
There are alternatives, like faircamp, which I may try in future. I also might be releasing some ambient material on a friends new independent label 🤞

complications

I have actually been quite reticent about doing recordings over the past 18 months.
It always feels that once something is recorded its then set in stone - frozen, ossified.
And that’s still largely the case, it’s hard to go back to something once you’ve listened to it a few times. And like the egomaniac I am, I usually do listen to my own tracks a lot. But also, I made the music that I like, so why wouldn’t I want to listen to it? Like, I eat my own cooking daily, so?
It’s also handy to have snapshots to remind myself what I’ve been up to, carry forward inspiration etc. Often I wonder how I actually did that¹

music:

I feel like something not talked about much within live coding - but something I want to be very open about - I’m making music. I’ve always loved it. It’s always had a profound effect on me. I’m about experiences and expressions of joy, wonder, passion. Energy.

So,

once I had gotten over this a bit, and for the other reasons above, I set up a bandcamp page (here). There’s a link to to it at the top of this website too, by clicking on the musical notes emoji.

And I’m really glad I did.

Then something happened.

Someone actually bought my music! I was so pleased, I was beaming from ear to ear for days. I’m an actual music artist now!

Yay!

But anyway, I’m going to keep recording and uploading. Syntə is doing a great job. No mixing, no processing necessary. Sure, they could maybe do with a little more finesse. But my favourite music is always somewhere between rawness and honed craft. Too ‘well produced’ and something is lost. Judging that boundary will probably be my life’s work as an artist.

future

One of my friends complained that bandcamp is not easy to use, and to be fair, they have a point. I mean that doesn’t stop people spending four grand² on it like someone else I know. But just simple things like it’s not immediately obvious that you need to click on the squares to get to the music, or that the artist bio is absent from the landing page. Still, it’s pretty good though.
My friend suggested posting on youtube and adding a koffee link, which I might do in future. I have a extremely neglected channel I can use already.

:)

Thanks for reading my ramblings x