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Pretty Good Hat

Tag: music

Well this is disappointing. I’ve been enjoying making a 365 for 2024 playlist, cheerfully adding a song a day. And Apple Music hasn’t actually kept the additions I’ve been making for nearly a month!

An image of the album cover for John Moreland’s album ‘Live at Third Man Records’: A close-up monotone profile image of him, bearded and in a hat and glasses, with a guitar strap across his shoulder.

I really enjoy John Moreland’s lyricism and performance style. This spare, live album is heartfelt and shows off both nicely. Great for a quiet early holiday afternoon.

I spent an unseemly portion of today getting Suse to work on my finicky NUC to run my Roon server. If it’s still unstable then I think it must be a hardware issue, and I’ll just replace the whole thing with a Mac Mini.

A bright yellow background highlights bold text showing my favorite new-to-my artists this year: Big Thief, Low, Japanese Breakfast, Alvvays, and Courtney Marie Andrews. The hashtag at the bottom of the image reads #tuneR.

A heatmap showing calendar days through twelve months, with light yellow showing ‘light’ listening days shading to purple for the heavist days where I listened to the most music. I listened to a lot of music in Januar, July, October and November.

I dusted off the last.fm data visualizer that I started working on last year around this time. This year I built a couple of fun Spotify-wrapped-like visualizations; why should Spotify users have all the fun?

If you’re a last.fm user, you can try it, too! TuneR is a small Shiny app that you can provide your last.fm username and see your year in music, a comparison of this year to your all-time most-listened artists, and a fun heatmap of your listening activity.

I was a little worried that either upstream bandwidth or firewall nonsense would make it hard to use the new Arc app with my home Roon setup. I’m super pleased to find it basically seamless in my case! After enabling it on my system and not touching a single network setting, I listened to a bunch of music from my Roon server while out running errands today. I had no buffering, dropouts or stuttering. Just music from my house playing in my car. Pretty cool.

I’m not sure my upstream internet speed will allow me to use it effectively, but I’m enthused all the same for the announcement of Roon Arc – a mobile client for your home Roon library that integrates streaming services and enables download for fully offline listening. Pretty cool!

A situation yesterday prompted me to recall this video, which I return to once in a while when I am low on joy. The rube goldberg machine version of this is probably more famous, but this marching band version of This Too Shall Pass fills a certain critical part of my heart in a way that I can’t really explain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKythlXAIY