A few weeks ago, prof Matt Crump wrote a blog post in which he explores tools to handle MIDI data in R, in preparation for a cognition experiment that involves creating musical stimuli. In the article he ends up using a mix of external command line tools ffmpeg and fluidsynth and a python module.

It’s getting towards the end of the year so it is time to assemble a list of my favourite albums released in 2023. I have sporadically posted lists in the past e.g. here.

Earlier this year I set up a bot on Mastodon. The bot, AlbumsX3, posts an album suggestion twice-a-day. Performance has been good. It has only missed a few posts due – I think – to server glitches. However, I have made a couple of tweaks to upgrade the bot since my last post, so I thought I would detail them here. Preventing duplicate posts In the last post I wrote: Well, it wasn’t long before I needed to revisit this issue.

I have long admired albums2hear, a Twitter bot that posts albums. You can read a bit more about it here. There was no mastodon equivalent and so I decided to build one. You can follow the bot – currently called Albums Albums Albums (or AlbumsX3) – here. Idea behind the bot The idea is to periodically post an album.

Another post about my time on Twitter. I will post the code in a separate post so that the R-bloggers don’t syndicate this one, which is about music . In my time on Twitter I occasionally posted about what I was listening to. I did this with a #NowPlaying hashtag. I wanted to preserve these tweets – and they can all be found below.

This website is all about niche tech tips and this post is no exception. I run a Plex media server. This allows me to stream my music collection when I am out and about. Plex pass owners get the nifty plexamp app for listening to music, which I really like. The databasing for the movie and TV show side of Plex works great, but the music side has its peculiarities. The problem I have a large music library.

Niche tech tips are the cornerstone of this website, and here is another. How to upgrade an iTunes/Music library whilst maintaining the database. I know everyone streams music these days – hence this is likely a very niche tech tip – but I still maintain a large music database on a server. The data in my library is precious (to me) since it tracks my listening habits over 17 years.

In early December, Spotify users received a list, known as Spotify Wrapped, of the tracks they listened to most in 2021. As a committed non-streamer, I was a bit envious of these lists; so I decided to assemble my own list using my Music database. This was possible by comparing two snapshots of my Music database in xml format* that were taken in 2020 and yesterday.

Every publication is assembling year-end lists of their selection of the best albums of the year. Well, quantixed did not want to miss out on the fun, so I came up with a list of my favourite 20 albums released in 2021.

A quick tech tip. I usually use Audacity for converting audio files and I have a few simple macros set up in there to make life easy. I had some opus music files which do not play in Apple’s Music app and therefore needed converting to MP3 format. Annoyingly, Audacity 3.1.2 on macOS does not currently import opus files, so I needed to find an alternative. The command line tool ffmpeg can be used to convert audio files. So how can we do it?