I thought about hosting my own blog a few times. It’d be a great way to learn some new skills and sharpen existing ones, but it’s also a great way to procrastinate against actually writing. If I just work on tweaking the blog, fix this issue in hosting, do this neat git trick, and so on…do I ever actually stop to write? And that always brings me back to, the best tool being the one you actually use.
I mean, yeah, that comes with a huge “if.” ‘Cause it depends on your goal. For me, the goal (at least right now) is just to write more often. It’s a nice way to organize my thoughts and relax. Plus, it’s just kinda fun. So for me, where my blog is already hosted on tumblr, and my domain is already set up, and no additional infrastructure is needed. I can just open the thing and write. It has its nice little integrations (like bandcamp!) and it’s just good ol’ WYSIWYG, 2005-style blogging.
And, yes, this got a little bit into meta-writing writing. Not for lack of having stuff to write about, though! Which is two things:
*bandcamp
*how carrying my music with me is going
so, bandcamp. It’s a good platform for listening to songs and albums and a fantastic platform for discovering and buying independent music, but it is 1000% not for playlists. No playlists. Very illegal. But that’s fine, because you can:
- find music
- listen to it, in high quality, in full (usually)
- buy it
- and download a FLAC
…in literally just a few minutes. Like, as much time as it takes to prep a FLAC album download from Google Drive, you can have a few albums. Which, yes, is dangerous.
(um. there was about a 20 minute interlude here as I wanted to try out rhythmbox and also buy more music)
and also, managing my music again. This is easy enough with Drive. I like to have the same collection at work, home, laptop, and phone. So, that’s 4 devices to manage. And, it’s honestly easy enough to do with Google Music, but it does a really shit job of handling albums with Japanese titles or song titles. For example, SHISHAMO’s 卒業制作 (sotsugyou seisaku, Graduation Project) has 8 songs. But on Google Music…it has 12! Because it mangles the metadata with other albums, or something. Then SHISHAMO 2 (their 2nd full album, surprise!) has at least one song missing. What!
But, Google Music is definitely good at the music part. There’s obviously tons to listen to, podcasts included. It’s nice. It’s good enough. But for my specialty stuff, I probably have to do something kind of elaborate. I’ll certainly keep the subscription, since it also includes YouTube Red. It handles most of the multiple-computer-music-syncing problem.
My phone is easy. A long time ago, when Android was just a bab, there was a great music player called doubleTwist. And, the’re still around. It was so familiar, I think I had it on my myTouch 3G or my original Samsung Galaxy S. The good news is, they’re still around, and in addition to doubleTwist, they make CloudPlayer. Which, true to form, will monitor folders in your Drive (or Dropbox, or OneDrive) and add music as needed. You can also download it locally. So, even though I totally don’t need to, it will automatically download my FLAC b u l l s h i t straight to my phone. So I can get lossless audio off my Versa hatchback’s 4 thumpers…without using data!
I guess all that makes me wonder about storage. Which is cheap and easy enough! Manual management of music is a little annoying, but it’s hard to argue with the results and the sound quality. It’s kinda like the premium experience, versus the Google Music 80%. I’d like to find a better long-term solution for synchronizing between computers, and maybe something simple like Google Drive integration is the way to go. I’ll figure it out and write it up here!
(oh and one last thing, turns out my X1 doesn’t arrive until Friday. But at least it’s stateside. yay worldport)