Patch Notes

• M32 EG > SubH VCO Sub
• M32 KB > SubH VCO 1
• SubH SEQ 1 Clk > M32 Tempo

Roughly one year ago, I wrote some thoughts about music.¹ Shortly thereafter, I finally paid for PLex Pass. I had asked Mike and Tom if it was decent and they seemed a bit on the fence; if I didn’t have a big Plex collection, it probably wasn’t worth. I broke down and bought the lifetime version to fix some annoyance I was having.²

Little did I know, Plex Pass gives you access to Plexamp, a music playing app. Plexamp plays music files in your Plex library and will stream to your phone if you are away from home. It has some nice features like per output device EQ and nice metadata display, if you are into that. But otherwise, seems like just another music app. Big deal.

The killer feature though is the sonic analysis. This takes forever on a big library, but once it’s done, Plexamp can ‘autoplay’ music in your library keeping to a similar genre or sound. It’s much like any of the algorithmic playlist features on Spotify and the like, but it’s for your music. It also enables rotating playlists made up of a few similar artists, so you always something kind of fresh. Obviously, on small libraries, this probably isn’t that great, but on mine (around 1700 albums), it’s pretty cool. If you have a Tidal subscription, there are certain autoplay lists that will also mix in music that you don’t have in your collection.

The other great feature is that it can cast from your Plex server to other endpoints, like Airplay, Sonos speakers, or other Plexamp installs. I have a raspberry pi headphone setup running Plexamp by the couch. I can play music from the server to the pi, while using my phone as a remote browser. It’s pretty reliable and seamless.

I highly recommend Plexamp for the few of us who still have large music libraries. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps on the phone that all have some nice features, but Plexamp seems like the most comprehensive and polished of them if you are willing to break away from the Apple Music paradigm. While I still use Apple Music (quite a lot actually), Plexamp is pretty low commitment since it uses a server as the hub. A server I’m already running.³ It also stacks up quite nicely against apps like Roon. Roon does have some attractive features but it also has a MASSIVE price. I’ve played around with the demo and am not really tempted.

It’s weird to me that Plex is sinking money into this niche app while at the same time slowly ruining their mainstream app by pushing weird social sharing shit and live TV, features that no one wants. But here we are.

This is about a dinosaur.

Here is a cool music-vid from some people I know in the place where I live. It’s called “Lovey Dovey,” and the band is nightmayor.

Here’s a short song I did this morning.

I’ve written elsewhere on this site that one of the most significant discoveries I made late in life was making chicken stock. A couple of years back, I experimented with making several different whole roast chicken recipes and learned to make stock while doing so.

Every time I roast a chicken now, I make stock. Typically, I use an onion with the skin on (or half an onion depending on how big the onion is), a carrot, a celery stalk, and some parsley.

Last night, when I prepared the stock, I found out I had no carrots, celery, or parsley. I decided to make the stock anyway. I put the chicken carcass in the crock pot, covered it with water, and put in a small onion (skin on), a radish, a bay leaf, four peppercorns, and half a teaspoon of celery seeds. I cooked it overnight on low and poured myself a cup this morning. I threw in a bit of salt and was blown away by how good it was for something so dead simple. Like other stocks, I’ll freeze the rest for other dishes, as the homemade broth always makes meals taste better.

I probably cook a chicken once a month, and there is no practical way not to buy store-bought stock for all the cooking that gets done, but it’s still a great way to use the entire bird and also get another tasty treat that can be used alone or for other meals.

Tim did a lot of work getting this site functioning correctly again, so I thought I’d do a quick post about what I’m looking forward to here in the last stretch of summer. After this week-ish, I have a vacation with my wife, and then I have to shift gears to get ready for work again.

I’ve been working on a script/movie idea with a collaborator for about a year and a half. We had a lot of ideas and ran into even more dead ends trying to figure out just what the story was, and finally, in the past two weeks, some pieces fell into place, and it looks like it is going somewhere. I’m excited about this because it is a cool idea.

I had also hoped to set up a Bandcamp landing page for some music/sounds I’d written, but… that may happen sometime in the fall/winter? I don’t know… I guess that is in the wings. I have the music; it’s just a case of setting up the page.

Finally, I hope to finish a book of mermaids I’ve been reading while concurrently watching mermaid films. Splash, by the way, is a bizarre film but a true testament to the acting chops of Tom Hanks. John Candy is funny, and Daryl Hannah plays the fish out of water mermaid quite well – but wow – the film moves from fantasy rom-com to full-on farce at points. The world of the mid-80s was very different than today’s. I’ve yet to compile my top 5 best mermaid films, but maybe Splash would make it to give the list variety.

This morning I got some BDs I ordered way back at the top of the summer today. I also got a free copy of Showgirls; I don’t know why; maybe it’s my lucky day.

In closing, the video game that has defined my summer is Mordhau, which is as inspiringly insipid as it is addictive. My time would be better spent on Diablo, but that’s how these things sometimes go.