fluffy of Sockpuppet - Virtual Music Experience - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)

Tom Ray: Hi, and welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom, and this is a show where I talk to musicians, people who create things for musicians, just music in general. Lots of stuff that has to do with music. And the person today is someone who is a musician. Also, there’s technology involved. There’s. There’s lots of things involved, and we’re going to get into that. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do?

fluffy: Hi, I’m fluffy. I am a musician, composer, singer, songwriter, and I release music under the band name Sockpuppet, which is totally a real band and not just one person pretending to be a whole bunch of people, which is, you know, the. The whole point to the name of it. you know. Is it from the Internet term? yeah. So I’ve been releasing music online for around 30 years now. Started, out, like, with, like, the, you know, the mod tracker scene and everything. And, you know, these days I’m, you know, releasing music just, you know, more traditionally. Always, trying to figure out how to get and retain an audience. and then also I perform in VR chat a bunch. I’m, you know, in VR chat right now, as you might have been able to tell, just because it’s a great environment for. For, like, performing. And so, like, as a. As a transgender furry, I like, people seeing my fursona rather than my flesh sona. And, and also, VR chat affords me a bunch more opportunities for performing just because, like, I don’t have to travel anywhere. I don’t have to haul gear around. I just have my performing setup just here in my living room, and I can just do whatever. And so it’s, also if my hands play all about. That’s because of, scuff, as, the kids call it in the hand Tracking isn’t great in VR.

Tom Ray: Did you say scuff?

fluffy: Yeah, so it’s, I guess I don’t know that term. Yeah, it’s a common term used in VR circles, like, you know, jankiness, basically, where it’s like, things get a bit screwy sometimes. Like, the technology doesn’t always work perfectly, so.

Tom Ray: Right.

fluffy: Yeah.

Tom Ray: In my circles, we call it wonky, but, I mean, I don’t know what other people.

fluffy: That’s another good term for it. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Now, here’s a question that it’s going to be fun to ask, because I’ve asked this of many people because I talk to people in many different places and I Think it’s neat that I get to meet these people. But you, where are you physically and where are you virtually?

fluffy: So physically I am in a small town near Seattle. ah, so I’ve lived here for a few years and before that I lived in Seattle for a long time. and then, virtually I’m in a world called YouTube search, which is just what I use as my home environment. it’s a cozy spot, it loads quickly. Usually I don’t spend a lot of time in here, but it loads quickly. It’s got a video player, you know, it’s a nice chill out spots, like if I want to like watch videos with friends or whatever, it works pretty well. yeah, most of the time I’m spending in like, so there’s there’s a whole bunch of places just like hangout worlds and vrchat where people can watch movies together, which is a lot of fun. a lot of the time I spend in VR is just performing. So there’s a whole bunch of like performance venues that that are available. and that’s you know, so that. So basically that’s, that’s where I spend most of my time. I also, another thing is I volunteer for the Trans Academy, which is an educational resource for members of the trans community and allies. and we have our own world, which is like a big like, you know, like college campus basically. and so it’s a, it’s a really cool environment. So my role there is I’m primarily the, the lead composer for the for our YouTube channel and so on. I also do some of the video editing and I also perform at some of our events and so on. Okay.

Tom Ray: yeah, and we met because I put out a call out for artists to do performances for the Ubuntu Summit this year. And you were one of the people that said I would like to be involved. And originally I was going to have it be a live event and then I realized that trying to. Well, with the short amount of time I hopped onto the project like a month before it started. And I was like, we’ll just have performances by people performing live like as it goes around the globe. And then it was like, oh yeah, you know, you have to find the people and then also find people who actually have live setups. And that’s actually much harder to do than just going, oh yeah, definitely submit a performance video. So we met that way and you had done that performance. Now with this setup you did send a VR setup. And before, before I go on, actually. so I have limited knowledge of VR. I know what it is and I know how it exists, I suppose. But are you. So are you wearing the goggles right now?

fluffy: I guess.

Tom Ray: I don’t know how you… You are wearing the goggles right now.

fluffy: So I’m wearing, I’m wearing a whole bunch of hardware right now. So I’ve got the goggles. I use a bigscreen beyond, which is one of the higher end headsets. and then, I also have, I’ve got my controllers to track my hands. And then that lets me do like gestures and so on. and then I’m wearing four body trackers right now which which lets it track my body. so that like, if, like if I, I can do a little wiggle and like it can, you can contract my feet. let me. So. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Yeah. Okay. And then where I was going with that was we were also, we were talking about the, the scuff or the wonkiness that I. And when you did the performance, I loved. So you did the performance, the whole thing was going through and then you realized at the end you’re like, oh, it looks like my hands aren’t tracking playing the performance. So I actually don’t feel very interesting.

fluffy: Yeah. But I don’t have a good hand tracking setup for when I’m performing. I’ve been trying to figure something out for a while. I’ve tried so many different things. so usually when I perform I actually just keep the controllers on the floor and just like you have my arms by my side, basically. The problem is like every now and then the, they’ll wig out and then like the, like the big problem with these controllers is they’ll, they’ll lose their position. They’ll just like start flying around randomly. So my arms are really flailing, basically.

Tom Ray: It’s not even just like stop working. They just start going crazy like you’re possessed. Okay.

fluffy: Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, it’s really annoying. but like, I’ve been trying a few different things for my hand tracking. Like I, like I tried a leap motion, which was the most recent experiment, and that worked sort of. Okay. But the problem with it was it uses way too much bandwidth. So it was it was like preventing my, my audio interface from working correctly. And also it got really confused by my guitar because when I’m performing I’m actually, I’m playing a physical guitar, while I’m Performing. So with my performance, you can’t really.

Tom Ray: Put a sensor on the guitar that you have. You have to have a virtual guitar that’s taking the place of the regular. Oh, my God, that’. Now I’m doing the whole, like, coordination thing.

fluffy: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Okay.

fluffy: Yeah. So, like, what I do for. For my. For the, the guitar that you see when I’m performing, I have a separate avatar. It’s going to take a couple seconds to load. Here we go. So I’ve got this, So this virtual guitar just hangs on my shoulder and like, it’s got physics on it, so I can move it around and stuff. But, like, it’s not, it’s not tracking my virtual. My physical guitar by any means or anything. It’s like it just hangs close enough to where my real guitar tends to be. So, like, if I had hand tracking, it would look correct.

Tom Ray: Right. But it doesn’t look bad now, though. It’s, you know. Yeah, it’s one of those things. It’s kind of like animation in general, where your eyes and your mind just go, oh, that’s. That’s what it’s doing. And I, I get where it’s coming from. You know, you just kind of. I guess you, not throw caution to the wind.

fluffy: You.

Tom Ray: You compensate for it in your own mind.

fluffy: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, but, yeah, I mean, getting back to, how VR performances typically work, so most performers in VR, they’re using purely just backing tracks and they’re just singing over it. and, I like to bring something extra to it by actually playing a live guitar as part of it. So I use partial backing tracks. Sometimes I use full backing tracks for some songs, but generally I have a partial backing track. That’s everything except vocal. Well, lead vocals and guitar. I’ll have like, you know, backing vocals in the backing track, of course. or sometimes I just do fully acoustic sets where, I’m just. It’s just me and guitar and just like completely live, sometimes using a loop pedal and a few other things. but yeah, so it’s like I’m. I’m going a little above what most performers do. There’s other performers who also perform live this way. I’m. I’m not. I’m not unique in this, but, like, the vast majority of VR performers, they’re. They’re performing, you know, they’re using backing tracks. They’re often using, like, karaoke tracks that they got off YouTube. and, you know, just performing covers. I. There are very few VR performers who are actually doing original songs. pretty much every song I perform in VR is original. I mean, I’ll do a few covers. so there’s one song I do fairly often called Space Cadet, which was actually written by, by someone I used to know. who. Part of Song Fight, which is a weekly songwriting competition I’ve been involved in for ah, 25 years now. And that’s you know, one of the longest running, I mean websites at this point really. But the, But so unfortunately he died, several years ago and it’s a really good song. So it’s like I’m just keeping his music alive. also when I’m doing acoustic sets, you know, there’s a couple of like more mainstream songs that I’ll do acoustic covers of like semi ironically, but also in ways that people like. So, like, you know, I often do a cover of like I’ve got Royals by Lord and then Toxic by Britney Spears. And then I’ve got a bossa nova version of Creep by Radiohead. So yeah, those things that. Those things are always a lot of fun when I’m just like, When I’m just having fun on stage as opposed or like doing like a song circle kind of thing.

Tom Ray: But it’s. It’s doing the Summit, this year and finding. When I did find, the performers that could submit live recordings because I still wanted to do live recordings. What’s really interesting and much like this conversation and then one that I just had previously because I’ve been speaking to all the people that performed on it and I discovered for me, two new online live genres that I did not know of. Like this particular VR genre that you were talking about that you became a part of. I had no clue that it was there. And it’s one of those things like, you know, you just don’t know. Those are, Sometimes you don’t run across them. And then when you do just like with the previous one was, the band was. Or the performers were live coders and I had never heard of that before. And it’s like, oh, it’s been around for years and it’s like, of course it is. I’m just. I’m just not exposed enough.

fluffy: Oh yeah, yeah. I know. Life coding is something I’d like to try at some point. It seems kind of stressful to me. But yeah, like like you know, there used to be. I used to do stuff with God, I forget the name of it. But there Was like this series of videos of like, music generated by small programs or something like that. and so. And like bit banging or bit bashing I think is a general expression for that. Ah. I’ve got a few friends who do the live coding, music as well. And it’s like, it looks a lot of fun. and of course like the There’s full on IDEs for it and everything now. And Yeah. Right.

Tom Ray: Which was harder to come by before. And like I had run into glitch artists and stuff like that where what they would do is they would take it open up in a text editor or take the waveform and then just rearrange code by hand and then run it through the processor again. Stuff like that. Like fascinating things that I’ve heard about over the years. now going back to the performances and you were talking about the different ones that you do. So when you explain your music, what kind of. How would you explain your music to people? How do you describe what you’re doing? I know this is the dreaded question, but every.

fluffy: What genre? the. The short. You know, the short answer is yes. I, I don’t like sticking to any one sound. Like, all of my albums have like all of my albums not only are each one in a different genre, but like, I can’t even stick to a single genre within a single album. for one of my most recent albums, Transitions, I set out to very specifically limit my sonic palette so it is only piano, guitar and a string quartet and my voice. And even then it like runs a really wide gamut of genres just using those instruments. so, you know, I do a lot of Like I think my most signature songs tend to be like on the alternative rock side of things or you know, grunge kinds of stuff. but like, I also bring in like, you know, classical, jazz, country elements. I’ve got a couple of hip hop songs or hip hop adjacent. Anyway, M. You know, I’ve. I’ve got. I’ve got a bunch of EDM types of stuff. I mean the stuff I perform live tends to not be that. Although there’s there’s one song of mine along Plastic Hallway is that one’s EDM with it with vocals basically. So I’ve been doing that one live a lot lately. actually my cover of Space Cadet. Like I’ve got an acoustic version, but I’ve also got the album version which is much more edmy. and then I, you know, I still play guitar over it but Yeah, no, I, I try to. I have ADHD and I like to always be trying new things. I also do like soundtracks for video games and so one game I’m working on the soundtrack for, the game designer has been really pushing me genre wise so. So I’ve been doing things like. Well I’ve been doing like lo. I do a lot of lo fi already but then like she really wanted me to do hyper pop which I hadn’t really done before. I might have done like some hyper pop esque things but like. And then like my next the next track I need to work on for that is supposed to be hard style techno which I’ve never done before. So that’ll be an interesting experience. yeah, I’m just Like I, so I’m classically trained on piano and cello. and like I, I always like to bring that influence into stuff. I’m self, I’m self taught on guitar and drums and a few other things. But ah. Yeah, I’m always just I’m just experimenting with the form. I don’t. I feel like genres are. They’re a useful way of guiding people in the right direction but.

Tom Ray: Oh for sure, yeah.

fluffy: But that they’re not like the be all end all of things. Like, like if you look at like some of my favorite bands like you know, the Beatles and Radiohead and you know, acts like that like they’re not stuck in a single genre. They, they change all the time. And So you know, it’s just, you know, it’s Yeah, I, I just, I feel like I don’t want to limit myself to a specific sound or a specific genre. It’s just for me it’s just music. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ray: And, and, and I get that too. And it’s hard because there are, I mean if you think about it and they’re not even. And this is just thinking the whole question because also I like always have to answer like what are you? And eventually I just go I don’t know, rock band, whatever you want. But it’s like it’s like movies. I don’t like horror movies. And you know there are different types of horror movies. There are types of genres of horror movies but if somebody goes oh, this is a horror movie. I’m like I’m probably not going to see it then, you know. Yeah, I mean it’s one of those things like it goes like I like this style of music whether it Be a sub genre or different. And. And I feel like that’s why that. I don’t know why that popped into my head, but that’s what. Because I’m trying to think of like. Yeah, it’s a question that we’re always asked and it’s like, it’s good to know, but at the same time it’s hard to answer because then you’re being asked to define what you do and it’s like, well, I’ve never really thought about it. When you start working on a song, you don’t think about what you’re doing. You’re just going on into a song. Unless the game thing where they were asking to do hard techno.

Tom Ray: anyway, I’m sorry, I just went off on my own little process there. Now let me get back to the game thing. so how are you meeting the game developers, the people you were working for?

fluffy: So, typically, I’ve participated in a whole bunch of game jams. and so, like, what I’ll do is like, when a game jam’s going on that I’m interested in, I will sign up to just make as much music as possible for people.

Tom Ray: How do you find the game jams?

fluffy: like Itch IO, has, it has a game jam section. also a bunch of the ones that I’ve been involved in are just ones run by friends to begin with. Okay. So, so that’s actually how I got my current composition gig was, I was making a bunch of music for games. And then one of the games was for, you know, for this one designer. And you know, she was like, hey, like, would you like to come on board for the full game that. Because, like the. Because like, the Game Jam game was sort of like a prequel visual novel for the, for the main game. And she was having trouble finding a composer that she liked. And, you know, she liked my output on the. On the Game Jam game. So. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Tom Ray: And I feel like I just recently heard about the game jams and I. That’s why I asked you. I’m like, where are you finding them? Because person told me about the game jams and I was like, oh, that’s really neat. And then when we were done with the conversation, I’m like, oh, I have no idea where they are. So you’re saying Itch IO is where a lot of it comes up. Okay. And, I’m only familiar with it because somebody did use one of our songs for a RPG game that they did which was a scrolling rpg. It was really cool. It was black and white, it was kind of noir. And our music was sort of playing eerily on like a, a transistor radio in the background. And I really dug it.

fluffy: It was a cool.

Tom Ray: It was a cool juxtaposition of moods. But anyway, so now you were saying that you also had stuff that you did with strings and everything. Now when you’re doing these, because you said you were trained in like cello and piano, are you playing these instruments through MIDI or keys, or are you actually playing like, what’s your setup around you? How many instruments do you have?

fluffy: Yeah, I own a lot of instruments and I do a mix of things. So most of the stuff I do for album work is just midi. so, there’s a few sampled string instruments that work really well. I also own a cello and a violin and a viola. So sometimes I’ll play the physical instruments for that.

fluffy: Okay. All right. But I am not as good at them as I used to be. So it’s ah. It would take me a long time to get a good take on those if I were to like. If you listen to my older albums, like if there’s cello on older albums, that’s all, that’s all real cello and real violin. But these days I’m mostly using the native instruments, Cremona Quartet for that. and then, So, Oh. So okay, so Cremona Quartet is a, It’s a chamber ensemble that’s been like very detailed, sampled by native instruments. So it has a, it has a Stradivari violin, a Stradivari cello. ah. And then then a couple of. Then then another violin and then a viola and with less, less well known names attached to them. okay. And they’re pretty detailed and they give you really good articulation control. So you can do like the different, different like you know, staccato and legato and like, you know, even col legno and a few other things that are a bit more advanced. It doesn do everything that I want. so like, like, you know, sometimes I just have to use a real cello to do certain things like that. Like there’s no, like a sound of slapping the strings, for example. Right. So.

Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah.

fluffy: you can sort of take it with the pizzicato articulation, but it’s not quite right.

Tom Ray: So I run into that problem with, well, one with guitar. I can.

fluffy: I’ve.

Tom Ray: I’ve yet to find something that is Comparable to an actual guitar, rather than programming or trying to recreate a sound for one. And to, Sometimes with drums, I can get away with a lot programming drums, but eventually it’s just like, nope, gotta record the real.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah, I’m the same way. So it’s like, with, like, I, I tend to use a live guitar on stuff, but like. Like for my game music, for example, I tend to actually use native instruments as, like, session guitar. And like, they’ve got a few things where it’s like, it’s basically canned loops where you can, like, give it the chords and it’ll. It’ll do an okay job of it. Although, you know, the controls. Minimal, but it sounds decent enough. And people have never pointed out, oh, that’s a MIDI guitar. but like. And then like, similarly, like, I’ve been trying to learn saxophone. I suck at it. but native instruments has session horns, which is actually really good. So I’ve been using that for my jazz pieces lately. I mean, I’m just kind of being a shill for native instruments right now, I think. Right.

Tom Ray: No kidding. This podcast sponsored by.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately not. I wish it would. I’ve spent so much money on native instruments stuff.

Tom Ray: Okay.

fluffy: Like, it’s been worth it. But, like, yeah, I actually don’t really. So, like, I like native instruments. They’ve got their complete collection spelled with a K. And, I’ve kept pretty up to date on that just because, like, I don’t use very much of it, but the number of individual instruments I use from it is just enough that, like, it would cost more to buy them individually than it would to, like, just buy the whole collection. So. Okay.

Tom Ray: And on top of all this, you were talking before about the different performances you did. And also there is a conversation we were having before we started this podcast interview. but I want to get to. You were finding live play, or you. You play many live virtual events.

fluffy: Hm.

Tom Ray: How are you finding these events to play for? And you do play often and you do record a lot of sessions and do your own live, events and stuff.

fluffy: So how.

Tom Ray: How does one go about booking themselves so virtually?

fluffy: It was a slow start. basically it comes down to finding opportunities or finding people who perform and then, like, getting to know them and then getting introduced to other people. So it’s like, like, like, you know, I’ve. Like I said I volunteer for Trans Academy as the lead composer, but, like, the way I got involved in that was, So they do weekly voice lessons for Voice training, which I really need to work on more. But, the,

Tom Ray: Okay.

fluffy: they were doing a talent show, for. For Trans Pride, which was in September a few years ago. and it was also. Or it was like the Trans Academy’s anniversary birthday celebration thing. And so. So there was, ah. So there was a talent show. I participated in that. and, from there it’s like, okay, these people, they really need someone to compose original music for their YouTube channel because they were just like, using just like, you know, video game music and stuff that they didn’t have the rights to. So it’s like I. Yeah, I volunteered. Hey, do you want someone to compose? But then also from the, From the talent show, I met a couple other performers, and I got talking to a few of them. So, Cookie in particular, she’s actually worth talking to. I can. I can give you her information. Cookie with a K. Yeah. but then, Yeah, so she got me, like, hooked up with a whole bunch of other ones. Like, like, she got me involved with Corbell’s, music festivals, which is one of the. They were one of the bigger organizations in VRChat, although now they’ve stopped.

Tom Ray: Corbell, as in, like, the Brandy.

fluffy: No.

Tom Ray: Or the Rum.

fluffy: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know where he got the name from. It’s just. Corbel’s just the name of a, is someone’s Persona’s name, basically.

Tom Ray: All right, I was just making sure this wasn’t, like, sponsored by.

fluffy: No, no, no.

Tom Ray: Cardi Graham.

fluffy: No, not. Not as far as I know. right. And so then, So then, like, you know, Corbell’s music festival, there was a, Like, he’s sort of backed away from doing frequent festivals, but then another member of his community, has started up another one called Virelium. and so Viralium puts on a lot of shows. So I’ve gotten a lot of attention through that. And then just from there, it’s just kind of. It’s snowballed. So, like, I actually recently got a booking agent for these shows.

Tom Ray: No kidding? Really?

fluffy: Yeah, because. Because, like, she’d seen a bunch of my shows and she really, she liked my music and she really wanted me to. To have more opportunities because, you know, she was. She was seeing that. Oh, like, like, you know, like, like you need to perform more. And I’m like, oh, okay. And so she was just like, do you want a booking agent? I’m like, sure. So. So now, so now I’ve got someone else booking shows for me. So. Yeah.

Tom Ray: That’S pretty outstanding. Yeah, I like that.

fluffy: None of it pays any money. It’s all for fun but you know, it’s, you know. Right.

Tom Ray: Well it, it pays virtual money. I know. Virtual money is an actual thing now.

fluffy: Yeah, it pays exposure. It pays exposure. There you go.

Tom Ray: Like real shows. yeah. So you were telling me before too that you do a show for Internet, ah, Archive staff and you were kind of talking about that before we started recording. So tell me about that.

fluffy: Okay. Yeah, so the Internet Archive, they have bi weekly status meetings, like I think it’s like on Mondays and Fridays. and so what they’ve started doing, and they’ve been doing this for a while is they’ll get independent musicians to perform like a 10 minute set at the beginning of each, status meeting. so I’ve only, I’ve only done it once so far, but it was a really good experience. and so I’ll probably be invited back at some point. and that’s actually, it’s actually a pretty well paid gig for that matter too. so yeah, like they do an honorarium for it and then people can send tips. So, you know, I made a pretty decent chunk of change when I did it. So, you know, they treated me well. Of course I love the Internet Archive. I mean, oh my God, I’ve been.

Tom Ray: Using it for years. I’ve, I’ve basically all of our albums are on it. I used to do a different podcast that was about Creative Commons music that we essentially just hosted it on Internet Archive. Like that was our podcast platform.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ray: I’ve been a huge fan for years.

fluffy: At some point I’m going to get around to putting all my albums on Internet Archive just because like I’ve just, that’s, that’s a whole other thing. Like I’ve you know, I used to have all my stuff on Spotify and YouTube Music and Apple Music and all that. And it’s just the distributor situation is terrible. I mean a lot of it’s because of AI just taking over everything. A lot of it’s just, you know, distributors being rent seekers basically. So I’ve actually pulled all my stuff from streaming and I’ve been re uploading it myself to my YouTube channel. so that you know, I’ve actually gotten a lot more exposure in the YouTube algorithm that way anyway. Like it’s actually ended up being a lot more useful for me. But at some point I Do more.

Tom Ray: It’s, it’s owned by Google, but at the same time YouTube is a platform. And I mean I get that it’s still owned by a corporation, but. Yeah, ah, I agree. YouTube is more creator centric. It’s more. It rewards you for people wanting to know more about you, for looking for more of your stuff. It’s not just, you know.

fluffy: I agree.

Tom Ray: I think it is a creative platform. and question. First of all, now you were talking about that and just I had been reading some of your stuff and you just prompted the memory and I don’t know why I can’t speak sentences. You made me think of a thing that I read on your blog and it was about Canimus. And when you were saying, pulling stuff there, I’ve oddly been going down the same sort of rabbit hole. And I was reading, continue telling your story about moving the stuff to YouTube, but I want to ask you about Canimus.

fluffy: Oh, sure.

Tom Ray: So finish your story.

fluffy: I’m sorry. Yeah, I mean I was basically done at that point where it’s like, yeah, like. Okay, well, I mean, well, it’s been. I guess I’ve got a little more to say. So like, like one issue is like, you know, with the distributors, it’s like they’ll just, they’ll just put just the album art and the music and it’s just like really meh, whatever. And then there’s like no discovery or anything. And so like I’ve been making visualization videos. I’ve been getting, I’ve been getting surprisingly good at ffmpeg. Ah. like filter graphs. Like I’ve I think I’ve hit the limit of what it’s capable of at this point. But I’m, you know, still having fun like figuring out how I can abuse them. and then just using that to like make videos to, for all my music. And then I wrote some software to just, you know, to schedule all the things. So like, like when it’s a release day, it’s like every 15 minutes it’ll post another song from the latest release or whatever.

Tom Ray: Oh, that’s what that meant. Okay. I was trying to follow along with that on the blog and I even downloaded the zip that you had on there for the FFmpeg and I wasn’t entirely clear on what you were talking about.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah, that was the FFMPEG zip file that was, that was for the that was for the shader graph. so like, like, you know, there’s a lot of like expensive proprietary software for Doing things like you’ve got like the, like the sunburst animation around things or whatever.

Tom Ray: right.

fluffy: And so I’ve just been like figuring out how to do that stuff in FFmpeg, which is not built to do that kind of stuff. So and I figured I’d share the, share the wealth of what I figured out on that. But but yeah, then like the, the YouTube updater script is a pain in the butt to set up because you’ve got to get like a developer account and like set up an app and everything.

Tom Ray: Okay.

fluffy: And then they, they, I would make it public or I would make a public web based instance of it, except they also throttle you pretty severely. So like you’re allowed, they give you like something like 10,000 action credits per day. and, and updating or scheduling a video costs 50 credits. So like that, that burns through it pretty quickly. So. Okay.

Tom Ray: Yeah, all right, all right. Okay. Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. I’m like, well, why wasn’t everybody doing this? And now that’s making more sense.

fluffy: I get why.

Tom Ray: But I was, I was curious about that and I, from what I was gleaning from what you had said about this post process that you had to YouTube, I was just like, oh, that sounds interesting. And I wanted to know more, but now, okay, I get it. And so now going into that, you were talking about the distributors and that’s actually where my thought process that I’ve been dealing with lately started.

Tom Ray: I, somebody was talking about, you know, Spotify and you know, never pays musicians, all that kind of stuff and you know, zero percent of. Zero percent. Yes, I get all that. But I was thinking too as I was doing that I was uploading something for my band to distrokid and I’m like, and I’m paying this other third party service to even give it to them because I can’t upload it myself. And then they send that percentage back through the distributor through whatever payment plan they decide I have to use and then take a cut of that. Yeah, I’m also paying them a subscription to do that or even if there are free services, they take a percentage of what you do make. So you’re still like basically if you boil it down to say, let’s, let’s say streaming, you get $3 a month for albums being streamed, you pay 29amonth to distribute your albums and keep them up on Spotify. So that doesn’t work. So I was thinking like, you know, what if there was something where you didn’t. Why do we have to go through this distribution? Why can’t we just upload it ourselves? Etc. Anyway, that made me go down that. And then I was looking at your Canimus.

Tom Ray: Post that you had and I went to the GitHub thing.

Tom Ray: Now there’s something in there that. Well, first of all, explain Canimus and what it is. So I did my explanation on my end.

fluffy: So the short version is it’s like RSS feeds but for music. yes. there have been a lot of attempts at adding music into RSS feeds, but they’ve been not great. just because like RSS audio has already been polluted by podcasts. I mean pollution is not really the right term for it. But like, like the like you know, the all of the prioritized.

Tom Ray: Yeah, it’s been prioritized.

fluffy: Yeah. So. So it’s like. And also like the metadata that’s in RSS feeds isn’t really that suitable either. So it’s like it’s just extending RSS or Atom was not a, ah, winning strategy. And then there’s been a bunch of a bunch of things where people are trying to extend Activity Pub in similar ways. Like you see like funkwhale for example. Or now there’s Bandwagon. And Merlo. Well, Merlo is not Activity Pub really. It’s like, I mean Merlo, they’re looking into adding Activity Pub for the blogging but not for the distribution parts of things. I am actually working with Faircamp.

Tom Ray: Camp as well too, so.

fluffy: Yeah, and so, so actually I mean, Faircamp Camp being a static publishing system, like it’s not really Activity Pub suitable either.

Tom Ray: but RSS built into it.

fluffy: It has rss, but it only does the album level, ah, publishing. It doesn’t do anything with like tracks and all the metadata for it. It’s just like, hey, here’s a new album, here’s its title, here’s where you can listen to it.

Tom Ray: It kind of does. And I’ll get, I’ll get to that in a minute because then I won’t be on there but you. So it’s really weird because these thought processes are crossing and what you’re saying here is one of the thought processes I have, but go ahead.

fluffy: Yes. Right. And so anyway, like the whole design behind Cannabis is okay, we have like, basically how do we have a distributed iTunes library that is web native? Because like the whole idea, the whole reason that streaming caught on was, oh well, I don’t need to Maintain my own library. I can. Like, And you know, the way that, like, the way the streaming services all started out was, oh, you can upload your library here and then you can have access to it as well as to all this other stuff. but, what I really want to do is rather than having it so that musicians have to upload all their music everywhere, like, you know, you’ve got Bandwagon and Meerlo and Bandcamp and all that other fun stuff, and it’s just. It’s a lot of work to upload it everywhere for vanishingly tiny returns. And so what I really sought out to do was to have a, to have a feed format that is basically a decentralized or distributed itunes library that like, describes the music or, you know, kind of like music brains ascolt. So I mean, I want to integrate with MusicBrains at some point, although that’s complicated. but then it’s just like, okay, you can subscribe to an artist’s feed and then it will show up in your player. I mean, I’m calling it a receiver as the receiver part. And then you’ve got the player that talks to your receiver or whatever. I mean, this could be one piece of software, but that’s all theoretical at this point. There’s a. There’s been a couple of receivers implemented, but they’re all very prototypical at this point. But, but, anyway, so the idea is that, yeah, you have, you just have a collection of music and it’s backed by the artist’s own website. So it’s like, then the. Then the artist is choosing like, how to present it, like, what quality level to have it at. Hello, Scuff. the quality level for, for, you know, the audio files. Like, you know, whether hidden tracks are. Are available or not. you know, whether the full lyrics are available. You know, like how to tag the genres, how to include like the album art, just like all the little things that, that Spotify doesn’t give artists control over. But, and then like, then the other thing is like the, like the, the streaming platforms, they’ve all had to orient themselves around what the. What the major music labels have wanted. And that’s a big part of why things are so broken. Because the distributor, the idea behind a distributor in the, in the, DSP landscape is that it’s. It’s a, proxy for a music label or for a record label. And so like, you know, Distrokid is basically acting as your label in, in that relationship or correct. Yeah, and, and it’s, there’s a lot of like legal compliance stuff that they have to do based specifically on what the major labels want. So my understand. So I know people who work on the, the other side of this. and what they have told me is that the whole reason that payments are structured the way they are is because that’s what the major labels insisted on. And like, you know, rather than it being okay, like, like, like the intuitive thing is, okay, you pay $10 a month to Spotify or Apple Music or whatever, and then that $10 should be distributed to the artists you listen to, but instead what they do is it gets spread out across all the artists and all the listens and that. So that incentivizes bot streaming, which has led to a lot of the problems that we see right now. so it’s actually kind of been a problem for the major labels as well because they’re losing money to the bot streamers. Right? yeah, but like, at least the.

Tom Ray: Losing part of it is, you know, it’s open to everyone. Yeah, but like it’s not like, definitely benefiting them.

fluffy: Yeah, but in my vision for Canimus, the idea is that your player would keep track of who you were listening to and say, hey, you’ve listened to the, to these artists this amount, and it’s like, you know, you should send them this amount of money. And then like, and like I’ve got some like white paper ish things about like how payments could be structured where. So for example, like, okay, this month you mostly listened to this band, so send them five bucks. But like, even if it was only like, you know, like $2 worth, then, okay, now they’ve got a negative balance. And so then the next month it’s like, okay, now you’ve listened mostly to this band, so send them the five bucks or whatever. And so the idea is that it’s like basically dithering. So before I went musician full time, I was a graphics programmer. So I always think about these things in terms of, graphics. So.

Tom Ray: Right.

fluffy: the, So it’s just like the idea is like you do this error diffusion dithering or Floyd Steinberg dithering on how you pay the musicians that you listen to.

Tom Ray: So no, and this is what’s really funny. So when I came across this project when I was you know, getting ready for the podcast and reading some of the things you had posted, I’ve literally been going through the same thought process and have a prototype that does almost the exact Same thing as an app now thinking of it as going to the RSS feed. I was thinking the same thing. If you look at the podcast 2.0, there’s so many things that they’re doing to benefit the podcaster. Adding things such as feed, elements like crowdfunding, platforms, M. So instead of paying, going through like, okay, everybody has to use PayPal, everybody has to use this. The payments that you’re talking about would be commented by the person who is there what their preferred form of payment would be.

fluffy: Now.

Tom Ray: Yeah, so I’ve been thinking about this music platform. What if it followed something that was customized, much like the podcast 2.0 is being customized now? The thing is, is for them building that, the apps are all starting to. It’s kind of going the way of the Web 3.0 and the browsers using the common things. And so what if music apps were more like podcast apps, but they were specific, they had a specific thing. So you couldn’t just go, I keep my podcast and my music here. Specifically doing that, where it only works with a type of feed. Now to organize this type of feed, that’s why I was thinking of Faircamp Camp. Now with faircamp, if you use that as your distro kit, you keep your music. The platform goes by using a musicbrain server that has a list of community lists of Faircamp Camp. Because right now it’s actually really hard to find Faircamp Camp.

Tom Ray: pages you have to be referred to by them, which is also how podcasts used to be. So there would be a music brains list that keeps this. You can integrate that. It only works with this now to get the information. And this is where I found it in the prototype because I wanted to figure that out. You get some information from the rss, you get the other information such as titles and other things like that, from the M3U files. The people can opt in or opt out of being in this platform because they can just go, I don’t want use M3U. If they don’t use M3U, then they can’t get added to the app and they don’t have to be because it is self hosted on your server. So if you do this, when you do that, you can add the mp3 or the m m3u. And the m m3u takes not only the album information, the song information, it can play the the music from there, and then it takes the artwork and the band descriptions and puts that into the pages for the album. Now there’s also a support tab it follows this is all stored locally. None of it is on a server, none of it is being kept anywhere. It’s only on the app. You get this information and enter it in. You put in new artists yourself. You can put in lists that you share. Then if you listen to an artist that’s more than 30 for more than 30 minutes, a support tab is there and it will show the artists that you’ve listened to for more than 30 minutes and suggest and nudge you to go submit to those people.

fluffy: Like it is.

Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah, it’s. I’ve never really been. Yeah, the same thing.

fluffy: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I mean the thing is like I like M M3U as a format is also super limited. Like it was intended just as a local playlist for WinApp. So that’s the whole reason I designed. I. Excuse me, that’s the whole reason I designed this new format specifically to have the information that’s necessary for all these interactions and so on. and so on. On the note of Faircamp Camp, so I’ve actually been chatting with Simon Rapp who who wrote Faircamp Camp about integrating a Canimus feed into Faircamp Camp as well. and he’s, he’s interested but he’s you know, he’s super busy. He’s working on a billion things. So yeah, like I’m actually considering, yeah I’m considering just like you know, submitting a patch myself or something because. Right, because, because building a feed is actually really simple. So my like my website, you know I’m always working on way m too many things myself but like you know my website is using my own publishing platform called Publ. and building a Canimus feed for that was just super simple. Like like you know, and that’s you know it’s like a you know adding the metadata to my, to my entry files was simple and then just like I have a, I have a custom view that just goes through my, my entry meta metadata and just like turns it into the JSON. and so the it’s just, you know that there, it’s. The difficulty with Canimus is building the receiver, building a publisher for it is super simple and that’s by design. yeah, where, where a lot of the activity pub things fall flat for me is that they put a lot of complexity at all ends and don’t actually address any of the issues that I see with this kind of situation. so like ah, a big inspiration was like seeing you know, bandwagon. they’re, they’re integrating with the indie beat. and that’s all like through like custom glue and everything. And I was just like there needs to be a better way. Like I don’t want to have to upload all my stuff to Bandwagon after having uploaded it to a billion other places too. and you know, I don’t want to run a Bandwagon instance of my own either. So it’s just, you know, like, can I just make a feed that I just publish from my existing website? Like, yeah. And like.

Tom Ray: And that’s kind of where I was coming from too. Where it was like if there was just a way that you go, here it is, it’s listed and kind of just like when you get an app, it will of course be pre populated with like here’s a list of things for you to start out with that you can look at and then add more. That’s why I was saying music apps need to be like a podcast app. Let people who want to find it. Yeah, do it.

fluffy: Exactly. And so like also on the other, on the other side of things. So, another one of the projects I work on is called Band Crash, which is similar to Faircamp Camp, but it’s doing a, in a different direction. So like Faircamp Camp, it’s a single site or it’s a single static site generator where it’s like you have metadata for all your music. You press a button and it runs through and generates your site and uploads everything. Bandcrash is a little different where it’s a local app that you edit. There’s a JSON format for it, but then there’s also a GUI for editing the JSON and then it will build an embeddable player and then zip files for like mp3, aug and flac. And I also recently added CDDA authoring for Kunaki specifically. just because it was useful for me. because you know, people want CDs as a, Not. Not that many though. So not enough to do a full run of them. So you know, Kunaki was a good choice for that. But they’re just, they’re a print on demand for folks who don’t know. and the you know, so. So Band Crash, it’s like the idea is, okay, I don’t want to have to like have everything all managed in one central place. It’s like I’ve updated just this album. I’m going to rebuild and re encode this album and then upload it to places. So like all of the embedded players on my website are Band Crash. Well, technically the. So the player component is called Camp Town. I was, you know, I was punning a bunch on, on Band Camp, basically. but, so the Camp Town player and then the Band Crash encoder, basically, and then Band Crash. I also have a, I, I have a pipeline for like automatically uploading everything to Itch IO. so, so, you know, it’s like you just press a button and it just like it updates everything on Itch IO for that album. so it’s, it’s built to be like a little more flexible, but also that it, it requires more work overall than fair Camp. But it’s also, it’s a bit more web shape. I guess web shape’s not the right term for it, but it’s a bit more, it’s a bit more flexible in what you do with it because. Because you’re building stuff for distribution on other websites rather than it being the website. So.

Tom Ray: And I, I saw one of the examples that you had. And then at the bottom. Yeah. That there’s a button at the bottom that you can download and it gives you the zip file and that’s part of it. You’re saying you didn’t do that separate from the thing you. Okay.

fluffy: Right. So the whole reason I wrote Bandcamp or Band Crash, rather. I should have chosen a better name. so, it actually starts. So, Black Ole Mori wrote a player called ah, Blamscamp, which it had like a JavaScript based thing and it.

Tom Ray: Was like, it was like names, I tell you.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah, it was, it was intended for like you like building a player for embedding on Itch IO, but it still left it up to. Up to the musician to do the encoding and tagging. And musicians suck at that generally. So.

Tom Ray: Yeah, I mean, we got to give them a little bit of forgiveness because it’s like, you know, you got to already all the song titles and now you’re supposed to add every other thing.

fluffy: Yeah, it’s. I mean, it’s a lot of work.

Tom Ray: To upload an album.

fluffy: Yeah, it is. And so like, so what I wanted to do was to make an end to end thing that would, it would like, you know, it would, it would let you put in all the metadata and it would generate an album that was useful in all the formats that people actually use. I want to add AAC at some point, but no one really uses that, so I don’t really care. and then, so it’s just MP3, Aug and Flac for now. okay, but then. And you’re just like, tagging it. I wanted the tagging to be at least as good as Bandcamp. I think it’s. It’s at least as good as Bandcamp’s tagging. It doesn’t, it doesn’t do all the, like, the fiddly things. Like, it doesn’t do ISRCs or whatever. But ISRCs don’t really matter for independent musicians and people care about it too much and it doesn’t matter. but.

Tom Ray: If anything, it’s just to keep you from uploading the same thing several times or to be claiming or uploading somebody else’s stuff. Like it’s basically a precautionary tale at this point.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah, but like, they don’t really. They don’t really do that either, so whatever.

Tom Ray: But.

fluffy: But, But anyway, you know, so it’s like I just wanted something to make it easy to edit an album, encode it, upload it places. and then. Oh, so then anyway, where I was getting it with that was. Oh. So. So band, Crash started out as a, ah, front end to Blamscamp. but then, you know, there were things I wanted the player to do a bit differently and I started out just forking Blam’s camp, but it just. It just became easier to write my own instead. Right. and so, you know, I wanted to be like, very accessible minded and make it just, you know, so that it’s, you know, web native. I really. I don’t like JavaScript apps. I mean, it’s very JavaScript based, but like, it has a. It had like, like the fallback mode of it is if JavaScript isn’t working and you click on the song, it’ll just bring up the, mp3 file on your browser. And like, for the preview encoder, I very specifically do not put in any amount of data and it’s also encoded at a lower quality. So it’s like, you know, someone could download all my songs from my website if they wanted to, or from the Canimus feed or whatever, but they’ll have to tag it themselves. So, you know. No, I mean, right.

Tom Ray: Since the dawn of time, you’ve been able to download every single album that’s on Bandcamp to begin with. You just do an inspect and search for MP3 and even if somebody’s charging 100 bucks, you can download it for free.

fluffy: So my. Yeah, my philosophy is keep honest people honest. Don’t punish people who are trying to do the right thing, you know, make things a little more difficult. Like, don’t go out of your way to make it easy for people to rip you off. But, you know, keep the honest people honest and, you know, just be. You know, if people want to steal your music, they’re gonna, so.

Tom Ray: Right.

fluffy: Yeah.

Tom Ray: That’s what the Internet’s for.

fluffy: Yeah. But.

Tom Ray: So we’ve talked a lot about the technical stuff and music stuff, and this is a good conversation. But before we go today, I wanted to ask. So you are doing a bunch of, virtual stuff, and you do a lot of live performances. What are some things that you have coming up that you like to tell the people about before we go today?

fluffy: Oh, geez. Well, I mean, in general, like, you know, my website, Sockpuppet Band, is where you can find out all the stuff I’m working on and listen to most of my music. let’s see. I am. I’ve got a couple of shows. I’ve got, like, three shows, I think, booked for December in Vrchat. nice. let’s see. I’ve got, You know, I’m just always making music. you know, every November, I do a thing called Novembe, where it’s, you know, try to make something musical every day. I didn’t do very much of it this year just because I was so busy with other stuff. But most years, I. I do, you know, 15 to 30 songs. Most years. a lot of my better albums even came from Novembe to begin with. so let’s see. Yeah, I guess, let’s see. What else? I mean, you know, I’m working on Canimus. I’m working on, on my own music. I’m, I just bought an E bike. that doesn’t really have anything to do with your audience, but, see.

Tom Ray: Now you’re just naming your.

fluffy: Yeah.

Tom Ray: The gifts and things that you bought for yourself. Myself some groceries the other day. Yeah.

fluffy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess, Oh, I guess, No, I guess I don’t really have anything else to add on that. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Okay. Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been my first VR guest. It was great meeting you.

fluffy: Yeah, same here.