mixcloud – Page 2 – Cubicgarden.com…

Weather is strange mix

What a pacemaker mix, quite mix of tunes from previous mixes with some new ones. All with a changeable pace throughout.

I do love this one which was done during a period during April in Manchester with snow, rain and hot sun over a period of days. Weather is strange just like the choppy nature of this mix.

Listen to it on my personal cloud or mixcloud here and enjoy!

Sunset (Bird of prey) – Fatboy Slim
Go (Extended mix) – Protoculture
Running up the hill (Jermone isma-ae bootleg mix) – Placebo
Prosac – Tomcraft
Wrist block (Joey Beltram remix) – Side four
Wilde (Extended mix) – Jermone isma-ae & Alastor
Follow me (Jermone isma-ae extended remix) – Jam Spoon
Ecstasy – Eddie Makrabi featuring Einat
Outlaw (Extended mix) – Fatum
Sequence (Extended mix) – Estiva
Tears (Protoculture remix) – Dakota
Alastor & Rue (Jerome Isma-Ae untethered remix) – Progressive Astronaut
Sunrise – Marninx pres Ecco
Tomahawk (Extended mix) – Maarten de Jong
The pride in your eyes (Martin Roth remix) – Tillmann Uhrmacher

Kubricks systematic percussive sequence mix

I have been loving a bunch of tech/progressive trance and decided its time for a nice mix using some of the tunes. I know there is some disagreement about the term, which I guess is closer to the techno category. Especially the tunes by Carlo Ruetz.

Either way its a good mix breaking into some classic trance by the end. The title of the mix is parts of the playlist, and the start is a long lost tune found after listening to one of the very first live mixes I did in Manchester. Roots is a killer start to a mix and sets the vibe perfectly. Reminds me how much I like Tomcraft actually.

Hosted again on Mixcloud but unlike the last one, hopefully it won’t fall foul of the mixcloud rules over using the same artist too many times. (note to say I have got a new self-hosted platform but anonymous web access isn’t ideal)

Enjoy the mix and here is the complete playlist.

Roots – Tomcraft
Trick – Carlo Ruetz
Percussive thinking (Meat Katie & Elite force remix) – Frome
Kubrick (Extended mix) – Jerome Isma-Ae
Rheninkraft – Oliver Klien
System hack – Carlo Ruetz
Running up the hill (Jerome Isma-Ae bootleg) – Placebo
Opium (Stan Kolev remix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Sequence (Extended mix) – Estiva
Floyd (Extended mix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Outlaw (Extended mix) – Fatum
Tears (Protoculture remix) – Dakota

Update: Feb 28th 2021

As I thought, without the Mixcloud restrictions mentioned above, this mix has made it to the 95th place in the Tech trance chart.
Very tempted to see what happens if I rename the playlist for Pattersons pandemic run.

Replacing Mixcloud with Funkwhale

For a long while I have been threatening to leave Mixcloud in favour of hosting my own mixes. I looked around and thought funkwhale looks great as its a federated network for music. With some help from JonT, I started to scrape the metadata I stupidly forgot to keep for myself.

I installed Funkwhale on the Yunoserver but spent too much time trying to work out how to mount my NAS on the Yunoserver. I gave Navidrome but decided it wasn’t right as there was no way to listen without logging in, so went back to Funkwhale and got things up and running.

Seems Funkwhale might not be the best solution for the mixes, plus the developer is looking for new maintainers recently. Its really setup for single tracks not mixes. I could upload mixes but my plan to use cue files, won’t work. The only place to put playlists is in the comments. I also need to do more digging as I can’t change the year of the mixes. More importantly, the public sharing is a bit broken for me. You should be able to listen to the radio but its not working for me

As I get my head around it all but you can subscribe via RSS and if you’re using Mastodon or other fediverse applications, you can subscribe to this account: @digitalitalicmixes@mixes.cubicgarden.info.

Enjoy, I’m one step closer to self hosting my mixes.

Its been a while… the mayday rave up in your flat live mix

Its been a while since I uploaded a mix to mixcloud. I have plans to self host my own mixes using funkwhale or airsonic. But its not quite happened yet. So in the meanwhile I have done a few mixes and I’ll do the posse thing and upload it to mixcloud with a smaller amount of metadata.

Of course I’ll be keep a copy of my metadata for when I get my own system up and running. In the meanwhile the mixes will form not travels with pacemaker but locked in mixing out.

I present the mayday rave up in your flat live mix. Recorded live while mixing live on R&Dio the other day. The volume levels were a bit high sorry but its not horribly distorted

Here’s the tracklist… (at about 133bpm) as always enjoy!

Gouryella (fall from heaven remix) – Gouryella
The Desert – protoculture
Arise – victor ruiz & d nox
Switch (oliver klien & peter jurgens remix) – beckers
Special K (timo maas remix) – Placebo
Prosac (original mix) – Tomcraft
Floyd (extended remix) – Jerome isma-ae & alastor
Soundbar (extended mix) – Giuseppe Ottaviani
Cuckoo – Jon Mangan
Breathe (Blake Jarrell remix) – Anna nalick
Cut and run feat Emma lock – Beat Service
Freedom (extended mix) – Arty vs Muvy
Tears (protoculture remix) – Dakota
Megalodon – MaRLo
Grotesque – RAM & Alex M.O.R.P.H
The Legacy 2.0 (alphazone remix – Funabashi pres Saltwater
Anahera (extended mix) – Ferry Corsten pres Gouryella
Echoes (extended mix) – Henrik B, Niklas Gustavsson, Peter Johansson
Higher State of Conscientiousness – Josh wink

The mixcloud metadata take down

I mentioned a while ago how I was slowly migrating away from Mixcloud as their business model is starting to impinge on people listening to my mixes and I’m not so keen on that. I already mentioned trying to get Funkwhale working and using cue files.

While looking through my mixes I noticed I really didn’t do a great job with some of the metadata. While I had spent most of my time adding to the metadata to Mixcloud (not ideal)

In Mixcloud (once logged in) there are some human friendly urls which I was able to grab images from. The key one being the upload edit page – https://www.mixcloud.com/upload/{username}/{mixname}/edit/ for example https://www.mixcloud.com/upload/cubicgarden/follow-me-into-the-fading-moonlight/edit/

Follow me into the moonlight edit page

My plan was to manually copy the times into my newly written cue files but while talking to Jon about it, he said give him 5mins and he could knock up a script to pull the values out of the HTML page. I thought about it before but using XSLT, however noticed there is a lot javascript rendering making things difficult.

Jon’s quick script written was just what I needed.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import csv
import sys
from collections import namedtuple
from typing import List

import bs4
from bs4 import Tag

SongInfo = namedtuple('SongInfo', ['number', 'artist', 'title', 'time'])

def load_html(filename: str):
    with open(filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as fo:
        return ''.join(fo.readlines())

def extract_song_info(song: Tag):
    try:
        number = song.find(class_='section-number').text
        artist = song.find(class_='section-artist').text
        title = song.find(class_='section-title').text
        time = song.find(class_='section-time')['value']
        result = SongInfo(number, artist, title, time)
        print(f'Extracted {result}')
        return result
    except AttributeError:
        print(f'Error with item {song}')
        return None

def parse_table(input_html: str):
    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(input_html, features="html5lib")
    songs = [row for row in soup.find_all(class_="section-row")]
    return [x for x in [extract_song_info(song) for song in songs] if x is not None]


def save_to_csv(file_name: str, songs: List[SongInfo]):
    with open(file_name, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as fo:
        writer = csv.writer(fo)
        for song in songs:
            writer.writerow(song)


if __name__=="__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) != 3:
        print('Usage: extractor.py [input_html_file] [output_csv_file]')
    html = load_html(sys.argv[1])
    songs = parse_table(html)
    save_to_csv(sys.argv[2], songs)
    print(f'Saved to {sys.argv[2]} successfully - Done!')

With it and the HTML pages, which I almost got with Chromedriver, again thanks to Jon, but I couldn’t be bothered to sort out the cookies, etc. I quickly wrote a quick /dirty bash script and fired up a terminal.

#!/bin/bash
./extractor.py $1.html $1.csv
# Verify
echo Details for $1

I thought about modifying Jon’s script to generate the cue files directly bypassing the csv file but decided I should just get them all done. Because I still need to get funkwhale going.

I did notice the edit page doesn’t include genre or the year of the mix, but I can live with that, for now… Scraping web pages is certainly a throw back but its better solution that what I originally was thinking.

This will teach me to sort out my own house of data!

A better way to listen to mixes online?

For a while I have been thinking about leaving Mixcloud. Its nothing personal, I think its a great service for djs but its clear their business model is starting to interfere with the listening experience.

I had a thought about what Mixcloud do for me and decided these are the key things.

Hosting the full mix with limited rights problems (unless you do something like play a track from the same author twice)
The community of people and djs in one place
Ability to see the actual tracks within the mix

With this in mind, I thought I’d see what else was out there as I’m lucky enough to be sitting on a large enough internet connection to host my own mixes and become a node on a larger decentralised network. If it was build like the fediverse, that could solve the community side too? After looking around for alternatives I found a new upstart called funkwhale. You may have seen I mention it recently in a previous blog.

Maybe 1 and 2 could be solved but what about 3?

The last part of the puzzle seemed to be the track problem, as you want seamless playback but get an idea of what you are listening to. Mixcloud does this via metadata, which you can create via a slider over the audio waveform. Some DJ systems create this for you like the Pacemaker for example but that metadata is lost in translation I found. If only there was a standard way to define areas of a mix without slicing the audio mix up?

For example, here is a ambient mix I liked recently.

Its by Tonepoet and even they have gone through the effort of adding this metadata to their personal site complete with timings. I do a similar thing but without the timings (which I really should have added since I had them all and entered them into Mixcloud manually.

I looked a number of things including a bunch of playlist formats including pls, m3u and xspf. Even looked at smil and asx to see if they would help, but their problem was player support. The issue seemed to be they all treated their smallest objects as physical files rather than subsets of files. I did buy into xspf thought it was close with this extension.

The extension element allows non-XSPF XML to be included in XSPF documents. The purpose is to allow nested XML, which the meta and link elements do not. xspf:playlist elements MAY contain zero or more extension elements.
<playlist version="1" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/" xmlns:cl="http://example.com">
  <extension application="http://example.com">
    <cl:clip start="25000" end="34500"/>
  </extension>
  <trackList />
</playlist>

Close but not quite right and player support for extensions was going to be low. This is when I rethought the problem with something like .nfo files and found .cue files. Here is an example…

REM GENRE Electronica
REM DATE 1998
PERFORMER "Faithless"
TITLE "Live in Berlin"
FILE "Faithless - Live in Berlin.mp3" MP3
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Reverence"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "She's My Baby"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 06:42:00
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "Take the Long Way Home"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 10:54:00
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Insomnia"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 17:04:00
  TRACK 05 AUDIO
    TITLE "Bring the Family Back"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 25:44:00
  TRACK 06 AUDIO
    TITLE "Salva Mea"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 30:50:00
  TRACK 07 AUDIO
    TITLE "Dirty Old Man"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 38:24:00
  TRACK 08 AUDIO
    TITLE "God Is a DJ"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 42:35:00

Perfect, so I took one of mixes, Quiver in the underground and turned the .nfo file into a .cue file.

REM GENRE Tech Trance
REM DATE 2019
PERFORMER "Digital Italic"
TITLE "Quiver in the underground mix"
FILE "Quiver in the underground mix.mp3" MP3
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Activator, I know you can (That kid chris mix)"
PERFORMER "Whatever girl"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Air traffic (Erik De Koning remix)"
PERFORMER "Three drives"
INDEX 01 02:07:00
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Chinook"
PERFORMER "Markus Schulz pres. Dakota"
INDEX 01 07:25:00
TRACK 04 AUDIO
TITLE "Opium (Quivver remix)"
PERFORMER "Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor"
INDEX 01 10:32:00
TRACK 05 AUDIO
TITLE "Surveillance"
PERFORMER "Jordon Suckley & Kutski"
INDEX 01 15:24:00
TRACK 06 AUDIO
TITLE "Nitric (Division one remix)"
PERFORMER "Hybrid system"
INDEX 01 19:02:00
TRACK 07 AUDIO
TITLE "Circa-Forever (Galen Behr & Organ Nilsen remix)"
PERFORMER "Rapid eye"
INDEX 01 23:55:00
TRACK 08 AUDIO
TITLE "Opulence"
PERFORMER "Simon Patterson"
INDEX 01 30:05:00
TRACK 09 AUDIO
TITLE "J'ai envie de toi (Protoculture remix)"
PERFORMER "Armin Van Buuren presents Gaia"
INDEX 01 35:10:00
TRACK 10 AUDIO
TITLE "Z.I.T.A (M.I.K.E's progressiva mix)"
PERFORMER "Hiver & Hammer with Funabashi"
INDEX 01 39:30:00
TRACK 11 AUDIO
TITLE "Kubrick (Extended mix)"
PERFORMER "Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor"
INDEX 01 42:01:00

Tried it out on a number of media player and they all worked except Plex.

There is a very good chance if I was to run my own funkwhale node/server I could set it to index .cue files and playback the mix in a seamless way like Mixcloud? Theres only one way to find out really… Get Funkwhale installed!

On a side note I am slightly kicking myself now because I entered all that metadata into mixcloud but never stored it myself. I’m going to need to go through 90 of my own mixes and convert my .nfo files into .cue files.

I have the SQLite Database for my pacemaker device with the actual real timings but I need to identify which mix is which one (another thing I should have done, as changed the names of the mix depending on many things). I also hoped mixcloud’s developers guide would come to the rescue but it looks like maybe a GDPR request is my only option if I want the metadata for my mixes?

The Helsinki drop out mix

Somewhat as a forerunner to the peace of mind in Brussels mix. The Helsinki drop out mix is also a bit slower but a lot more punchy with harder tunes.

Recorded while sat in the city centre of Helsinki, watching people go by. Enjoy!

Tenshi (Magdelayna’s Resurrection mix) – Gouryella
Empty Cities, Dead Ghost (Chronosapien remix) – Fictitious Riceboy
Big Sky (Agnelli & Nelson remix) – John O’Callaghan feat Audrey Gallagher
Circles – Robert Nickson
Everythings been written – 8 Wonders
Hello (Jerome Isma-Ae remix) – Above & Beyond
Kubrick (Extended mix) – Jerome Isma-Ae Alastor
Out of the Blue (5am mix) – System F
The Wave 2.0 (Extended mix) – Cosmic Gate
Crayons (Leama and Moor remix) – Starkid
Torrent – Dave 202
The Game (Extended mix) – Fatum

The Peace of mind in Brussels mix

Recorded in Brussels while taking the Eurostar, while thinking about mental awareness week at work. Nicely relaxing with a slight edge.

Enjoy…

Empty Cities, Dead Ghost (Chronosapien remix) – Fictitious Riceboy
Big Sky (Agnelli & Nelson remix) – John O’Callaghan feat Audrey Gallagher
Bulgarian (Signum remix) – Travel
Drifting away (Lange sunset dub) – Lange feat. Syke
Casino Fire – Matias Faint
Tears (Protoculture remix)- Markus Schulz pres. Dakota
Crayons (Leama and Moor remix) – Starkid
Sister Sister – Sister Bliss
Floyd – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Key of life (Marlo remix) – Ohmna feat. Nurlaila
Made of love (Extended mix) – Ferry Corsten feat. Betsie Larkin
Peace of mind (Myon & Shane 54 summer of love mix) – Above & Beyond feat. Zoe
Peace – Yves Deruyter
Indigo – 4×4

Plex’s future, without its server?

Plex recently announced they were making major changes and that we should be excited about Desktop AF. What wasn’t said was the media server is being killed?

Years back, the most common Plex implementation was to attach a home theater PC (HTPC) to a TV to stream media. With the proliferation of cheap streaming devices like the Chromecast, Apple TV, and Fire TV, almost no one bothers with HTPCs anymore. Thus, Plex is retiring the TV interface with the launch of its new desktop app. This will, no doubt, upset some Plex fans nonetheless.

dates

Upset? Absolutely and its now in direct competition with Kodi too.

I’m now in the market for a alternative to Plex. Originally I was looking at Emby a long while ago but frankly I don’t want to switch to another freemium product.

Jellyfin and Triton look good but its early days.

Jellyfin is a personal media server. The Jellyfin project was started as a result of Emby’s decision to take their code closed-source, as well as various philosophical differences with the core developers. Jellyfin seeks to be the free software alternative to Emby and Plex to provide media management and streaming from a dedicated server to end-user devices.

TRITON is a media pipeline that aims to go one step further than services like Jellyfin and Plex provide. Media is fetched from a magnitude of supported protocols (HTTP, S3-compatible, Usenet, etc), converted into multiple different quality levels, and then uploaded to a S3-compatible storage provider. This enables cheap storage and ensures that buffering is never a problem.

Lots more research is needed, including a look at what others are doing with the Plex announcement. Although I did find Ampache and Airsonic which could be useful for my mixcloud issues. Imagine if they were federated too?

Changes to the experience of mixcloud for free listeners

Rain clouds — Stormy rain clouds are coming?

As you may have noticed I use Mixcloud for uploading my DJ/Pacemaker device mixes. It works quite well because they upload the whole track with a few restrictions and you can listen to the lot anytime. I use to upload them to soundcloud but that didn’t work out too well.

Mixcloud has been pretty good to me but recently I noticed some changes coming into effect.

Some changes are coming to Mixcloud’s free playback experience. As a valued creator of the Mixcloud community, I’d like to personally notify you in advance about why we’re doing this.

We need to make some changes in order to keep running a legal platform in line with our licensing agreements, and a platform that is truly sustainable for the long term. Please read this open letter from myself and my co-founders to understand why and how these changes contribute to building a fair and sustainable streaming model that supports artists. I’ve summarized this for you below:

What’s changing?

Free listeners will only be able to seek forwards while listening to a show.

Free listeners will be able to listen to the same show maximum 3 times in a rolling two-week window.

Free listeners will not be able to listen to shows that feature more than 4 tracks by the same artist or more than 3 tracks from an album.

There more but its clear the pressure is on. Its nothing personal about mixcloud, they have to make money and its pretty fair. But I can’t help but wondering about dataportability, because although I’m less concerned as I have all the mixes complete with track-listings and mix art on my machines backed up (The only thing I would like is the tags and some of the timings which I may not have directly).

I’m wondering where I would go if I did move on?

The copyright filter would kill uploading to youtube and archive.org. I wonder if theres a decent alternative which is part of the dweb? The closest I can see is peertube, but its focused on video. To be fair I have enough bandwidth to host my own mixes on a instance of peertube…. Maybe something for a rainy weekend?