grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg

This release fixes #6, making it so that typing regular quotes in the album filter will find albums with the equivalent smart quotes in their titles. For example, typing God's will match God’s Country. This was useful for me because I started using beets, which likes to normalize quotes to smart quotes in titles.

As well, this release randomizes list ordering for the mpd and mpdtime commands, and makes mpdtime choose albums to show based on the following logic for a time of N minutes:

• Collect all albums with duration between N – 1 and N minutes.
• If there are less than 50 such albums, continue to collect albums with length less than N – 1, in decreasing order by length, until there are 50.
• However, don't collect any albums with length less than N – 10, even if that means you collect less than 50.

This release is named after the final track on Chat Pile's absolute wrecking ball of a release God’s Country, whose title was the cause of my discovering #6.

Slips and Tangles

This release fixes a bug with mpdtime that caused it to fail to find the artist name for some albums (and, worse, to fail to play those albums). It also speeds up mpdtime by doing some necessary database querying only for the 50 albums it shows rather than the whole dang library.

Behind the scenes, there are some changes to make the workflow view in Alfred a little less tangled by incorporating as many modifier actions as possible into the underlying scripts.

Release name is from the last track on The Weakerthans' 2000 album Left & Leaving.

Time Refuses To Stop

This release includes a new command, mpdtime, to find albums whose total length is as close as possible to the given time without going over it, for when you have some amount of time before a scheduled obligation and want to use it to listen to an entire album.

It takes one argument, a number of minutes, or hours and minutes in the form 1h22m. It will list the first 50 albums shorter than that in your library, in descending order by length, so that the first ones are closest to the given length.

The release name is from the song "Microphones In 2020," which is also the album Microphones in 2020, by The Microphones.

Öll Birtan

This release fixes #4, queuing of items containing non-ASCII characters in the artist, album or song name. It was broken, at least for me, because of a discrepancy between Unicode normalizations. Alfred would pass strings to the "Play" action with combining characters, e.g. ö would be o\N{COMBINING DIAERESIS} whereas mpd would expect it as the single character \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}. The fix normalizes all strings to Unicode NFC before using them in the mpd query.

The release name is from a Björk track off 2004's Medúlla. It means "all brightness" in Icelandic, per her translation in an interview.

Lyrics fixes

This release fixes a couple bugs with lyrics handling. The skipped and never-to-be-released v2.1.1 fixed some issues with how output was sent to Alfred, causing lyrics display to fail in an embarrassingly diverse number of cases. v2.1.2 adds support for tagging (mainly Apple, but here we all are using Alfred presumably on Macs) M4A or MP4 or whatever-they're-called files. The ones they sell on Apple Music.

Words, Words, Words, Longings, Longings, Longings

This release adds lyric searching and display, if you set yourself up with a Genius API account. Or you can skip that and just rely on the lyrics in your audio files, if you set mpd up to connect via UNIX socket.

I got a new keyboard, so the default hotkeys have also changed substantially. You are of course welcome to change them.

This workflow now requires Python 3, so if you're not on a Mac OS release that includes it, you'll have to install it. Also, the Python dependencies are now cordoned off in a separate directory and no longer checked into GitHub. If you want to hack on this workflow, you can do so with python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt -t lib.

Release name is from "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker," off Destroyer's 2011 album Kaputt.

I Want It All

I started working on this again to add a few features, and then added more features, and more, and more... well, not that many, but more than I originally intended. The TL;DR:

• MPD volume control, which I occasionally wanted when system volume control didn't do the job e.g. to have quiet background music relative to a Zoom call
• A status command to display details about what's playing
• Queueing rather than immediately playing albums and songs
• Generally being better about displaying something when actions are taken

Release title, "I Want It All," is a quote from "Oxbow," by Waxahatchee off her spectacular album Saint Cloud.

Melt My Wings And Call It Fun

Faster, faster I should run.

This release does away with the clunky mechanism previously used to list albums in favor of a faster one taking advantage of improvements in the Python-mpd bridge since the last release. Version 1.2 took several seconds to load my album list—on version 1.3 it's done before I finish typing the album name.

This release also drops the dependency on mpc.

The release title, "Melt My Wings And Call It Fun," is a quote from "Faster," off Janelle Monáe's bewilderingly good first full-length LP The ArchAndroid.

Second Bug Fix

The last release broke showing the artist in the notification that comes up when you play an album. This release fixes that.

Ceci N'est Pas Un Release

This is not a real release; I just messed up the version number on Packal at some point so I'm changing it here to make them match.