Marking up a Tracklist
Is an album's tracklist better suited for a table or a list? The answer may surprise you! (But it probably won't).
Archives
Why Spotify playlists never truly shuffle
Y'know that thing where Spotify is on shuffle but refuses to play certain songs in your playlist? And you can shuffle the same playlist several times over the course of a week and it'll seem to have […]
Scrobbling stats
A great (and niche) website that lets you look up the history of any given Last.fm account. For example, here's my stats page: theAdhocracy's Last.fm stats. There are lots of great data […]
Compose to a vertical rhythm
An interesting look at using consistent line-heights to force a vertical rhythm to a page. Specifically, it looks at setting a base line-height (in this case 18px) and ensuring all text uses it. That […]
A Small Slice of Normal
The summer solstice started like most Sunday's of the past year: we had a fairly lazy morning, ate brunch, Alison read a bit whilst I tinkered on the microsite. And then we pulled out our drumming […]
Weighing up UX
There's a lot of interesting thoughts packed into this overview of UX Fest 2021, but the bits that really hit home were Jeremy's musings on A/B testing and dark patterns, particularly how one can […]
Recording Records
A look at the largely manual workflow I've used to convert my physical music collection into a digital data archive.
Layout love and drumming
A follow-up to Andy's previous explanation of his compound grid layout in which they explain their logic behind a 4 + 5 compound grid a bit more. It's neat, but this description is what really caught […]
Around the Tesla coils
The Daft Punk track Around the World performed on Tesla coils. Somehow this manages to be even more awesome than the summary, too (I still slightly think it's fake... somehow […]
Associative trails
Some very resonant musings from Jeremy on why he […]
Soundfonts
I love coming across some of the more niche or esoteric uses of the web; the internet's marginalia, if you will. I feel like Jeremy's post very much fits that category, with an excellent overview of […]
Genius web annotator versus a woman with a blog
I had no idea that the music lyrics website, Genius, also operated a tool that allows you to comment/annotate on any website, but apparently it does and apparently it's not even that new. It also […]
Bandcamp, Spotify and the wide-open future
A fascinating dive into the mentality differences between Bandcamp and Spotify. Spoiler: Bandcamp comes out looking a lot more positive, particularly for artists. Interesting to see the CEO of […]
Drumming in the Air
It's July, which means it should be time for the annual Walthamstow Garden Party festival. As the Garden Party is funded and run by the Barbican and Guild Hall groups, who are also heavily […]
Isolate parts of a music track
Another really neat music-related tool, Stems claims to be able to split tracks into their various components e.g. drums, piano, vocals, instrumentals etc. It's something I've always […]
Turn music into visual magic
Astrofox looks like a really clever video editor, developed specifically with the aim of creating videos for music playlists and personal tracks. Nothing too fancy, but lots of options to animate […]
2020 Challenges: Mid-Year Update
We're almost at the midway point of 2020, so I thought it would be a good moment to take a look at my New Year's challenges list and see how things were going.
Monarch
I really love the colour palette that Trent has created for his recent album release. It's a lovely blend of warm tones and underlying texture that just feels inviting. Also, the album itself is […]