Hello, my name is Grant Shangreaux.
This is my talk titled Bard Bivou(m)acs: Publishing Music with Emacs.
I'm a software developer with Unabridged Software in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Long time Emacs user, relatively new Emacs hacker.
Hopefully, I'll be able to show you my workflow,
with how I publish music with Emacs.
All right. So as a musician, I would like to publish my music online.
I could publish with popular online music services,
but I'm more of a DIY-type,
so I chose to go ahead and publish with Emacs.
What's the motivation behind this?
A lot of it comes down to some fundamental freedoms
that Emacs and GNU software represent to me,
as well as my ideas on culture and my background.
I don't believe that music is a consumer good.
It's a form of knowledge, like an algorithm.
And it's just such a part of culture,
like in tribal cultures,
music was seen as a gift from the cosmos or the gods.
It was a gift maybe through an individual vessel,
but was shared with the people
and shared with everyone,
kept alive by the culture itself.
So to me, music is something that
should be shared and should be
freely enjoyed by everyone.
Of course, artists should be compensated as well,
but that's a whole different topic.
So when I want to share my music,
I want to do it without impacting anyone's freedom.
Using GNU software like Emacs
is a good way that I can ensure that
I won't be requiring people
to sign away their freedoms for anything.
There's a lot more I could say about this
but I don't have time.
Feel free to reach out to me by email or IRC.
Part of the motivation for me,
personally, is that Emacs is super magical.
It's an all-in-one solution.
Like I said, the GNU software aligns with
Creative Commons' ideas.
I can do file management.
I can author HTML, all the web stuff I need even, literate-style.
I can handle media and metadata.
I've got version control, remote server access...
All the tools I need are right under my fingertips with this tool
that I use every day for a long time.
I don't need to look elsewhere.
It was a challenge.
I wanted to see if I could do this
all within Emacs itself.
So, how do you use Emacs to publish music?
Well, for me, I needed
a couple of things.
I needed to be able to audition and label unlabeled audio tracks.
I have a lot of files that I don't know where they came from.
I don't know what they are.
I need to be able to listen to them,
and I need to be able to add metadata to
whatever audio format it is
and rename the files based on that
metadata, potentially.
And in the end, I wanted to take those
files and programmatically produce a web page
for people to consume.
I found out that Emacs scores a hundred percent on all of
these requirements that I had for this,
and a lot of that came from EMMS, the Emacs multimedia system.
EMMS is great.
If you haven't checked it out, please do.
It's a little bit unintuitive,
but once you get into it, you know it works.
Basically, what EMMS gave me was
the ability to listen to the tracks,
organize playlists.
On top of that, it gave me
super-powered metadata authoring.
I'm going to demonstrate that to you.
So in order to do this,
you have to require markable playlists,
so (require 'emms-mark). I'm going to
go through, and I'm going to open the red...
I've got this. These files here.
So you can see these files are mp3s.
They're recorded on a digital recorder.
If I had the choice, I would have a
recorder that used a different format,
but so be it. I can mark all these files
and I can do EMMS add to .., and now they've been loaded into a playlist.
So you can see the playlist here.
There's some leftover files.
So I've got these three files
in my playlist, and as you can see,
it's just the file name, the path.
I don't have any metadata associated with them.
In this playlist, I can hit E,
and it'll bring up a buffer showing
the tag information that I have.
I could edit these here.
I could edit them one at a time,
but that's not really great. I want superpower metadata authoring.
So, by marking them, I can then hit E,
and I have all three of the tracks loaded up in this tags buffer.
On top of that, I can do EMMS tag editor,
set all, C-c C-r, and I want to set the artist.
so these are some recordings of my family.
So, Shangreaux, set all three of them.
I want to set the album:
Spring Walk with Lap Harp.
I want to set the year.
And then I'm going to go ahead and put these in manually,
but with the power of Emacs keyboard macros
and registers and so on. I could do this
programmatically as well,
which would make it a lot easier
if I had much more than three files to do this with.
Submit the changes with C-c C-c,
and now we've got the playlist.
You can see the artist and track number have been updated here.
And then the final piece of this is that
if you look at this, you can see that
the file name is still the same.
So if I were looking at the directory,
I would still have this file name.
When packaging these up for a release,
for people to download,
it's nice to be able to have that
filename reflect the track number
and the artist and so on.
So there's another command,
EMMS rename tag editor, rename,
so it could be just capital R.
I think I need to mark all of these,
hit capital R, and then it's going to ask me to confirm
and say yes to all of them.
And now, if you look in the--
whoops I have to update it--you'll see
it's been updated with the artist,
track number and track name.
This format is a format string,
so it's customizable of course.
I just decided to go with the default.
So that's pretty great, this workflow just with EMMS.
I didn't have to do anything. This is all there.
It's all built in. It gave me exactly what I was looking for
in terms of being able to process a lot of raw audio files,
add metadata to them, and get them ready for publishing.
And this is for publishing for playback
in any media player. It'll be useful.
Not just for the web page that I'm building.
So the final part, of course, is to build the web page.
Emacs makes authoring HTML trivial.
As I was going through this,
I wanted to challenge myself and just be, like,
can I do this just all with Emacs? Can I just make this?
I don't need a... I don't need Ruby.
I don't need Rails. I don't need Node.
I don't need any of this other stuff.
I have my tool right here. It's a fully...
It's a whole operating system, basically,
plus programming languages.
So the first thing I started with
was buffer scripting for manipulating text.
That's kind of the easiest way to do it.
Basically, anything you can do in a buffer,
you can do programmatically with Elisp.
So this might be a good example for beginners.
If you haven't done any Elisp yet,
a simple example is to create this div output here.
You can use this with-temp-buffer,
so basically creating an imaginary buffer.
insert is just like typing,
so you put strings in, you put new lines in,
you can build some strings together.
Here you can see I'm doing a random number,
so every time I execute this,
my content changes.
I can generate dynamic content in HTML blocks with Elisp.
For my web page builder, it's a little more complex.
I'm pulling data out
using EMMS data structures,
so it's pulling that out from the track data.
And then I'm using some program to
generate list elements, so each track is
going to have the title and track number,
and then a button for playing it,
plus the source of the audio file,
which will get added here.
Right now, this is hard coded for Opus,
so it won't work for my MP3s.
I'm going to skip over snippets.
Turns out format strings were good enough for me.
Snippets could be useful,
but format is super powerful,
and I didn't really even need all that much power,
basically, just doing string interpolation.
So if you haven't seen format before,
you basically put these control strings
or control characters inside of a string,
and you can generate an output string that you want.
So in my generator code, basically,
it's down here,
I'm calling format with this Bard Bivou(m)acs template,
and that's basically a big string of HTML.
It's just my whole page of HTML
with those control characters in just four places.
One of them populates the track list.
That's really the meat of the program.
Again, this is a combination of using buffer scripting, using HTML mode,
inserting text format strings,
and then I can indent-region
so the HTML actually looks pretty
when it comes out of it as well.
I will show that, just really quick actually.
So you can see, this is the HTML that got generated.
I've got my template.
I inserted the title here, the style,
the font was all inserted,
and then this whole list of of tracks here.
It's kind of messy to look at,
but this track list, this whole div here,
is all generated by my generator code, and it works. It's great.
Okay, moving on.
So the other thing was that as I was developing this,
I decided to use Org Babel
and some of its features for multi-language things
because I needed to style it with CSS
and put actions in Javascript,
and also I used SVG for authoring stuff.
It was a little bit complicated.
It probably would have been simpler
had I not used Org Babel,
but it's also really fun.
I think it's a cool, cool idea to use literate programming.
My idea was to create HTML components.
I could name it like this,
put a format string inside it,
and build a function
in Elisp to format it
and spit out the HTML that I want.
By doing this, then,
I can just change things in my Org file,
which, not getting a whole lot of time to work on it,
I can come back to it
and I have a lot of notes.
I can kind of generate things as I'm going
and keep notes for myself, and keep the...
I don't know. It's cool.
Literate programming is fun.
So I don't need to
go into that too much, but you can see if
I execute this here,
I get the the div that I want.
It's a little bit funny.
You'll see I have the string like this,
the way that noweb expands, I can't do this on a single line.
It looks funny when you do that,
so that might be something to work out later.
CSS blocks can either be tangled out
and referenced in the HTML source, or inlined.
Here's an example I have of inlining it.
So I've got my little CSS block named style,
Javascript named script,
and then I've got this HTML source block
with noweb expansion.
These double angle brackets here
are where I'm going to expand
the block named style. I'm actually calling a function,
so I want the result of the function here,
and then the script will just get expanded here.
So org-babel-expand-src-block,
you can see what it looks like.
I've got my style here. I've got my title.
I've got that main content class I showed before,
and the script as well. So that's kind of cool.
I could just run org-babel-tangle and get my thing out
and just edit one file instead of multiple files.
Not for everyone, but I thought it was kind of fun. All right.
Oh, and the final thing is that in Emacs,
you can author and view SVG.
So this is just an Org. This SVG, I used to make the play and pause buttons.
I didn't know this,
but if you edit an SVG file,
you can toggle back and forth
between the code and the image.
It's pretty sweet. So I can iteratively
work through this because of how Emacs is.
Final considerations here,
like when doing this,
I want it to be all free,
so I want to use fonts that use a free license.
I found GNU Unifont. It's kind of cool.
The content license...
I chose Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike,
which is kind of like the GPL.
Ideally, I could serve it with Emacs.
I'd like to remove idiosyncrasy so other people can use it.
It's pretty much just my tool right now.
Not requiring the web browser...
I can ship playlists so that you can just click or link to a playlist
on your favorite player, even EMMS if you want,
and then packing up those albums in like a ZIP or .tar file.
So you can go to churls.world .
It just has a link to this album.
I'll display it here in just a second.
You can contact me. I'm shoshin on #emacs
in IRC and on sourcehut. You can email me:
grant@churls.world, personal, or
grant@unabridgedsoftware.com. All right, now.
Let's see about this...
This is up online, so if you want to listen
to my college band's album from 20 years ago,
here it is: Cassiopeia Basement Days.
Whoops. I made this art in Krita.
You can press play. You can skip around.
I do have the playlist up here too.
So yeah, thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed it, and enjoy the rest of EmacsConf. Goodbye!