TomboFry

It's been a while since I really did anything with my website. I would occasionally post songs (if I even remembered to), and the other pages were kind of empty and boring. This website was just a place that existed because I felt like it had to.

But, not anymore, baby! Ha-ha-ha-haaaa! ^{it's a reference}

The Music page is completely different

I've been hard at work doing all sorts of random bits and pieces, most specifically my Music / Discography page. It's finally got a FULL list of all the music I've ever officially released, and I'm adding a bunch of smaller stuff that I would have normally posted on social media - but either because of their questionable decisions (...Twitter), or the fact that for a sliver of upload space you have to pay a bunch of money (...Soundcloud), I just never did. This page is still being updated with more music - you won't believe how much I've made that never got released - so if you happen to visit it every so often be sure to check the Miscellaneous Stuff section at the bottom.

Here's what it looks like now (this is just an image, you can't click it unless you go to the music page 😆):

You may notice there's a button that says "Play Now" - what I eventually did is personally create a music player from scratch over the course of several days, that lives on the site at all times, and you can probably see it right now by clicking the lil music icon in the bottom left corner of the screen (unless you're using an RSS reader).

Don't worry, if you navigate pages the music will continue playing, and you'll even see a nice notification with the title and album art and everything! It's so cool I'm absolutely obsessed with this creation!

Nerding out about audio and image formats

I'm a tiny bit obssessed with audio formats (just a tiny bit), specifically OPUS. Web browsers are now at the point where nearly all of them support this awesome format - the main exception being iOS Safari - so I took the plunge and encoded all my music in this format for my website. So, if you are using iOS Safari, the music might not play (unless you use Chrome or Firefox, it seems to work on those, funnily enough), and I'm sorry about that 😅 If you're interested, here's the site that lets you figure this all out.

On some devices that do support Opus, for some reason the bitrate sounds worse than it does on my desktop PC using Firefox. Admittedly, everything's encoded at 64kbps, which is super low, but for streaming purposes it should sound fine (and honestly re-encoding everything at slightly higher bitrates would be insanely annoying, considering how long it took to get everything this organised in the first place - you wouldn't believe it!).

Another big change I made is - if you have Javascript enabled, pages will transition nicely now without having to reload the page at all! It'll still work like normal without, but it also means that if you're listening to music and you navigate away from the current page, the music won't stop 😎.

Finally, I've also converted all the images on my site to use the AVIF format. You might hate me for not using JPEG or PNG, but they're so small compared to their JPEG counterparts, at similar quality too. At least they're not webp. gross.