Introduction
Five Songs is coming back!
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Five Songs is coming back!

So, back in May, I stopped posting to Five Songs because YouTube were being incredible bastards (they still are), and I didn't really want to contribute to them in even the puny, pathetic way that I was. I needed to find a new solution to stream music, with my criteria being:

  1. It needed to have the ability to specify a playlist in one place
  2. It needed to have the ability for me to upload my music to it, because a non-trivial percentage of the songs we have here won't be in streaming services
  3. It needed to not throw stuff out on copyright claims whenever I try and add stuff
  4. It needed to not be YouTube

The first of these is pretty easy, but means I can't just Frankenstein something together with a bunch of services. Uploading cuts out pretty much all of the big streaming services like Spotify. SoundCloud has copyright controls, so that's out. And that leaves YouTube, which, uh, fails the last of these tests. As a result, I gave up for a while.

But, I missed it. It did sometimes feel like a bit of a grind to update this, but it got me listening to stuff I'd forgotten, and it would be nice to be able to update this thing again. Without the ability to play music for my listeners, what would be the point? For a little while, I considered handing out accounts to people on my Plex server, which would work, but upon reflection was going to be a huge pain in the ass and would realistically limit me to just a few reader/listeners.

Well, a couple days ago, I decided to hack around with just hosting the songs myself. I found some code to have a simple embedded player with a playlist, goofed around with how I could integrate here into Ghost, and it turns out...it's not too bad! I can even tag the player to only show up on posts that need it, so I don't need to update the archives (which was NOT going to happen).

What does this mean? Well, it means that I'm afraid y'all are going to have to resume ignoring my bleating here again. Sorry about that.

Joshua Buergel
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