Last night a couple of friends and I decided to play Fortnite Festival, which we hadn't touched since around 2023. For those who haven't tried it it's basically guitar hero inside Fortnite with trendy songs. Back then we used to have a lot of fun grinding for top scores on songs and this recent session has sparked that in us again. What's interesting is how many songs Fortnite have actually managed to license for this game mode, about 750 total, most of them recently trending. The way it works if you don't want to buy the songs for 500 v-bucks each (the cost of a meal), each week has a certain rotation of songs you can play for free. Because of this rotating catalog feature and the vastly increased sized of licensed songs I decided to build a quick Discord bot that let's me know when a song enters rotation, when it's about to leave rotation, and when a new song gets added to the catalog. The bot also includes a few other features that are meant to help browsing and subscribing to songs. This way I can keep track of the festival scene even if I stop playing for a few years again.
New Site
I've rebuilt the Blapps site from scratch. It's now made with TanStack Start and runs on my own server, and I've added a few projects I've been working on that weren't on here yet. The admin side got a big upgrade too, so hopefully that means more regular posts here :)
Now Playing Visualizer
Now Playing Visualizer Released
For years I've wanted a music visualizer running on my second screen while I do other things, and I've finally made one I'm happy with. Now Playing Visualizer is a Spotify extension that turns the cover art on the Now Playing screen into a visualizer that moves with the music. It looks like it's part of Spotify, works with every song and barely uses any computer resources. It's available on the Spicetify Marketplace, and I also made installers for Windows and Mac so anyone can set it up without knowing anything about Spicetify. I haven't fully tested it and I do see some bugged behaviour especially across Spotify versions but I will be using it everyday from now on so hopefully those will get phased out. Additionally if anyone notices anything platform or version specific, I will be monitoring the github issues as well.
Planka Gamification
Planka Meets GitHub
The gamification and MCP didn't feel significant. They definitely helped stay on track but a lot of the workflow process remained chaotic. That's why I've connected my Planka fork to GitHub. Cards now get ticket numbers, can create their own branch, and show the status of their pull request and CI checks, so I can see where everything is without leaving the board. It also pushes me into a more structured workflow, where every change starts as a card with a clear goal and goes through a pull request before it's merged. I just spent a good while refactoring TV Diary, so the hope is that this keeps the code quality up from the start and saves me from having to do that again. Yes, I've basically rebuilt a certain ticketing tool everyone loves to complain about, but at least mine gives out XP.
AI Music Detector
Dissertation Submitted
My dissertation is finally submitted. I ended up with a dataset of almost 1,900 instrumental tracks, roughly half made by people and half by MusicGen, Stable Audio and ElevenLabs, and my best model could tell them apart with almost 97% accuracy. Detectors trained on one generator were a lot less reliable on the others though, which turned out to be the most interesting part of the project.