If you are free, and you want to, you should make stuff

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Here is a very nice article called “Everybody’s Free (To Write Websites)” by Sara Joy. I found the link through one of my RSS feeds–it showed up in at least a couple of them.

As you can tell from the title, the article is about web sites, but you can apply the same ideas to pretty much anything you like to do.

If you like making things, keep making things.

There are always new things to learn, and new ways to approach what you do. You will always feel like you are falling behind, and there will always be lots of voices telling you what you should be doing.

With any luck, you will never feel like you have it figured out. You’ll always think you can do it better, or that you should feel better about what did. You’ll always feel bad about the things you didn’t make very well, or didn’t finish. You’ll always want a do-over. Always.

That means there is no downside to making more things. Or to trying more things. If you make things, the worst regret you can have is that you didn’t screw up as many things as you could have in order to learn more things you could have done better.

If you like making things, keep making things.

Non-binding statement of intended intent

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From now on, for short posts, I’m gonna shoot for posting at least one positive story per negative one. Seems fair.

I’ll try to post each one separately, so that if you want to use the categories of “Excellent” and “Not Excellent” you can just see the positive or the negative. I could probably set up RSS feeds for just those categories as well, if one or both people reading this let me know they want that.

Note: On my janky hosting, WP takes a while to bring up those category pages.

I would like a music player for IOS

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PLEASE NOTE: I AM aware that Apple Music exists and what it does. I do not want to use it.

I have been looking for a good audio player for iPhone. My criteria are:

  • Reliably plays pretty much any audio format that was very popular in the last 20 years, but particularly any MP3, WAV, MP4 . Don’t care much about weird or proprietary formats, as this is just for my own use, not converting stuff or anything.
  • Plays files that I keep on my phone. That is to say: I will put files on my phone, and then the app will be able to see and play them. I am willing to move files to a specific directory with the Files app, but ideally, the music app will just open and play files I tell it to.
  • Can create and organize playlists of files.
  • Can reliably play back those playlists, in set or random order, once or looped.
  • Does not require a connection to the Internet in order to play local files.
  • Does not require a subscription. To anything.
  • Does not involve DRM. If I want content that is DRM-encumbered, I’ll play it in whatever the owner provides to play it in. This is for playing stuff I own.

So yep, pretty basic. Play some local audio files I want to play, in the order i want to play them. Pretty much what we have been able to do on computers since the mid-late 90’s.

The closest thing I have found to what I want is VLC. Unfortunately, the version for iPhone will sometimes stop playback in the middle of a playlist. I haven’t been able to figure out why. Based on the support information I have read online, I am the only person on the planet who has this problem.

I just tried the new Winamp, but it looks like it will only work with files in iCloud and/or stuff in Apple Music. It kinda looks that Winamp is just another way to do Apple Music stuff. That’s not what I want to do.

If anyone reading this has any useful recommendations, I would love to hear about them.

PLEASE NOTE: I AM aware that Apple Music exists and what it does. I do not want to use it.