Some of my online friends have gotten into picking and ranking things – albums, movies, video games, etc – and most recently we held a “song draft”. Each participant took turns sending in a song until we had 100, then everyone went off and ranked them individually, and we compiled the results at the end of a couple weeks.

For a little side project, one of the players went and compiled all the tracks together into one eight-hour-long MP3 (complete with radio-style bumpers), and I then set up Icecast from my home network to just play it on a loop. It was a lot of fun to tune in with the other listeners simultaneously, commenting on tracks or laughing at the wild tonal swings between some of the picks.

The ranking is over (congrats to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”) but the fun of the radio led me to set up a new, standalone Internet Radio project. It broadcasts a continuous AAC stream on HTTP/HTTPS via Icecast, plus a set of management webpages using PHP for users to upload songs / view recent plays / update metadata. It also has one killer feature: users can supply a URL instead of a file, and the system will download and process using yt-dlp, making it trivial for even the non-technical to contribute more tracks. The entire thing runs at a couple watts using a Raspberry Pi 1B+ from 2014, with a single 128gb SD card, hooked up permanently to the router behind the family gaming PC.

A Rant About IPv6

I cannot recommend enough running a radio for your friends! Nothing in recent computer touching has brought me this much joy. You can bootstrap one from basically nothing, and everyone loves to listen to the same thing at the same time, or make other people listen to your best (and worst) musical tastes. It has been an incredible shared experience for us all.

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A user in the Nectarine Discord brought an interesting question recently: they had some Youtube videos of cracktros from Playstation games, and wanted to know if anyone could identify their soundtracks. For those unaware, a “cracktro” is a combination of a “crack” (piracy) and an “intro” (demoscene) – it’s a little movie or menu that plays at the start of a hacked / pirated game, usually with credits and simple visual effects. It’s a calling card from the group who helped pirate the game, often with “greetz” to the supplier of the disc image, the coder who cracked it, the BBS or site who re-hosted the result, etc.

Cracktro soundtracks are usually an oldschool chiptune or lo-fi soundtrack in “module” format. Originally created on the Amiga computer, .mod audio files are very small, similar to a MIDI with bundled sound samples. They are well-suited to cramming into a tiny executable, which must fit on the CD along with the pirated game. Sometimes the musician gets credited, but other times it’s a mystery. MOD files don’t have a place to write the artist or other info, only the title and instrument names. Because of the unknown provenance of the files, ripped from games or BBS posts or musicdisks full of sounds, sometimes the original credits are lost or incorrect.

Back to the Playstation games. There was a short list of videos that needed help to track them down, but eventually we got them all figured out. Every one of these was from the group “Paradox”, a console cracking and piracy group who released a number of titles in the early 2000s. Here’s how we figured them all out:

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