The mixtape I put together for 2025 is now on YouTube! This is the first time any of my mixes have been publicly available for listening. The 2024 mix I did, I burned to some CD-Rs and mailed out to the Somnolians, most of whom don't have CD players. I have an alternate 2025 mix I had made before the trip seriously improved my spirits and brought back my optimism for a lot of things, and I think only dcb got a copy of it. I did drop a zip of this mix in Somnol, but it was over the holidays and everyone was busy and only dcb and I listen to actual music files anyway.
I knew that, if I wanted people to appreciate the work I put into these, I was gonna need to put them on YouTube. "Why not just make them a YouTube or Spotify playlist?" you might ask. I do a lot of extra work on these to make sure they listen exactly as I intend them. I source everything from lossless files or CD rips, I do volume normalization and limiting so everything plays at the same level, I do crossfades, I'm particular about the silences between songs, and I like to have the option to use outright alternate mixes (which I did for "Black Metallic" on this mix, from a CD single of the song that isn't available on streaming). None of these things would be possible with a playlist.
Still, it took me this long because I had much greater ambitions for the visual component of these, including lyrics. In the end, I decided up and posted is better than perfect, and that the extra widgets would've added an extra week onto what's already a months-long process of sequencing songs and mulling over mastering decisions. I wound up just coming up with some simple album art/song info graphics and putting them over captured Windows Media Player visualizations, which was pretty quick and easy outside of the slowness of working with big files. I gotta start simplifying things for myself more, especially in details no one will think about anyway, and the music speaks for itself, I feel.
Hopefully you take the 70 minutes to listen through it, or at least skim through and find something you like in there. The 2024 and alternate 2025 mixes will be in my back pocket to assemble into videos and post some other time. This is already a lot. Will I be doing one for 2026? Probably not of all-new (to me) music. A comfort food mix of tons of old Cammy favorites, maybe a "this is my music taste in a nutshell" kinda thing, that sounds a lot more likely. As I'm looking to re-enter the real world and go back to school and things post-trip, a comfy burrow of familiar games, music, and so on sounds ever more appealing.
Tagged under: music
