Funkwhale - New Addition to my Fediverse
My Music Is Now Self-Hosted (And It's a Mess, But It 'Works')
I moved my music off SoundCloud. It lives here now: music.aurionblack.com
It's running on Funkwhale , a self-hosted, federated music platform, on my homelab server. It's not pretty. The "album" is literally called "Soundcloud dump." But it's mine, it works, and I can play it anywhere.
Here's the embed, if you want to just start listening:
Who Am I, Musically
Quick intro if you found this from somewhere other than my homelab posts:
I'm Aurion. Solo producer and multi-instrumentalist out of Grand Rapids, MI. I make music that doesn't fit a single genre because I've never cared about having a consistent artistic brand. Tycho, Radical Face, ratatat, and STRFKR are probably my biggest influences, but any given track I post might be deep house, lo-fi, indie pop, dubstep sound design, or a 30-second experiment I made on a Tuesday.
One thing I feel strongly about: I don't use AI to make music. AI helps me with my homelab, my writing, my code, my pictures...but what you hear in my tracks is my own hands on my own gear. If I sample something or do a cover, I try to make it obvious.
My setup:
- Ableton Live with Max for Live
- Arturia Collection (VSTs)
- Superior Drummer 3
- Ebosuite / SENsie (for some live visuals)
- Roland TD-27 electric drums
- Ableton Push 2
- Fender California acoustic guitar
- Washburn electric guitar
- Arturia KeyLab Essential 49
Why I Moved Off SoundCloud
Honestly, it's less of a principled stand and more of a "I have a homelab and this is what homelab people do" situation. I run a bunch of self-hosted services and music felt like a natural next thing.
SoundCloud has been fine. I'm not mad at it. I spent a lot of time making my profile look good over there. If you want to see it before I nuke it:
Go listen. It's the same music. It's prettier. The waveforms are the right colors.
But it's not mine. The server is theirs, the player is theirs, the data is theirs. Funkwhale runs on hardware I physically own, behind a domain I control. If I want to change something about how it works, I can. (And apparently I have to, because Funkwhale's embed widget had a bug and I ended up patching the source code at 1am. Classic homelab experience.)
The Migration, Non-Technically
I downloaded everything from SoundCloud using a command-line tool. Then I uploaded it to my Funkwhale server. The tool preserved track titles and artwork. The descriptions required a bit of extra work. I had to write a small script to match description files to tracks by name and push them through the API....still hasn't worked yet.
Then I discovered that anonymous users couldn't listen because of a misconfiguration in Funkwhale's instance info endpoint. Fixed that with another patch. Then the embed widget wasn't showing any tracks in Ghost because of an API field rename in a newer version of Funkwhale. Fixed that too.
The point is: 71 tracks, fully migrated, publicly playable, embeddable anywhere. The album is called "Soundcloud dump" because that's exactly what it is.
The Actual State of Things
I'm going to be honest: this is not organized. Everything is in one album. There's no genre sorting, no playlist curation, no nice cover art for most tracks. Some tracks are finished songs. Some are 30-second daily-challenge sketches from a 30-day challenge I did a while back. Some are sound design experiments that have no business being public, but here they are anyway.
I may or may not clean this up eventually. If you're reading this a year from now and everything is still called "Soundcloud dump," that's probably accurate.
What's Next
If you want to follow my music through the Fediverse (the Funkwhale channel is federated), you should be able to follow @aurion@music.aurionblack.com from Mastodon or any ActivityPub-compatible server. (I haven't tested this thoroughly yet. It might work...)
The rest of my Fediverse presence lives at @aurion@go.aurionblack.com if you want the full stream of consciousness.
Homepage-ish thing: aurionblack.com
Running on Funkwhale 5.x on self-hosted hardware. The embed widget is patched. It was not patched when I wrote the first draft of this post.