Creating the Aetheryte Radio

Not the OC, but I’ve done something similar and it wasn’t permanent but it was effective short-term after listening. My idea was to match the pitch, turn up the volume until it was fairly loud, then shut off the sound, and when I did that the pitch was gone or greatly diminished for about a day.

Years...until a period of extreme stress came along. Came and went for a couple of years (along with a host of other stress induced fun) and now it's gone again.

> I went to the site and listened to the track. Sounds nice!

Thanks! I played a lot of FFXIV and idled a bit in between dungeons and often sat at the Aetherytes (teleport / fast travel locations). The ambiance was nice enough that I didn't feel the need to mute the game when tabbed out.

> What about the sound is so nice / interesting / soothing that drives you to these lengths? What about it do you like?

Most of the audio I keep playing (either music or ambiance) is usually unobtrusive. I appreciate less demanding audio because I can focus cognition towards the task at hand, usually work or games. This means I gravitate towards genres without vocals, like EDM, jungle, IDM, etc. I actually used to use a tool to loop music without gaps because the clip would annoy me[1].

For the aetheryte ambiance in particular, it was just low and novel enough to be relaxing, without constantly drawing my attention to it.

> I find your whole project really fascinating. I want to do something similar at some point, even though I don’t have the same kind of sound capturing my interest at the moment.

You could also try recreating my project on a new platform! I've actually recreated this tool as an iOS app because background play on iOS is toxic and changed between iOS versions. [2]

Even if you don't have an earworm it's fun to explore new APIs. I really liked CoreAudio and Web Audio.

[1]: https://github.com/NolanNicholson/Looper [2]: https://github.com/haze/Aetheryte.app

My dad always wanted me to create a VST but I'm not close enough to production to find it interesting, especially when there are already so many out there that are so versatile. This isn't my introduction, I've done a lot of exploratory work with hardware accelerated FFTs in the past for BPM algorithms and visualizers. I've also worked extensively with codecs and file formats. I wasn't happy with the performance of taglib and wrote my own to parse my ~600GB music library.

Thanks! I've fixed the radio. MariaDB for Azuracast doesn't tear down gracefully and some log file is always left around that prevents a restart from happening. I'll figure it out eventually.