#I WAS GOING TO DO THE FULL SONG BUT MY EDITING SOFTWARE IS AN EVIL BEAST...

[marchenhare]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen!

Shinkai Trio - Purge March (DECO*27)

[kbandtrash]

Dance or Band? (Seunghyub x Reader)

~Rachel~

Masterlist

Idk how many of you are familiar with the original dance or band (mnet survival show--sf9 vs honeyst) but this is the au where they did it again with girls and the reader is the leader of the band group. @yukheisuh you said you wanted it so here it is

Content: survival show drama, fluff, an implied kiss

Word count: 3k

“You’re not coming back with me?” your youngest member Seohye asked.

“Hakgu and I will take her home,” Seunghyub jumped in. “I was going to teach her some things about the music software I use.”

You waved Seohye toward the studio door. “You can tell the other girls I put you in charge tonight,” you told her with a wink.

She brightened up and bowed her way gracefully out the door. “I will use this power, for evil,” she promised brightly. “Thanks for letting us help, sunbae!”

“Get home safely,” he wished her, waving goodbye. He chuckled good-naturedly. “She must be hard to keep in line.”

You smiled and shrugged. “Not as long as we work together. She doesn’t need to be kept in line.”

“Wow, you sound like you’ve been leading your group for as long as I have,” he sighed, turning his chair so he could meet your eyes. “You’ve been working so hard for so long, you really deserve to win this.”

Downcasting your eyes, you clasped your hands together in your lap. “I’m at a loss,” you admitted. “They’ve been promising us our debut for a year and a half now, and then they decide to pit us against their shiny new girl group.”

“And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this to a trainee band, either.”

“No, it’s not. Like, which is going to win in the eyes of the public? Dance or band? It’s obvious. If the dance group wins next week, I don’t know if I’ll be able to pretend to be happy for them.”

Seunghyub patted your head comfortingly. “You know you have my vote, and after you opened for us last time, I think you have N.Fia, too.”

You were able to bring your smile to your face again. “Thanks, sunbae. And thanks for letting Seohye and me help out with our finale song.”

Seunghyub laughed. “You know, I asked Boyoung and Hyerin if they wanted to help with the dance group song, but you know what they told me?”

You cracked a malicious grin. “What?”

He matched your smile and told you in a high pitched tone, “‘That’s okay, we trust you, sunbae!’”

You gasped. “They turned you down? Why wouldn’t they want a part in shaping their future?”

“I can’t figure it out, either! I already knew that you would want as much influence as you could have, so I thought it would be fair to offer them the same chance.”

“Naturally,” you agreed with a nod. You felt your anger rising again and it was getting harder to stuff it down. “‘We trust you, sunbae,’ of course they trust you! I would trust you, too, if I had to.” You pulled your hair down from its ponytail and ran your hand through it. “Are they really so sure they’re going to win? They don’t think it matters whether or not they have a hand here?”

Seunghyub listened quietly.

“To me, that seems like arrogance. Like no matter if they try or not, it doesn’t matter. I know it’s my job—our job, as the band—to be more involved in the music, but telling you that they don’t want to help at all…that feels lazy.” You looked up and saw him watching you, his face full of concern, and you realized what you were doing and who you were complaining to. “Sorry, I don’t need to tell you all of this.”

He shook his head. “Don’t apologize. To be honest, I thought the same thing, but I can’t say that to anyone without sounding biased.” He fiddled with his hands, trying to decide what to say next. “They…don’t edit you very kindly, do they?”

Your anger was cooling down, but too quickly. You were afraid it was going to give way to tears. “You’ve been watching?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t read the comments, do you?”

“Do you?”

You looked down again, letting your hair hide your face in case tears decided to spill over. “I stopped after episode one.” You sniffed. “I was just trying to show myself as a strong leader, and PD-nim said it was good, but now I wonder if he said that because it made the dance group look more desirable.”

“You’re a strong leader whether you show it or not. There’s nothing wrong with standing up for your members.”

“I just don’t want them to lose because I’m standing up for them.”

“If you stop standing up for them, then they’ll really lose.” He set his hand atop yours and, startled, you looked up to meet the determination in his eyes. “You started this strong, and you have to keep going strong or you’ll lose your fire.”

“Fire?”

“You’ve been burning the stage with your passion every time you perform. The dance group girls haven’t been able to match that even once.” He took your other hand, too, and he held them tightly as he made his point. “If you lose that, you lose what’s been setting you apart this whole time. Your passion is what fuels your members, and what fuels your performance together. You can’t stop now, or the world will never see what you have to offer.”

You looked down at his hands and back up to his face.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked. “The way you are, you don’t have to change that. You’re talented and beautiful and you’re strong. You don’t have to hide—I want you to be able to show everyone.”

“Sunbae,” you began, tightening your fingers around his apprehensively. Oh, how you prayed you were right about the venture you were about to make. “Do you like me?”

His hands tightened briefly in a lightning-fast squeeze as his face dropped in shock. “Do I—um, do I have to like you? In order to want you to…to do well?”

You shook your head frantically, feeling your stomach tie itself in knots. “No, of course not, I just—I don’t want any misunderstandings, I thought I would ask at the very least.”

He retracted his hands bashfully and turned his chair back to his desk, suddenly avoiding your gaze as his ears turned pink. “This timing is terrible, seriously. I wasn’t going to tell you because you’re under so much pressure right now.”

“You do like me?”

“Yes, but…” he folded his hands in his lap, “I don’t expect anything back. I just want you to do your best and be happy. If I can help you succeed, that’s enough for me.”

“Sunbae—”

“You don’t have to give me a response if you don’t have one, it’s okay.”

“No, I want to tell you something.”

He glanced back over at you and tried to read your face. “You do?”

You nodded. “I’m really not in a place to date right now.”

“You really don’t have to tell me anything, I mean it. I’m really not hurt if you don’t return my feelings.”

“But I do.” 

He was cute when he was surprised, and you knew you were starting to show how flustered you were. “You do?”

You nodded again. “For a long time, I think, but I know I can’t be dating right now, so I just liked you quietly. Kind of like you said, I was just happy to work with you.”

He kicked around in his chair, spinning between facing you and his desk. As he glanced up at you shyly, you wondered if you had been ignoring the now obvious signs on purpose. 

“What do you want to do, then?” he asked.

“For now…” you slid your chair closer to his, but you turned it toward his desk so you could see his computer. “Can you teach me about your music software?” I don’t know yet.

An understanding smile spread across his face and he slid over to make room. “Let’s do that. Where do you want to start?” I’ll wait until you do know.

—

“You two have incredible chemistry, really,” Yonghwa noticed appreciatively. 

“Ah, thank you!” you said, beaming. You could barely see anything through the stage lights, but you bowed in what you hoped was the right direction.

“You worked on the arrangement together, right?”

“Yes, but we made it originally with just Hyerin and Keeho in mind,” you explained.

“I thought it would be better if Seunghyub-sunbae and (Y/N) joined us,” Hyerin added. “I may not know much about the technicalities behind the music, but I’ve learned as a trainee how to make a good performance. For a vocal stage like this, I felt it would be more impactful with the feelings of the arrangers themselves.”

“It’s a shame that you two leaders aren’t on the same team,” Hong Ki said. “Your two voices blend so nicely, I want to hear more.”

You and Hyerin exchanged smiles, but you couldn’t tell if her smile was fake—you couldn’t tell if your smile was fake. After the last months of being pitted against each other, it was hard to remember when you had thought of her affectionately.

“We do have one more combined performance,” you promised, “and after that…” You snuck another glance at Hyerin, who seemed a little too relaxed. “I’m sure I’ll produce something we could—”

“It would be fun to feature her with us someday,” she jumped in.

Your mind went totally blank. On autopilot, you heard yourself say, “That would be fun,” but those words were for the sake of politeness. 

The assumption she had just made was glaring, and it made you scared. With the confidence she had just spoken with, it seemed like she thought her team had already won. Was there something you hadn’t been told? Was this game already set before it began, just as you had feared?

“I think any of us would be overjoyed to feature her,” Jongseob piped up. “Or, either of you really,” he covered, catching his slip in neutrality.

Jiung bumped his arm. “Here he goes again.”

“Please collab with us, Noona,” Jongseob said with a grin. “Write a song with us—it’ll be fun, I promise!”

“Only if Boyoung and I get to make the choreography,” Intak said. Jiung laughed again.

“Our hoobaes really love each other,” Hong Ki chuckled. “Were we like that with our hoobaes?”

“Our CNBlue hoobaes were also our hyungs,” Jaejin pointed out.

“You’ve shown us plenty of love over the years,” Seunghyub said, finally back in his seat. “Lots of gifts, lots of kindness. We hope to continue paying it forward.”

Hyerin giggled and tucked her hair behind her ear. “We’ll receive it well.”

As you bowed and thanked both your sunbaes and the audience, your brain was on fire trying to stay quiet and impartial. You’ve already turned their kindness down, you longed to say. But you kept a smile on your face, for the sake of your future, and hers too.

The last stage was something you had worked hard on. Equally displaying the talents and virtues of both a band and a dance group was a challenge that Hyerin hadn’t put a lot of thought into beforehand, so once again, you had been stuck advocating for the visibility of your girls.

If only people saw you as hard-working instead of as pushy.

(a/n: this is cringe to put this in here but I understand this flashback needs context if you haven't watched dance or band. One of the first challenges in the original was going and performing at a school--by random chance the band went to an all-boys school and the dance group went to an all-girls school. The students at each school then voted for whether or not they thought the group they watched perform was ready to debut. The winner was decided solely on the number of yes votes without any comparison to the no votes--as a math major, this still doesn't right with me but anyway. I also should explain another reference to the original dob I made earlier. Sf9 and Honeyst both opened for cnblue at one of their concerts in Japan for a no-stakes mission with no official winner or loser. Then cnblue gave both groups feedback from their sunbae perspective. I figured n.flying would get to be the sunbae this time around. My apologies for this unsightly interruption)

“Those numbers don’t mean anything,” you stated bluntly.

PD-nim blinked at you and put on a fake smile. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just because they have ten more votes doesn’t mean they won.”

He laughed, barely hiding his frustration.

“I know it’s been a hard time for your group—” Hyerin cut in.

“Sometimes you need to learn to accept your losses,” PD-nim snapped.

“No,” you shot back. “Unless you can confirm the same number of people were in both schools for our performances, that raw number is useless.”

“I don’t get it,” Minji from the dance team mumbled.

“The only valid statistic for these votes is a percentage—how many people in each school voted yes compared to how many voted no.”

“The schools were close enough in size that it shouldn’t matter,” PD-nim said.

“It does,” you argued further. “Look, I’m really okay if we lost, but I want to see the data with my own eyes.”

Seunghyub’s encouragement had meant everything to you. Before you had talked with him, you were nearly ready to give up. Although PD-nim kept telling you that standing up for your team was good, his actions told you otherwise, and so did the public’s opinion of you.

His words of encouragement reminded you what you were fighting for and reassured you that what you did was worth it. Coming from someone you trusted and respected so much, what else could you do but believe them? 

Most importantly, he had restored your faith in yourself. You were strong enough to lead, and you had worked hard for what you had accomplished. You were the one who made things happen for you and your group, not good luck.

“Dang, eonni,” Seohye snuck in. “You and Seunghyub sunbae…”

“Hmm? Why?” you responded nervously. What was she referring to here? The stage, right? Or had she noticed something about how you two were acting around each other?

“You just went off, that’s all,” she answered with a shrug. “That was like Kingdom stage level good.”

You tried to brush her off to hide how touched you were. “Ah, stop, it was just a little bit of fun.”

“Just a little bit of fun? And how about how you and Seunghyub sunbae were singing with each other, was that just really good acting?”

Oh.

You could only blink in response.

“Don’t worry, I think only our group members would have understood anything,” she went on. “Only people who really know you would have known that you were sincere.”

“We’re not—”

“Oh, no, don’t say anything here. Let’s just kill our last stage, and then when we go home with our debut date set, you can tell us everything,” she said with a grin.

You found the rest of your girls, all three of whom gave you knowing and excited smiles. You brought them into a huddle.

“Girls,” you began. You couldn’t go on. Tears sprang from nowhere, and your throat was stopped with a sob.

“No no no, eonni! You can’t cry!” your drummer fussed. “You’ll ruin your makeup.”

“I wanted to give a speech about how far we’ve come,” you sniffled, holding back your tears. “Instead—I love you. I love you all so much.”

“Eonni!” they all whined.

You hugged the other four as tightly as you could manage. “Let’s have fun!”

—

“Stop comparing numbers,” Seunghyub scolded you. 

“It’s inevitable, and I get it,” you sighed. “It doesn’t matter who won the competition, they’ll pull higher numbers anyway just because they dance.”

“It’s a win for you either way,” he chuckled. “You wrote the song, and you’re getting paid nicely for its ratings.”

You humphed. “A little recognition would be nice.”

He turned his chair to face you directly and he put his hands on your shoulders. You met his eyes skeptically. “You did fantastically,” he assured you seriously. “They wouldn’t be getting any attention for their debut if you didn’t write them such an amazing song.”

Your face grew hotter as you continued to look at him. “I wasn’t talking about you,” you said, trying to keep your annoyed composure. In reality, though, he always knew how to cheer you up. His words were always exactly what you needed to hear.

He snickered and leaned back in his chair. “Should I text Hyerin, then? ‘Hey, should I congratulate you or (Y/N) on your debut?”

As you smacked his arm playfully, you gasped before you laughed in shock. “That’s terrible!”

“It would be funny, though.”

“No, she wouldn’t think so,” you groaned. “We don’t need to breed any more animosity here than there already is.”

“Ah, ever the wise and mature leader,” he acknowledged with a sigh. “Maybe you should be the leader of the leader project they’re putting together.”

“Absolutely not,” you spat. “I have enough with Seohye on my hands, I don’t need to be in charge of seven sunbaes and Hyerin.”

“Oh, now that you say that, I don’t want to do it either.” He shuddered. “I hope Yonghwa-hyung does it.”

You nodded. “He’s the obvious choice.”

A knock came at the door and Seunghyub hurriedly opened his music program.

A staff member poked his head in the door. “Seunghyub-ssi? Oh, and (Y/N) is here too.”

“We’re a little busy right now,” Seunghyub said. “Do you need something?”

“Just checking to see if you need a lightbulb replaced,” the staff claimed with a shrug. “But you’re okay in here?”

“Yes, the lightbulb was replaced last week,” Seunghyub reminded him with a politely annoyed smile.

“Ah, right…” The staff looked between the two of you. 

You nodded at him. “I was there.”

“Okay, then,” he said, taking the hint. “Work hard!”

“Yep, thanks,” Seunghyub called after him as he shut the door. “They’re definitely onto us,” he told you.

You shrugged. “We have an impenetrable cover, though.”

“True,” he said with a laugh. He reached over his armrest and picked up your hand. “If they ever catch us, we can just say we were trying to feel the emotions of the song.”

You scooted over your chair and leaned your head on his arm. “We had better keep writing love songs, then.”

He turned his head to look at you, and you looked back up at him. “That’s what I plan to do,” he said with a smirk and a purposeful glance down at your lips.

“We just had a staff member try to walk in on us and you want to kiss me now?” you snickered.

“I always want to kiss you.”

“Then be my guest.”

[ddrkirbyisq]

Let's see here...the first major thing I have to write about is foobar2000!!!

I'm perhaps ages late to the party (?), but I've finally taken the plunge and switched from using iTunes to foobar2000!  This was not a decision I took lightly, but I decided to pull the trigger after working with foobar2k and considering the pros and cons, and I've been pretty satisfied so far!

Foobar2000 is a free windows-based audio player that is known for many for its customizability, advanced features, modular design, and basically being the dream of anyone who is not scared of complexity and wants to really have their music player function the way THEY want.  It's also available for OSX as of ~1.5 years ago, though I have not tested that build yet.

Perhaps more importantly, foobar2000 now (as of ~a year ago I think) has a mobile client, available for all of iOS/Android/WindowsPhone.  This is key as one of the primary things tying me to iTunes has always been the fact that my ecosystem includes a lovely iPhone SE running iOS and of course I'd really like to have my music readily available on that.

Right, so let's first talk about the things I'm losing during the move to fb2k:

First off, syncing music to iOS is a bit more involved.  Unfortunately, foobar2000 has no way of directly interfacing with the iOS media library, so instead you write music to the foobar2000 app's sandbox and only fb2k can access it.  There is no "automatic" way to do this, but fortunately the iOS fb2k app includes an FTP server that you can use to transfer files via FTP.  This is as far as I can tell the best way to transfer music to fb2k mobile as you can't access the foobar2000 app sandbox directly (without jailbreaking your phone).

Of course there's no built-in "sync management" like there is with iTunes, so instead I first use foobar_onewaysync to copy out the relevant playlists (and their associated music files) to a temporary directory, then use WinSCP to mirror that on the iPhone over FTP.  So like I said, this is "a bit more involved", but now that I have that flow set up it's as simple as running those two commands and waiting for them to complete.

Like with all things in foobar2000, I have so much more =confidence= in what is happening here with the sync.  There would be all kinds of uncommon weird annoyances back when iTunes was in the picture -- you'd find it transferring old files again and again (why?), you'd find that certain songs were missing and showed up on the device but weren't actually playable (why?), you'd find that every time you did a sync one of your playlists mysteriously duplicated itself (why?).  I think a recurring theme so far with foobar2000 is that you have to spend some effort setting up your workflow for doing certain things, but once you do, it Just Works.

The REAL main thing I'm losing during the move to fb2k is actually a significant one: it's bluetooth media browsing via the AVRCP protocol.  In other words, browsing music via my car's on-board display (or through the controls on the steering wheel).  I can still trigger playback and track skips via bluetooth, but any attempts to browse the tracks/playlists/etc from my car's bluetooth interface will result in it looking at the native iOS music library, which is now empty (as all of the music is in foobar2000).  This is actually a pretty major loss as it means that I can't really fire up a music playlist in my car unless I'm parked or stopped for a good minute, as I have to actually do that browsing on my phone itself.

As far as I can tell there's no real way around this.  foobar2000 used to have an iPod management module but that is looooooooong defunct and iOS tends to be very closed off in terms of these sorts of things anyways.  The only way I could really get this functionality back would be to bring iTunes back into the picture, and then use iOS music as my mobile app while still using foobar2000 as my desktop/laptop music player.  We'll see if it comes to that, but I don't think it will.  foobar2000 mobile is a better media player anyhow, and I don't see an efficient way to sync from foobar2000->through itunes->to the iOS device for anything more than maybe a single playlist.

That being said, what I'm =gaining= in the transition to foobar2000 feels well worth the loss so far:

- A =working= ReplayGain implementation!  I now use replaygain to play music at adjusted volumes for normalized listening.  iTunes has a proprietary "Sound Check" feature that is supposed to do this but completely fails on VBR-encoded files.  This is super useful for social dance DJing in particular as having normalized (normalized as in equal perceived loudness, not as in peaking at 0dB) volumes is pretty important.

- I've customized my UI to include a clickable waveform display that shows the current song progress and can be clicked to seek to any point in the song.  Super useful for visually seeking to a given point in the song!

- The ability to work with ID3 tags and file metadata in a very fully-featured and rich way.  Want to convert all ID3 tags to ID3v2.3?  Want to batch-append a genre or grouping tag to 500 songs?  fb2k can do it all!

- The ability to ensure that your media library's files are organized correctly and robustly.  iTunes of course attempted to do this automatically, but it wasn't customizable at all and there were a lot of times when it would come up with filenames and/or paths that seemed a little....off.  fb2k gives you the option to organize your paths however you want and will give you a preview of what files need to be moved where before actually reorganizing everything.

Anyhow, that's sort of been an ongoing pet project of mine, but I'm basically done with the switch now and have been enjoying not only the new functionality but most of all the peace of mind and robustness that fb2k offers.

=====

Alongside that big customization project, I also spent quite a while looking at mechanical keyboards and finally decided to get myself a pink Filco Majestouch 2!!!  I first started thinking about buying a new keyboard when I saw the Razer Huntsman Quartz Pink edition, but after some research I figured that I'd probably be much happier with a less "consumer-y" brand and decided on the Majestouch 2.

Just look at that beauty!  It's possible I might replace the keycap color scheme with something a little more exciting in the future, but I'm happy to just try going with the all-pink for now.  I decided on Cherry MX 'brown' switches, as I'm not a huge fan of the infamous clickety-clackity noises of the blues, and I'd still like some tactile feedback (so not going with the reds).  I also decided to go with a "TenKeyLess" size -- you'll notice that it has the arrow keys and home/end/printscreen/scrolllock/etc but no numpad.  Having full arrow keys around I think is still very useful and necessary but I think I can actually live without a numpad as there are only really a few cases where I really use it and I think the prospect of having that additional desk space freed up (and having the mouse be closer to the keys) is pretty exciting.  (if I REALLY miss the numpad I could always buy a standalone numpad, but I get the feeling I really won't miss it that much)

Anyways, that should theoretically arrive in a couple days -- super exciting!!!

I've also already gone ahead and got a Quartz Pink Razer Basilisk to go along with it:

Unfortunately for getting an aesthetically-pleasing pink mouse there are wayyy fewer options than keyboards, so it was pretty much between this and the pink Razer Lancehead (which has a symmetrical design), or perhaps a pink Zowie mouse, but that seemed to both look worse and have a worse scroll wheel/etc. (despite being lighter/etc).  Razer's Synapse software is.....a bit shady to say the least, but unfortunately that is an evil I ended up having to swallow for now.

On the plus side, the mouse itself is working great.  I was previously running a Logitech MX Revolution and this mouse feels more sensitive/smoothly responsive, and the control mapping is actually a step up as well.  There's an optional thumb trigger (they give you two different sizes!) that you can use as a modifier to give yourself a whole other set of mappings, so for example thumbswitch + mouse wheel up increases my volume, thumbswitch + mouse middle click triggers a pause/play in whatever media player is open, etc.  The media controls also work better than that of Logitech's -- no annoying onscreen display and it is also pretty intelligent about looking for media players to send the command to.  I miss having the scroll wheel free-spin function, but I'm fine living without it to be honest.

No bluetooth version so I'm back to having a cord, but I don't actually find myself minding that too much either.  Plus, it's got two multicolored lights (one in the scroll wheel and one on the logo display) and I have them set up to react to whatever audio is playing from my computer, which is pretty spiffy as well.  If I wanted I could have gotten a keyboard that also has fancy backlighting (basically the corresponding Razer model) but I really didn't consider that a priority, so just the mouse lights will have to do.

Oh, related to mice: I downloaded Smooze for OSX and am happily using it for one thing and one thing only: disabling scroll wheel acceleration!  I'm not super against scroll wheel acceleration in theory, but in practice the way OSX handles scroll wheel acceleration for mouse has just never seemed to be sensible for any mouse I've used (maybe it's different for an actual apple mouse).  Now that I've completely disabled it, I can go back to sensible scrolling, yay!!!

=====

In other news, our game Goodnight Meowmie has gotten quite a lot of attention since I posted it on itch.io, which is really great to see, especially because I feel like this is the most significant game I've ever worked on.  It's gotten about 2.5k views on itch since I threw it up there, which is pretty amazing.  It's also been really cool watching people's video playthroughs of it on youtube, seeing their reactions and interpretations of the game.  It really makes me feel like we did something worthwhile, that we were able to reach out to people and have them listen to our story, and perhaps take it to heart.

=====

In other other news, I'll be DJing at Friday Night Waltz this Friday!  Be sure to come out if you're in the area, it's gonna be great!

Life has actually been going pretty fantastically lately -- this weekend was a lot of fun, between FNW, spending time with good friends, and just being in a good place.  I feel as if I'm not losing my attachment with the past because of it either.  Things are really good right now.