1. Music
1.1. Downloading music
💜 Wisp: thank you for visiting WIBIFORTIS.ORG. you are able to freely stream and preview the tracks as much as you like. you can download any song you like for private or public listening use for the price of $0.00.
to download an individual track, right-click on the audio player (or the "(link)" text beside it) and click "save as".
to download an entire album in firefox-like browsers (and probably chrome), right-click somewhere in the page for the album, then click "save page as", and select "complete page". the album will be in the "[webpage title]_files" directory, along with the css stylesheet which you can delete. you can also use wget -r -np if you know what any of that means.
(or you can just go to the album's Bandcamp page as listed right above the album description (where it's also free); can you tell we had dreams of making this site the primary way to listen to our albums?)
you'll notice the filenames all have underscores_instead_of_spaces and have most punctuation stripped out. this is because firefox-like browsers' "save page as" feature saves all files with url-sanitized filenames, so including spaces and whatnot in the filenames would%20result%20in%20this%20gunk%20being%20everywhere. the filenames are also limited to 64 characters because we were already in the "maximum compatibility" mindset and we felt a little paranoid.
for filesize reasons the songs do not come with embedded artwork; all relevant artwork comes with the album page and you can manually embed it if you want (though most music players should recognize "cover.png" or "cover.jpg" in the same folder as an audio file to be that song's cover art)
filenames are prefixed with disc numbers whenever the album consists of multiple discs. if the album only apparently contains 1 disc but you notice a disc number prefix, look closer at the original page.
1.2. Audio quality
💜 Wisp: all audio on WIBIFORTIS.ORG is exported to Opus format with a target bitrate of 128kbps, which is generally agreed to be transparent (meaning you're unlikely to be able to hear the difference between it and the much larger original files). in practice the opus codec likes to go above or below the specified bitrate sometimes if it... uh... thinks it knows what you want better than you do? i dunno. maybe it does.
if you are a hardcore audiophile you can click the "bandcamp" link on any album to annex the original lossless files. however if you are a hardcore audiophile you should have further gripes aside from availability of lossless downloads; e.g. most live recordings are done on our iphone through the "voice memos" app and are only ever as high-fidelity as 64kbps aac, and most of the stereo balance in our songs is fucked up because our hearing isn't as full in our right ear.
1.2.1. .opus trade-offs (sorry, Safari)
💜 Wisp: we felt a little iffy about providing files exclusively in opus since it's a relatively new format (2012) and won't be compatible with really old music players, but it's a tradeoff we were willing to make. at the time of writing, this entire website holds 18 hours of music, and weighs in at 1.1 gigabytes.
and of course we were mainly concerned that it was old software that wouldn't support opus. so at the last hour we were completely blindsided by the fact that neither Safari nor the iPhone's built-in audio player support opus audio. Apple, leaders of the sandboxed world, don't support a widely-used audio codec that just turned 13, probably for some really stupid corporate reason. hooray. not that this site is especially mobile-friendly right now.
we are considering including 128kbps aac versions of all our songs (with the bonus that the songs recorded straight from iphone in 64kbps aac could just be provided in their original form without further lossy compression) which would probably add another gigabyte to the website size, oh well. this will take some research on what encoder we should be using to ensure the best quality for bitrate, and also will require us to comb through our external hard drive for all the original lossless audio. again.
once again all our albums are available on bandcamp and should play fine on iOS there; each album page has a link to its corresponding bandcamp page right above the album description.
1.3. Licensing
💜 Wisp: DAMMIT...
ignore what it says on our bandcamp (we have a lot of clicking to do). all our albums and the tracks in them, as well as all of the front & back covers and disc art, are hereby licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0, except where noted otherwise on this website.
1.4. Modules
💜 Wisp: okay: if we wanted, we could save a ton of space on a ton of tracks. most of our songs are made in OpenMPT, which has tiny project files (modules), usually smaller than any audio format they're exported to, and they're even tinier when they're Amiga-compatible .MODs like we're making. so we could exchange all our Opus files for the original modules whenever applicable. the main reason why not is your browser & music player software probably wouldn't know how to play it, or would play it with a low-pass filter we don't intend to be enabled.
we could just offer them as separate downloads, but we're not doing that either because some of the sample names are mildly sensitive, and we haven't worked out the logistics behind locating & generating sanitized copies of all the modules.
it also kind of opens a can of worms as to why aren't we sharing our modules on modarchive.org or the openmpt forums or amp.dascene.net, which boils down to compulsion to flatten our online identity down to whatever makes us a nicer retro tech suckup & burnout from that.
1.5. Composers
💜 Wisp: composers are listed alongside each song name - e.g. "Anne's Awesome Song (Anne)". for kinda arbitrary reasons, this does not include the composers of the original song if the song is a cover; e.g. if we cover a They Might Be Giants song, "John Flansburgh" will not be included in the composers list, though we will mention the song is a They Might Be Giants cover in the remark section.
1.5.1. Uncertainty
🔵 Tango: we are under no obligation to record exactly which of us made any given song. sometimes we simply forget, sometimes we refuse. as a result there is sometimes an uncertainty as to which of us made a given song, or parts of a given song. any known composers will be listed, and situations with uncertain composers are usually listed in the "composition" section. if it's entirely unknown who composed any part of a song, the list of composers will be empty.
if, in the composition details, you see something to the effect of "composer uncertain", that doesn't mean that someone else on the internet made it and we downloaded it and passed it off as our own; that means we made it, but it's uncertain which of us did.
1.5.2. The Outside World
🐦️ Silver: Let's say there's this song I made with Chloë:
03. The Not Bad Song (Silver, Chloë)
Now, say we pull some strings, call in some favors, do whatever, and we manage to secure a remix from acclaimed electroclash producer Janesmith Example, better known under the alias "Exemplar". Since we're not that interested in printing people's full names, we'd add "Exemplar" to the composers list. But if we just added it alongside our names, and you weren't familiar with Janesmith's ongoing (if generic) career, you might not realize "Exemplar" is a separate individual from Wibi.
So the composers list "zooms out"; we appear as "Wibi" with the exact Wibi composers in parentheses:
04. The Not Bad Song - Exemplar RMX (Wibi (Silver, Chloë), Exemplar)
An unnecessary bit of humility on our own website? Maybe.
For songs with no certain Wibi composers (per the above section on uncertainty), the parenthetical section next to "Wibi" would be dropped. So if Exemplar remixed this song:
05. We Were Pretty Zonked When We Made This
It would look like:
06. We Were Pretty Zonked When We Made This - Exemplar RMX (Wibi, Exemplar)
As it happens, this is what most tracks on The Softdrinq Suite (our collaboration with poetmistry) look like, except for the couple of songs specifically worked on by Innominal.
1.6. Capitalization
🎀 Princess: a lot of times the canonical title for a song is capitalized incorrectly by standard title case rules, e.g. "Please Wait to be Seated", "The Only Room In The House Is Empty". usually this is an intentional aesthetic choice done out of linguistic playfulness and maybe a liiittle desire for chaos. if people lowercase "is" without noticing so often, why not "be"? why not lowercase less important words? or why not start-case every word when we feel in a snarky or robotic mood? can anyone even agree whether the "to" in infinitives should be capitalized?
and anyway, do you really expect proper capitalization for titles like "If The This The And?!"?
1.7. Samples
💜 Wisp: one time there was a musician named Ennui. he liked to take all sorts of sounds he heard from other songs and put them in his songs. he really wanted to share which songs he took sounds from, because he really liked those songs and valued honesty and respecting his elders, but he shied away from it because he feared his work would be judged as infringing on their intellectual property. then later he realized most of the musicians he took sounds from were just the same profile of mildly-famous edgy white European men, and he felt less inspired to mention them. the end. this has been Storytime with Wibi; please check back later for more original short fiction.
1.8. do u use ai???
🐱 Lowry: there are two things we dislike: software-as-a-service, and ongoing art fads. so that should answer the question. maybe 10 years from now when suno is on its death-bed we'll get it to cough out a song and cut it up
2. Website
2.1. How?
💜 Wisp: this website uses a purpose-built static site generator coded in pure Lua 5.1 (if you count way too many non-portable os.execute() and io.popen() calls as "pure Lua").
to test it, we locally host it with darkhttpd and then open it with Pale Moon, which is also our main browser. (people online are really antagonistic about Pale Moon and we suspect it involves layers of oldschool FOSS drama.) we code it in Geany, which seems to be the closest thing Linux has to Notepad++, and we consistently pronounce "Geany" with a hard G for some reason.
songs are tagged using opuscomment.
(🎀 Princess: we have also tested the site in lynx. works pretty well aside from the "column view" table in the music index being way too wide to ever render nicely. visit wibifortis.org on ur terminal)
2.2. Why?
🪴 Chloë: Here are some assorted reasons why we made this site:
- We wanted a more custom presentation for our music than Bandcamp allows.
- We wanted something to do.
- The itch to build a custom-purpose static site generator in pure Lua wore us down until we had no resistance left and became a web hipster.
We're reading through the RSS specs for fuck sake.UPDATE: We are done reading through the RSS specs; they're pretty good.
- The itch to build a custom-purpose static site generator in pure Lua wore us down until we had no resistance left and became a web hipster.
- We wanted somewhere to post in case Mastodon becomes unusable for us.
- We wanted somewhere else to host our music in case Bandcamp closes down (which seemed more likely in 2023), but...
- We don't want to burden any of the up-and-coming Bandcamp alternatives (Mirlo, Jam.coop, Bandwagon, itch.io) with our many-gigabytes-large full lossless discography (though some of those might accept lossy uploads?), nor do we feel we fit in with the music communities surrounding them.
- We think Youtube and Soundcloud emphasise engagement too much.
- We found ourselves consistently disappointed with mainstream distributors after doing any research on them.
Briefly, the music part of the site was going to be a Faircamp instance, but Faircamp enforces transcoding audio, meaning we have to either supply it with lossy files that get lossily transcoded and feel bad, or use disk space we barely have to store our full lossless discography on our computer, and either way we sit and wait for all of it to be transcoded every time we update our website. (Shout-out to Faircamp for rekindling our interest in making this website, though.)
2.2.1. Why is it so basic and Web 1.0-looking?
💜 Wisp: short answer: aesthetic.
long answer: half the internet is filled with bespoke CSS and javascript that slows the main web browser we use to a crawl, when it doesn't just prevent it from accessing websites entirely. and if we use more modern web browsers they have a chance of randomly freezing our computer (a decade-old macbook running Debian 12 with nouveau drivers). so, for our own website we decided to stick with no javascript and really basic CSS that will work on just about anything, for maximum compatibility. and also aesthetic. except the compatibility point is moot because all our songs are provided in .opus format which was introduced in 2012 and still doesn't work on iphone.
some good reads:
- why isn't this a doom 2 mod by the packbats
- The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML by Terence Eden
2.3. Randomness
🕸️ Ons: There are some random elements here. These elements are fully static (as is the whole website) and change not when you reload the page, but each time we rebuild the site.
Random elements include:
- The order in which members are listed in the "Who are Wibi?" page (as to use a canonical order would imply ranking us from "most important" to "least important")
- The order in which artists are listed in the "Music" page (ditto — except the first artist is always Wibi, and there is a divide between "artists who have released something" and "artists who have not")
- The placeholder icons for unimported albums (one of 8 Bandcamp logo variants, from Bandcamp's "Buttons and Logos" page)
- Which strip the "not really random" button leads you to when viewing a Rock Bottom strip
2.4. Ads
🕸️ Ons: This website has ads. But like, really good ads, I promise. Please turn off your adblocker to see them. Please? Pretty please? Pleeeease?
