How to dig online with Tymon Zaniewski
Tymon is an Eindhoven-based DJ, music producer and interactive media artist working in the field of projection mapping, UI and sound design.
Okay, so for getting my music online, I mostly use the classic websites, which is Discogs, Bandcamp and SoundCloud of course, and previously I used a lot of archive YouTube channels, I don’t have specific names, they’re very much genre specific.
What I think is the most interesting in my workflow are two extensions: Bandcamp Tempo Adjust and Discogs' Tempo Adjust.
Tempo Adjust
I open some random record in Discogs and when I click play, a small section opens below, I can then check how that track is going to sound in different tempos, if I'm going to be DJing with it.
They also have this master tempo button, and I'm wondering if you can maybe play a whole DJ set by basically having two browser windows open like that, and I think it's really funny, it's like a kind of gimmick.
For Bandcamp it works pretty much the same, the extension adds a BPM button.
Digital Digging
From Bandcamp, I really like the selling-now crate. Most of the time it's something that's not interesting to me at all, but the idea of it, that there is a website that has this non-algorithmic option -that seems to belong to that kind of internet that ended in 2012-, I find that amazing.
Ripping archives
Another tool that I use a lot, to be fair, more for video than for audio, is yt-dlp.
You probably know these websites that are like ‘YouTube to MP3’, they're usually super ass, they have a lot of ads and trackers.
Well, under the hood, they all run this program called yt-dlp, and what you can do is download the tool on your computer, and use it locally.
It is way more powerful like that, much faster. You don't have any limits, you can download a whole playlist, or a whole channel on YouTube, on SoundCloud, on can almost every website.
(disclaimer: remember that downloading and sharing copyrighted material without permission is illegal, we do not endorse pirate activities ;))
It's pain in the ass to set up if you're not familiar with using command line tools because it doesn't have a visual interface, you have to type everything in the command line.
I will quickly show you how it works. I’m gonna create a folder, double-click open, my terminal is set up in the directory I’m in. Again, it might be a bit unintuitive if you’re not using terminal tools? What is happening right now is that I’m in this directory, in the folder I created and I can type ‘yt-dlp’ and then paste a link to almost every website that has any audio or video form.
So this is, you know, this is kind of p1r4cy. So I'm gonna use my music as an example.
If I would paste link to my profile, it would download all the albums, so it's like super powerful. You can leave it running on your computer for I don't know, 10 hours, and you know, download half the internet.
By clicking enter, it's going to download everything. It’s in MP3 format, it's not lossless because Bandcamp doesn't let you access the lossless files, but there’s virtually like, no difference.
It also works with YouTube. Most of the time I use it with Bandcamp or YouTube for archiving videos.
‘before:’
When it comes to YouTube, there is one more trick that I have, but it's more for finding samples for VJing.
When you type something in your search bar on YouTube, let's say ‘Rave’ you can add ‘before:’ and some date, for ex. 2012. Then it only shows you videos that are older than 2012.
We can even go back to 2008. It's good that it works on YouTube because that way you can find really old videos that are super unpopular. If you combine this ‘before:’ trick, with ‘showing videos by date of upload’ rather than number of views, then you get some videos that would be impossible to find otherwise.
While we're at videos, there are also some websites that show you random YouTube videos, but specifically videos that have formated names, default names from when you record on old cameras.
For example, astronaut.io. It just switches after some time, it's kind of crazy, getting these glimps into stuff that you wouldn't find.
‘supported by’ section
Now, not a hidden function, it’s pretty much up front, but super underrated.
On Bandcamp, you have this section that shows the people who bought the albums.
And when you just bought something that you really like, when you see that it has very little amount of supporters, I really, really recommend going on profiles there. Because this way, you can find some things that are really niche.
This album, Circle Line Project 18 Wien, by Theo Nabicht, only two people bought it. If someone buys an album like that they are probablymusic nerds that buy a lot of weird stuff on Bandcamp.
It's also a really good way to making connections with artists because if someone is like super small and you buy their music they are always going to stalk your profile and if you say some nice words then it's going to be even better.
For this I am speaking from experience, for this album milk CPU (by taichi furudate). I bought it because it's like 300 yen, I don't remember how much that is in euros but it's super cheap. Then I saw that his last album was from 2013 so I stalked him a bit, to find his profile on twitter and I posted about the album on twitter while tagging him.
Soundcloud
I also use soundcloud for digging, more so by following the algorithm. When I like some sound, I go to its radio station, then I find things in the radio station again, but still it's mostly following algorithm. Also searching through the likes of artists is quite cool.
Discord
Lastly, servers. This is more something for promoting your own stuff, or for building community. There's so many great discord servers, to broaden your views artistically when it comes to music. Because basically every artist that is prominent on the internet, that has more than 2,000 followers, has their own discord. That's just so many very small communities that are often very much focused on some like very specific niches.
I have a lot of good ones that I can recommend, but again, it's like more about the rule than about a specific place.