So I'm a massive procrastinator and decided to order all the states by size and compile them into a table for fun (instead of studying for my last 2 finals). Not too bad, right? Well, little did I know that this adventure would turn out to be quite the task.

I started by going through and using the newgrounds length for all the songs. This got me the majority of the way there, but surprisingly there were like 8 songs that had the same length listed. I then just opened the files up in apple music, and found that there was a way to get it to tell you the precise length beyond the 1 second mark and using that I was able to order the majority of the rest of them (barring the strange fact that apple music and newgrounds lengths didn't always agree). You'd think that would be the end of it, right?

Except no. New Jersey and Delaware happened to be the EXACT SAME LENGTH on apple music (1:28.424) despite having different tempos.

Because they have unrelated tempos, I obviously thought this was incorrect. I mean, apple music isn't known to be the most accurate, and surely they wouldn't be the exact same?

So I did some more digging and found out you could compute file size of mp3 files using the bitrate and length of the song using the following formula:

Size = length*bitrate/8192

Where the 8192 was just there to deal with the kbps vs megabytes.

Apple music said that New Jersey was 2.2 mb, so I solved the formula above for length and got

Length = 8192*size/bitrate

Using this formula, I computed the length of both New Jersey and Delaware.

And they were several seconds off from both NG and apple music. I'm not sure what is wrong with that formula, but then I tried another approach where I converted 2.2 mb to kb (17600) and divided 17600 over the bitrate (which was 192 kbps) (this is effectively just using the units, kb/s vs mb vs s) and got a more accurate, but still incorrect length of the song.

At this point I was about to give up hope, but I had one last idea. Why not just plug the mp3s into FL mobile and visually verify the lengths?

You won't believe the results; just see for yourself.

(max zoom)

New Jersey and Delaware ARE THE EXACT SAME LENGTH. I had no idea. Please let me know if you guys have any other ways to verify that because FL mobile could technically be wrong too. But I think this is finally a satisfactory answer for me.

Well that was a waste of 3 hours. Enjoy the spreadsheet below.

The reason for the semicolons is because excel is stupid when it comes to decimals and likes to round everything off, so it was the only way to get it to not do that.

I find it funny how basically the entire first half is 2020-early 2021 and the second half is late 2021-2023, I think that kinda says something about the quality of my music over the years lol.

I also put em in some charts cause why not.

And a histogram!

TLDR: Time to get back to studying.

I've started my first symphony! At this point I only have progress on the first movement though. I'm gonna prob throw up a sneak peek at some point because of my grand ambitions for this project. And if I let y'all know that'll keep me more accountable and (crossing my fingers) hopefully it won't take till June lmao. But yeah when finished this will be the grandest composition I've ever embarked upon.

God I need to do electronic again. Tangerine literally warned me about this, how once I started making classical I would never be able to stop. Whenever I get the itch to compose I pull up musescore, not FL.

Anyway look forward to that. I appreciate all the support you guys give me. Just about to exit my second year of college, and none of what I'm studying has to do with composition lmao

Just turned green for the luckiest day of the year.

Happy St. Patty’s! 🍀

Also untitled Tennessee remake and Ostinato 2 are 1 bout of inspiration away from completion. It’s starting to look like a ton of songs are going to release in quick succession. Maybe I could throw them in a playlist and call it the remix album or something cause that’s the majority of what I’m making right now.

It’s been difficult to step back into making electronic music. It just feels like I can accomplish so much more with muse sounds. Musescore has their fair share of synths and such anyways. It’s just a totally different way of making music that I find a lot more immediately enjoyable. I can just throw down notes, they’ll sound good, and then focus on the actual music rather than spending huge amounts of time tinkering with the sounds till it sounds semi decent (and even then, you’ll never get FL mobile to produce sounds half as good as musescore when it comes to anything their soundfont supports).

Slight rant over. I’ll still try to use FL mobile for stuff solely because I have so much history with it and want to maintain that part of my compositional style. But yeah

So yeah. Been 4 months since I really uploaded anything on this acc. Whoops.

After presage I got the sinking feeling that my music was starting to blend together again. So since then I’ve been broadening my horizons a bit. I randomly generated an ensemble of 4 instruments 3 separate times and made short 2 minute pieces. The first two had no other restrictions but the last one had the additional stipulation of being a whole tone piece. I also said I’d never post them, as they functioned solely as compositional exercises and not as actual pieces.

I’ve gained “experience” writing for instruments not generally seen in a normal ensemble. Also trying to make my scores look nicer, spell notes correctly, and overall just be a better composer. Having a friend who’s majoring in composition certainly helps lmao.

Rest assured I got some good stuff in the pipeline. We’ve got a new Missouri, a remake of Tennessee, a remake of Ostinato (probably the most intriguing one imo, and also the one most likely to come out first), and some original works as well. The Tennessee remake in particular has hit a snag but hopefully it can be revitalized before the day I die LMAO

TLDR: stay tuned. I have plans….. big plans.

Ostinato is back on my other account btw. Kinda forgot to do that a long time ago.

Recently found an old phone associated with a ton of old music. Most of it is too garbage to even post without being considered spam, but the chosen 7 are the ones I decided were good enough to publish for archival reasons on my second account. Go and have a listen if you’re interested in hearing my 14yo self try to put notes on a screen.

These 7 songs fill the gap (hence the name) between my first two accounts. After 5 years of waiting, lol.

Follow for new releases, updates, sneak peeks, and more!

https://bsky.app/profile/50steaks.bsky.social

I feel like an internet personality advertising my bluesky account like this but like how else are people gonna know I'm there? Never even had a twitter account.

Vote

(also I’m cooking up another piece to be released November 17)

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been chosen to serve as a judge for this round of NGADM! They needed a backup lol. Wish me luck!

Actually I’m just a full judge now for consistency purposes. So yeah that’s pretty cool

We finally have a new banner and icon to go along with the release of my NGUAC submission Zenith! Thought it was time for an update. The old banner looked a bit antiquated and the old icon is too associated with the “50” part of my name back when I was doing that series. Well that series has been done for over a year now (damn, time flies) so I decided to refocus onto the “steak” part. The banner retains that old red white and blue but the icon is now a steak, just like it should’ve been for a while now.

Oh my next track I think is gonna be a banger so stay tuned.