Howdy, crowd!

If you've been following the fotoplayer livestream journey, you might get a kick out of some of the groovy stuff that's been added recently to the YouTube channel . ݁₊ ⊹ . 📽.ᐟ.

🗳️First off: democracy.

There's now a way for you (yes, YOU🫵) to vote on which featured flick will appear next on fotoplayer.

👇To vote, follow the link to the playlist by clicking the thumbnail below. From there, you'll see two choices of silent films—upvote or downvote them to your heart's content. Once the elected film has been screened in a stream, it will be archived and the selection will refresh with two new films in the playlist poll.

ℹ️You can always find the playlist from the homepage of the fotoplayer YouTube channel, or near the bottom of the livestream page. Suggestions are welcome, too, although there are technical factors which determine whether or not a film can be shown. If you want to toss one my way, though, feel free to comment the title on this post here, and I'll do my best to get it through.

Note: most, if not all, future flicks are planned to be silent films in the public domain. The figure I got from a quick search is that there are a little <3,000 surviving silent films, give or take ~several hundred which are inaccessible for one reason or another. Although this implies finitude for fotoplayer streams, there are still plenty to go around before it's at its limit.

⏭️Next: All fotoplayer featured flicks can be viewed independently in a dedicated playlist archive!

The playlist is sorted according to the retrospect of livestreams, recent to oldest. In the description of each video, there will be a link to the corresponding VOD as well as a wiki to learn more about the production.

This was a seamless upgrade; these films (originally downloaded from archive.org) had already been stockpiled privately behind my channel in order to check them against YouTube's capricious Content ID. Make lemonade, or playlists I suppose!

😮‍💨Last but not least, a minor yet playful update on the fotoplayer channel is that the official livestream playlist, the collection of all the previous streams, is now categorized as a "podcast" on YouTube.

This means that the streams are now accessible on YouTube Music (although not on other podcast platforms), which feels more suitable to the style of content. Also, it makes a little more sense to describe the streams as "episodes." I borrowed this concept from longform looping friends, Bugs in the Basement.

It was only a click or two to set up, and the format feels better for the future. It also arouses the possibility of the streams becoming more of an estuary, where music meets talk show/commentary/whatever sorta deal.

Find the "podcast" on the YouTube channel's podcast tab, from the livestream page, or on YouTube Music!

🔔A casual reminder that all audio prints from the sessions are available to listen to on Soundcloud from the MEGA-PLAYLIST or by collection on Bandcamp. 

🫶 @fotoplayer is a home-spun music project, made independently as a labor of love, yet a labor nonetheless. As it happens, there's only so much I can do myself to extend the bandwidth of their reach, which is where you can help! If you dig the streams and would like to see them continue to grow, the best way to lend a hand is by word of mouth. Share a jam with someone who you think ~v~i~b~e~s with old film and/or experimental music—entice them to the mailing list. To stay in the loop for future streams, be sure to subscribe on either YouTube or Twitch. 🙏

~Signing off,

Alex/fotoplayer