 So with that chat with no more questions, let's go on to our first EP of the night. Rafa, who are we listening to? We are going to listen to Unfa's EP. They're a super cool community. Everything is open source, everything. I've seen them kind of hard code their own servers and their own plugins and they don't like using proprietary stuff so a lot of their SPS was building out systems that they didn't have. Awesome. Can't wait. So super cool. Let's see what they have to offer. Benji, if you could play that EP, let's get started. Oh my goodness, that was crazy. So much different stuff in one EP. Yeah, round of applause. My goodness. Thanks so much, guys. Yeah, we're joined here by two wonderful gentlemen from Unfa. Welcome, guys. Welcome. If you could introduce yourselves, please. I'm Unfa. The server is named after me and yeah, I'm the guy. And with me is John the Bard, who has been a driving force behind the whole collaboration on my server. And he's been pretty much the lead of the project. Maybe even a little bit more than me. Awesome. He also recruited like five guitarists for the project. So and vocalists and rapists and whatever. That's awesome. Yeah, we were having a bit of trouble finding. You guys can hear me, right? Yes. Yeah, okay. We're having a bit of trouble finding contributors at the beginning. We had a lot of people the first week and then we had not much going on for a bit after that. So then I kind of brought on a bunch of my buddies to do a lot of cool guitar stuff, I guess. And then yeah, the last week, we suddenly had everybody on not to jump the gun on talking about it a bunch, but yeah, it was kind of funny. Awesome. Thanks for having us, by the way. Yeah, absolutely. Huge thanks to Story for inviting our community. Yeah, I'm very glad you all pulled through. It's an amazing project. Chaz, do you have any thoughts on the EP? I think the mic is muted. Yeah, we can't hear you, Chaz. Sorry. Oh, that's too bad. Oh, no. We'll just talk about it for a second. And then when he has sound, we'll let him give us thoughts. Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah, I guess you want to talk about what your community is kind of about? Sure. So as we've already been introduced, we are focused on open source software, which also by extension means most of us work on Linux. So we're kind of the proof that it's really possible to do music on the next end with open source software. And some people think open source, is that the same thing as freeware? And the answer is no, because SYNTH1 is freeware, but that means all you have is the DLL you can use. If it was open source, you'd also have the source code and you could upgrade it and make it better. So that's what we are about. And that's what we use and we try to promote. So, yeah, I've been making video tutorials about making audio production on Linux with open source software for quite a few years. And the community on Discord formed around that. Awesome. How many people are in your server? Oh, man, got to check. I think a couple hundred. On 9, 150 of line, I don't know. I think it's about 400. No, 600. Okay, so it's about like 700, 750 people, something like that. Awesome. So I know your community is kind of split up, you're unique in that you have a Discord and a Rocket Chat, right? How do you guys kind of handle collaboration with sort of a divided community like that? Rocket Chat is for those who don't know, because I assume most people have never heard about it. It's like an open source version of Slack. So when I was looking for an open source of something, something open source to be an alternative to Discord, because Discord is proprietary and closed source and also has a problematic terms of service document that so I don't want to force anybody to use it. And we decided to set up Rocket Chat as an alternative so everybody can talk to each other from, it's like a once community that just has two outlets, two portals. Yeah, because the chats are bridged. So you're able to see all the Discord messages on Rocket Chat and vice versa. So it's not a split in that regard. We actually, they're testing a matrix server too, but that's beside the point. So yeah, it's not exactly split. Yeah, it's not exactly split in that. Where's my overcoat? But it does. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. I think the coolest thing that we did with being the open servers that we, although I think a couple servers are, I didn't hear everyone yesterday, but doing something similar. But we're passing just project files back and forth instead of stems or anything like that. And we're doing our best, we were doing our best not to bounce anything that didn't need to be bounced. So all of the synthesized drums, synthesized tones in general, amp simulators, whatever can be changed by anybody, which was pretty neat. Yeah, we have, since we're only using open source software, it doesn't cost anything for us to just add more plugins or be like, Hey, I like this. Can we all use it? If we, I mean, it could be like bias effects is my favorite plugin. So we all need to spend $200 in order to pass, you know, projects back and forth. So we didn't have any of those kind of issues. So we tried our best to make use of that. And yeah, I think it went really well. Awesome. Yeah, we wanted to use the strengths of what we are doing with the open source software and try to utilize the unique stuff that we can do, which is, for example, legally distribute the software. And also, we did something, we didn't want to work on stems, as John said. And so we set up a difficult thing for me personally, was that right when the theme was dropped, I just started a new job. I was having issues adjusting my work schedule and everything. So it was really hard for me to contribute. So what I've done is I tried to set up a proposed way of working, figure out the workflow for the collaboration. So I've set up a shared network folder where we can add anybody. And then... Hold on. Yes. Benji, there's some audio playing on stream. And nobody heard anything that one just said. I'm so sorry. Is it better? Are we done? It's gone. Awesome. Okay. Should I repeat? Yes, please. Okay. What's the last thing if you think went live? I think you started a new job. Ah, okay. So yeah, the challenge collab was difficult for me because right when the theme was announced, I was just starting a new job and I was having issues kind of adjusting my rhythm. And I also didn't have much time and energy left for the collaboration. This is where John pretty much like took over the leadership. And without him, this collaboration would have never really fruited anything. So thank you, John. Yeah, I handled a ton of the, I guess, administrative tasks between... It's called sync thing was how we were sharing files. It's sort of like Dropbox, I guess, but open source naturally. So any files we put in a folder would appear on everyone's computer, which is how we passed the binaries for the programs along with the projects themselves. So I have a machine that's just dedicated to that that we had up and running. Things of that nature was a lot of... I wanted to do more sound design, but I wound up kind of watching over what was happening much more often. But oh well, fun times. Gotcha. So secrets. I know you guys took it kind of literally and used the word secrets in some of your lyrics. How did the theme kind of inspire the EP? And what other secrets did you guys hide that chat didn't get? I think there's quite a lot to discover in this EP, hidden. So yeah, take out your tools and ears and have fun. We can of course provide a bandcamp link for anyone who want to release and download flags or whatever to have lots of fun. Although I did see some people in chat mentioning Morse code, so your next step is figuring out what we said. In case that was true, of course. There's plenty more. They can get one. Someone said, are you going to share the background binary code? Can you read binary? I think it's kind of possible to extract it if you just stitch together the frames. You got an afternoon and a photo editor. Just take a bunch of screenshots. Just hand write down the binary. Or you can train AI to do it for you. There you go. That's the time for way. What else is going to deal with your GPU power laying around? Yeah, chat. By the time we finish this EP, someone have that AI ready, please. Someone's got that binary. Story, you asked about the theme and how it inspired us. Yeah. I guess it was that a lot of people started tracks and everybody had their own idea on how the theme is going to be portrayed. There wasn't like a master plan for the EP. It definitely wasn't a concept album. It was a collection of different ideas and tracks that were developed. Also funny enough, during the last week that was added, the fifth week of work, we went from four tracks to seven because we kind of realized, oh shoot, we are under 10 minutes. Hey, what else do we have? Oh, now we have time to finish it up. Okay. Oh, we have seven tracks now. Okay. All right. Let's do it. And then maybe we could make a visualizer too. All right, I'll do it. I like that. Unfortunately, our mixing phase suffered a little bit as a result. But I think the variety is really cool. I think it was the right way to go, instead of just having barely 10 minutes. Otherwise, that, what's it called? The realm, that's the name of the track, was going to have an additional two minutes of guitar solos. And there's a meme release that's going to happen that's going to have all the guitar solos. If you really like that track, you got a solid 40-ish, 45 minutes. It's going to be great. Just guitar solos. Wow. Chas, I think you're back. Can you try speaking? Oh yeah. It's not working. I don't hear. Does anyone know sign language? Oh yeah. Do you sign it? That's weird. No. Yeah. All right. It wouldn't be an SVS stream if there weren't any technical issues. Oh, he's gone. Maybe if he reconnects, then it's going to work. Yeah, probably. Maybe try turning it off and back on. Sorry. It's pretty much the solution. While we're, while we're waiting on Chas, you guys have a lot of genres. How, I guess like, how do you sort of describe your guys' sound and then how did you sort of meld so many sort of ideas together in 20p? I don't know how I would describe our sound. Because there's a lot of sound in there. I guess all over the place. Some word like that. Pull out your thesaurus for a better one. But yeah, it's, we have two metal tracks. Two 80s style tracks. I guess 50s spy track. Drum and bass and orchestral ambience or orchestral synthetic ambience intro. So there's a quite a variety. I'm not sure there's too much even connecting them other than the theme, of course. I would say it's eclectic. Yeah. Although surprisingly, a lot of the same people worked on a lot of the variety of tracks. So I think our non-destructive workflow has contributed a lot to how the music itself emerged. Because we weren't limited by things like, oh, I got these stems. Now what I do with them, everybody was able to take anybody else's MIDI data on the timeline and just rearrange it or take to somebody's synth patch and change it or add automation to the synth patch or replace the synth altogether, which is what I done a bunch of times. Or just re-synthesize the drums or replace them or remix them or rearrange them. There wasn't this limitation of exchanging audio files and there wasn't any necessity for people to say, hey, can you fix this for me or do that and then wait until they do it and turn around with new stems for you to pull into your project? No, you could just do it on the spot yourself because you have all the power, all the tools. Everyone opens the same projects using the same plugins. Actually, setting this up was like, this is the idea I had that this would be so cool if you could do this because, actually, why shouldn't we do it like that? It would be silly if we tried the standard way because we can do this. So I decided, let's do it. Let's set up file synchronization, standardize a set of plugins and the DAW we're going to use, which is our door. It's an open source DW, kind of similar to Cubase or Proto, so Logic, whatever. Well, it's standard stuff. That's all the things you need to do. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for our interview. Thank you, Anfa. Thank you, John, for joining us. You can stick around for the next EP, talk to the next people. Thanks for having us. It was really great to collaborate and be able to be a part of this project. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Chaz, I think we could hear you now. Around the world, 15 minutes. I loved it. I was trying to say that for so long, but yeah, great work, you guys. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Good job. All right. So we're going to move on now to the next EP of this awesome afternoon, night, morning, wherever you are, by the Untitled Virtual Ensemble. Very excited to see what they bring. You're an online orchestra, right? Yes. Yes. I dig the name. Very cool. All right, Benji.