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? if any Bandcamp album isn't free it's probably because Bandcamp updated the price without us noticing; contact us and we'll set it to free. as an exception The Softdrinq Suite is hosted on Poetmistry's bandcamp and costs $5, but you can still listen to it here & download it through the above means for free.)
when downloading tracks from here, 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
🐱 Lowry: the music on this site is provided in V2 MP3. actually, a bit worse than that: all music from before december 2025 is provided as V2 MP3 transcoded from Opus 128. this is for boring reasons. if you prefer hearing/tasting every bit, lossless downloads are also on our Bandcamp for free until whenever Bandcamp implodes.
devisions are solely available in V8 MP3 for that tinny low-filesize goodness. mmm.
keep in mind even the highest-fidelity verisons of our songs are often purposefully low fidelity. aside from just our Amiga-compliant tracker music (crunchy 8-bit samples galore), whenever we record live audio with our phone to use in (or as) a song, it's through our phone's "voice memos" app, which stores everything in 64kbps aac. (and, yes: we do have songs originally only as high-fidelity as 64kbps aac that are converted to opus 128 and then V2 mp3. conventional audiophile wisdom says that's suffered so much generational rot you better throw it out and make a better song instead!!! and design it for 5.1 channel audio! aaargh!!!!!)
if you think you do notice a compression artifact, consider listening to the lossless verison on bandcamp to check if it's actually an artifact; e.g. the sparkly noise throughout Shuffling Of Feet In An Empty Lounge is there on purpose.
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 MP3 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 (in the rare case it uses libmodplug or whatever) 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 "initial 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 one of us made it, but it's uncertain who.
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.
In cases where "we" could be read as referring to either us or us and someone we work with, we may use "we&" and "our&" to refer specifically to us, Wibi (the "&" being a common symbol used by plural systems). This is another one of those things that makes specific people on the internet really irritated for some reason.
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 edgy white European men who were mildly famous in the 80s, 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 three things we dislike: software-as-a-service, ongoing art fads, and business models that rely on divorcing customers from consensus reality on the company's own terms (amazon sez "manifest a win"). so that should answer the question. maybe a few 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 id3v2, which kinda sucks but works.
(🎀 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. Either figuratively because Threads embraces-extends-extinguishes it into oblivion ("if anyone's negatively affected by new changes to Mastodon they can always just self-host an earlier version" is a socially unconscious techbro take), or literally because it becomes so sleek and modern our browser can't handle it.
- 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 bad1, 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.)
^ 1. Though, ironically, when we replaced the .opus files on our website with .mp3 files for compatibility reasons (and didn't keep both for cost-effectiveness reasons), a lot of those files ended up being transcoded from Opus to MP3. The original lossless files are all on another hard drive, and our system to keep track of them has fallen behind, so we figured we'd rather accept lossy-to-lossy transcoding than go hunting for all the lossless files to re-convert. Audiophiles have much better music to be 'philic about, anyway. If we ever release a definitive 75-CD Wibi boxset, ideally it'll be sourced from the lossless masters, but there's a minor snag in that we will never release a definitive 75-CD Wibi boxset.
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. also please don't mind the invalid html and stray closing tags all over the place that our browser happens to put up with. maximum compatibility.
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?
