EnnuiCastr is coming...

Well, we've hit $220, and that's the EnnuiCastr goal. The alpha version of EnnuiCastr is running and has had a few testers (thanks!). It's still not perfect, but I think it's at the point that I'm willing to release it publicly as a beta pretty soon.

[For those who don't know what EnnuiCastr is: Back channel to send audio to Craig via a webapp without Discord processing it and chewing it up.]

Generally speaking, I only patron-lock features if there's a compelling reason to do so. I'm going to run my thoughts on EnnuiCastr past y'all first tho, as I don't want anybody who may have patronized in hopes of eventual EnnuiCastr to feel betrayed.

There are currently two toggleable features of EnnuiCastr (one of which isn't fully implemented yet): FLAC and continuous mode. By default, EnnuiCastr records in Opus, and uses a voice activity detector—that is, it only sends data if you're actually talking.

The Opus is 128kbit, which is, frankly, good enough for all purposes. The VAD is WebRTC's VAD, which is very good, and on top of that, I buffer the two seconds before and after speaking and send those too, so the usual symptoms of VAD (sudden cut-in and cut-out) don't exist.

In FLAC mode it records in 24-bit FLAC. 24-bit audio is in many circumstances pointless, because 16-bit is completely sufficient to cover the human hearing range, but this is NOT one of the circumstances in which it's pointless: By using 24-bit FLAC, we can in principle (although it depends on the computer setup) record microphones with bad gain settings without losing any depth. However, FLAC is big. Like, *really* big. OK, it's not big compared to WAV, but it's still pretty damned big. Far too big to not patron-lock it.

In continuous mode, the EnnuiCastr webapp always sends audio data, even if you're not talking. This is modestly more useful than it sounds, since VADs make noise detection difficult. Opus + continuous mode is pretty big. FLAC + continuous mode is *huge*. FLAC + continuous mode + a bunch of clients at once is gigantic.

With all this in mind, my current thought is this:

1. Everyone—patron and otherwise—gets EnnuiCastr support in Opus+VAD (default) mode.

2. For FLAC and continuous mode, realistically I have to introduce another tier. $8/mo buys you both.

3. MAYBE the $4 tier buys you one but not the other? Frankly, they're both such hogs, I'm a bit reluctant to place either at the lower tier, but I feel bad about making a patron goal to develop a feature which would then be locked to a higher tier...

Thoughts? Concerns? Other approaches?