We've been quietly building two things for you, and this week they're both ready! Two small gifts, both free, both yours to keep.
Bad Taste
We made a music player, and we love it! It's called Bad Taste, and it looks like it came straight out of 2001, back when your music lived right there on your own screen and nothing sat in between. Every song we've ever released is already inside it: all of Crown of Thorns, all of Broken Dolls, every single, sorted into folders you can just click through and press play. No account, no ads, nothing to sign up for, and no algorithm deciding what you hear next.
There are different skins you can switch between whenever you like, and each one changes the whole feel of the player, with its own colors, fonts and layout, so you can make it match your mood. There’s also visualizers that move with the music: bars, tunnels and a pulse that follows the sound. It runs in your browser on your phone or your laptop, so you can open it and just leave it playing all day. It's the player we always wished we had, so we made it for you.
You can open it here: pinkparadox.itch.io/pink-paradox-bad-taste-music-player
Pink Paradox Compressor
The second one is a little tool we kept wishing existed, so we built it! Every time you want to shrink a photo or convert a video, most websites make you upload your files to their servers first, and that never sat right with us. The Pink Paradox Compressor doesn't do that. It converts and compresses your images, your videos, and your music, and nothing ever leaves your device. No server, no upload, no account, no limits, and once it has loaded it even works with no internet at all! You can drop in a whole batch of files at once, give each one its own settings, and watch them get smaller with the before and after right in front of you.
It also strips out the hidden tags and metadata that get buried in your files, the location you were standing in, the device you shot on, the timestamps, and the AI provenance markers that tools bake into everything they touch. Your camera, your phone, and the apps you edit with write all of that in without you ever asking them to, and it rides along inside every file you share. Those AI markers especially, the C2PA credentials, the AI tags, the invisible watermarks, are exactly what Instagram, Facebook, and the others now scan for the moment you upload, so they can label your work as AI made and quietly bury how far it reaches. We think you should get to decide what stays in your files, not them. So this lets you wipe those markers before anything leaves your hands. It won't make you anonymous on its own, that takes a lot more than one tool, but it's one piece you can take back, one less thing about you baked into what you post. Use it in your browser, or download it for Windows or Android, whichever suits you.
You can get it here: pinkparadox.itch.io/pink-paradox-compressor
Why we made them
If you're wondering why a metal band spent its time building a music player and a file converter, it's pretty simple. This is the fight we're already in! We've spent this year watching Instagram, YouTube, and other social media decide what you're allowed to see, listen and say, pulling videos down, burying posts, banning accounts for unclear reasons, and we've watched governments lean harder and harder on those same platforms to identify people and shut down anything they don't like. They want to know exactly who you are and exactly what you're saying or watching, and they're building the tools to track every bit of it. Freedom of expression online is being quietly taken apart, one tag, one takedown, one new law at a time. We can't stop all of that, but we can help make it harder to do. With Bad Taste that lets you keep the music no matter who tries to bury it, and Pink Paradox Compressor that lets you strip the hidden markers out of what you make before you share it. Neither one fixes the whole mess, and we're not going to pretend they do! They're just two small pieces of it we could actually put in your hands, for free, because we think you should have them.
So please, go enjoy them. Put Bad Taste on and let the whole discography play loud! Keep the Compressor around for the next time a website tries to make things harder than they need to be! We didn't make these to get anything back from you… We made them because we wanted you to have them!
Con mucho amor, Pink Paradox.
