Keith Handy 1.999

So… uh…
KeithHandy posted in Business on September 29th, 2007

…I guess I should “go live”?

My only concern at this point: it needs to be gapless. Most of the songs segue into one another, and if lulu’s disc image puts two-second spaces between my wav files, I will not be happy. Especially if people out there pay for it. I mean, you still would get all the music, regardless, but still. I asked one of lulu’s online support people if gaps would be put in, and their answer, after checking with someone else, was “there shouldn’t be”.

Users of lulu’s service can update their files at any time, and they do allow you to provide a complete disc image as opposed to wav files, so if necessary I could create one and upload that instead… but I’m hoping I don’t have to.

By the way, this is the “announcement” I was referring to in earlier posts, as if you couldn’t tell. In no way does this preclude a timely release of some more current material in the not too distant future, as I’m making great progress on that — but the idea of releasing a CD without putting up cash up front is incredibly appealing, and I think a remastered Leave of Absence 2 is the perfect guinea pig for it. Not to mention, a strong album in its own right.

Stop looking at me like that. It’s just a figure of speech.

Well, should I wield the mighty power of my left mouse button, and hope for the best? I’m kind of a hypocrite, because I wait seven years and change to put it out, and yet I can’t wait a couple weeks to order one for myself and just check it… I expect everyone to be patient except me…

Update 9/30/07: Leave of Absence vol. 2 is available for purchase. You can click on the word “this” in this sentence. No, not the “this” just before the word “sentence”, the one just prior to that one, between “word” and “in” — the one in the quotes. The one that actually looks like a link, you troublemaker. I should just make this entire paragraph one big link, but I like to test your motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and ability to follow instructions. Especially if you’re going to be a wise-ass.

Anyway, the process of self-publishing is not as roll-off-a-log dead easy as you would think, but most of it is a matter of uploading the right files the first time, because you’re spending a lot of time waiting. Waiting for files to upload, waiting for disc images to be generated, and so on. If you’re recording music, and you plan use this sort of service, I recommend you download their cover art templates now and start designing that in your spare time. Even if you don’t publish through the same company, the templates will be useful.

Here’s how my day went today. I started off by putting together my little promo mp3 for my page on their site, which I had to keep shortening and rendering at a lower bitrate to get it down to their 2 MB limit. Then while I was editing that, I had a sudden and terrifying thought: Tracktion, by default, starts new projects with the master fader at negative three decibels. So when I did my assembly project to the already-sweetened files, just to make sure they would be at good relative levels from song to song, I ran off partial renders (from cue point to cue point) with the normalize option turned off. Normalizing would have brought every song up to the maximum volume. I wanted most of them to hit maximum volume, but there are a few that shouldn’t, and since the songs had previously been normalized, I assumed I was “good to go”. (Generally acoustic songs should not hit the same levels as full band songs, or they sound out of proportion.)

So okay, the relative level from song to song was fine, but it dawned on me that after this last step they would probably all be three decibels quieter than they could have been!!! Three decibels is noticeable. It won’t ruin the listenability by itself, but if you have CDs in a changer, you will definitely notice the need to adjust your volume from disc to disc. So I opened up each wav file in Audacity, checked their peak levels to confirm that my concern was well-founded, ran a hard limiter on each song at -3.5 decibels, and then boosted each song by 3.5 decibels. Yes, I used this as an excuse/opportunity to push my stuff another lousy half decibel. Yes, I’m an accomplice to the loudness war. Destroying the artistic integrity of my own work half a decibel at a time.

So, re-uploading all the files took another four hours, but at least that’s just a matter of starting the upload and then wandering around, finding stuff to do, and thinking sane thoughts.

Now that that’s all been taken care of, I recommend you grab a copy! If you’re extremely tight and pinching every penny, just bookmark it. Even if you’re so poor that you’re eating rats, you can at least look at the page, listen to the low-bitrate audio clip, and say, “y’know, for being all ‘remastered’ and whatnot, this sounds an awful lot like a low-bitrate mp3.”

Figure of speech, dude. Okay, not a very common one, I admit it…

Seriously, though, right now your word of mouth is more valuable to me than your ten dollar bill.  If you’ve got it, great (I’m currently back on my bread and tuna diet), but otherwise, any plugs into the public consciousness on your part would be enormously appreciated.

This probably calls for a “so you want” post about finishing stuff. Anyone still reading that?