The evolution of portable music.

True story.

it’s very quiet.

The trickling is ongoing, 4 tracks out so far, and pretty much no reaction. It’s all going according to the plan.

Trickling out

oooh looks like all these months of quiet work are coming to an end. I’ve mixed and pseudomastered the whole thing, and I even now have the .iso file for distribution of the complete product. But because I’m such a tease I’ll release the mp3′s one by one. Like anyone cares

So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you track #1 of Elsie 2017, the album.

… and this is what it all boils down to. Not too impressive.

Art or Science ?

is mastering art or science ?

I’ve read the excellent Bob Katz’s book and now I realize it’s both. Like architecture, but with sound instead of buildings.

And right now I’m in the science phase. Checking RMS, goniometer, and freq spread are all interesting when you can correlate what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. It’s not easy but it does kind of make sense. And either I’m so bad that I don’t realize at all what I’m doing, or I actually did pretty well in terms of general balance between all the songs. I’m now going through minor adjustments to put all the tracks in order and make sure they have a smooth apparent loudness average across the whole thing.

I need moar tracks.

Working on the last track, clocking at 11:30 minutes, 79 tracks so far. Going overboard, anyone ?

//18 december edit: I’ve hit 100 tracks

“Perfection”, he said.

And then he was disappointed. This thing is really difficult. You mix it, it sounds good, you listen to it on two or three different devices, all good, and then device #4 and it’s really horrible. So you go back and try to compensate, and sweeten the overall thing, and go again through all devices, fixing, adjusting, compensating, and so on.
And it never sounds perfect everywhere.
What to do ?

Lifting the curtain (a little)

So track #1 is out. Hope you like it. Nine more to come…

I’m the Pseudo Master

Showing off — that’s the current mastering stage for the first track. And because I really suck at this, I can’t even bring myself to use the limiter (not represented above, for all you nitpickers with an eye for detail) to max the level up and have each and every second between -0.5 and 0dB. So hooray, count me out for the Loudness War. I’ll pretend I did it on purpose. You’re welcome, Bob.

“Pseudo” mastering

It’s called “pseudo” mastering because it’s a poor man’s crutch. At this stage I can’t afford proper, professional mastering. So what I’m doing is the equivalent of monkeys banging on a keyboard in the hope of writing a Molière play — or some sort of “”"”mastering”"”" effect.

Affective Computing

I’m just realizing now, but this is what it boils down to: Affective Computing.