blather: bday on delay +mastering master

[arrow00]

my birthday round up report is on hold because I'm still hip deep in the nightmare landscape of music CD wrangling. but I am grateful to all of you, my friends online, who made up for the lack of any particular festiveness on the day in question. I have to garnish? gather? heap praise on the kind people who made me such lovely presents, and will do so tomorrow. hopefully. but right now my life is fubared beyond belief.

ahem. What I Have Learned In the Past Month

(I already knew this.)

if you want something done right, you have to kick everyone in the head and then run away and do it yourself. I have finally done so.



see, it turns out $10,000 software in the wrong hands just makes little clicks and bobbles and craptastic sequencing errors on what was otherwise a very serviceable, if low-fidelity, quirky little folk-pop album.

otoh, cheap-ass, comes-with-your-Apple-computer software apparently can fix the goddamned problem if you just yank the files away from the very well-meaning but not particularly attentive mastering "master" and just fucking DO IT YOURSELF. which is what I did. using Garage Band, no less (somewhere Steve Jobs is masturbating) instead of the $10,000 I kid you not Sonic Blade software/hardware that put all the dopey artifacts in.

And, to make matters completely unacceptable, the song that got fucked up the most is a) one of my favorite tracks b) completely a cappella so you can't even PRETEND it's just someone brushing their pick against the mic stand or something.

No. Unacceptable.

I have fixed it. I have created a gold master CD which I will deliver Wednesday morning to the duplicator along with the artwork (that's another funny oh, ha ha funny story about getting the correct UPC barcode thingy so that our album doesn't end up shelved in Housewares or something. but that's a tear-jerker for another day.)

did I mention I have a headache the size of Poughkeepsie?

Comments

[arrow00.livejournal.com]

drive-by, because I still have to review the new master for track spacing (my brain hurts) but I know just what you mean about what the hell? show up to rehearsal on time much? and how about actually rehearsing ON YOUR OWN occasionally?

[ruthless1.livejournal.com]

Oh girl - don't EVEN go there. The things my bandmates did? [insert hyperventilation here] made me realize just how much I needed therapy after it all stopped. It was out of this world. One of my favorites? Was spending literally HOURS making arrangements, writing them all down and getting to the gig and the harp player would shake her bottle blond hair and say "I lost the peice of paper I wrote everything on (vs writing it on the music itself) and I forgot what I'm supposed to do here"
*stabbity stabbity stab*
But only metaphorically!
*deep calming breaths*