Good party at the Starport

Good party at Grand Central Starport today. Most of the food (including a large corned beef) got eaten, which is always a good thing. johno and chriso honored me with a simplified kanreki ceremony, complete with red vest and hat (appropriately enough, a RedHat tradeshow baseball cap). I guess that makes me a recycled geek now.

There was some good singing early on; I spent much of the day in the office where I have a comfortable chair, and it's quiet enough to hold a good conversation or show off tracks from the Consonance concert.

Tracks, and other albummery

Despite having other things to do, I managed to get "World Inside the Crystal" into pretty decent shape -- the main thing it needed was bass cut on the guitar track to tame the boominess that resulted from having the mic slightly above the strings when I recorded it. I think I can take care of "Silk and Steel" this evening as well. (9:58 ...except that "Silk and Steel" needs to have its guitar part redone -- too much bleedthrough on the vocals otherwise.)

This markes something of a milestone: 9 tracks out of 18 are basically done, and only two need me to do any actual recording at this point.

My conversation with Jeff Rogers yesterday at the party, plus some of the other feedback I've gotten, has left me feeling pretty good about putting the live version of "High Barratry" on the CD. I pushed the .wav file up on the web so he could work on it. Jeff, like me, is in favor of a clean acoustic sound with the lyrics clear and understandable.

Almost finished with the switchover from 16-bit wav files to 32-bit. If I export the final mix in floating point it means I can normalize the tracks without losing any bits, so I'll have more headroom for mixing. I believe most mastering software takes floating point as well. Only thing left is actually building the disk TOC, but I don't need that immediately. Maybe not at all, if I let the duplicator put the disk together from uploaded track files.