Tracks

"High Barratry" -- less noise reduction. "Stuck Here" and "Paper Pings" -- bass cut on the guitar. Older tracks were recorded with the mic too close and pointed toward the bass strings. Oops! "TEOTW" -- even out the tambourine part. There appears to be a timing bug when applying an effect to a short selection (e.g. attempting to amplify a single hit), that causes an X exception that blows Audacity out of the water. There are, fortunately, some workarounds. Don't have time to file a bug report. (12:46 "Mushrooms" -- bring guitar up and my vocals down just a little.)

Album status: Down to the wire

With last night's midnight mixing mania, the album is in a state it's never been in before: as far as I can tell, none of the tracks make me cringe to listen to them. That leaves the following work:

• "Vampire Megabyte" still needs spin-up and head-crash effects.
• Final mixing -- delete unused tracks, clean up any problems that turn up in the next couple of days.
• Tray card and booklet layout. If necessary I suppose I can do the layout in Photoshop, but I'd rather use Illustrator, Pagemaker, Corel Draw, or Quark. Suggestions? I may try to do the preliminary work in Inkscape and export SVG.
• Paperwork
• Label printing, some experimentation, and home burning of the bonus disk. In particular, I'm still not sure of the best way to make a mixed CD/CD-ROM out of it. Bonus disks, at least, will be available at Baycon.

I'm currently planning to take tomorrow off to do as much of this as I can. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to give the current mix a good listen and make comments, I really need another few sets of ears on this one. Email me (my LJ username at livejournal.com) or comment below for a pointer to the secret link. (Or hack it -- this is an album about hacking, after all. The URL is on a disk label image linked from this page. It's really meant as a bonus for people who pre-order, so feel free to do that, too. There are still plenty of pre-order packages available.