mdlbear | ConChord: Friday (Reply)

As it turns out, ConChord is shaping up to be a very small con, with nothing scheduled before 6pm on Friday. Just as well; that let us spend Friday recovering from the drive down, meeting old friends, handing out pre-order packages, and not getting very much done.

The original plan had been for the flower_cat to connect with tibicina and cflute in the morning for a trip to Penzey's spices in Torrence, but they didn't arrive until noonish. The theme of this weekend appears to be real-time scheduling.

We'd originally thought of holding a CC&S release party, but between a late start and the fact that there was a "New Stuff Listening Party" on the schedule kicking off the con at 6pm, we sensibly decided to bag it. In past years the listening party was normally held at the reception, which was cheese and veggies on the poolside patio. But since the acoustics were so terrible two years ago, they decided to put the listening in the concert hall on the second floor, and let people drift between them. I have no idea how many people were there to hear my album.

The con was kicked off properly by a concert by Joe Bethancourt. The schedule is very much a work in progress; more so than at most cons I've been to. The short concerts on Sunday are especially flexible, so after cflute mentioned that 11:30 Sunday morning was a bad time for a concert, and signed herself up for a slot at 3pm, I talked to Rod O'Riley (who's doing the schedule) and moved mine. It'll probably end up at 3:30, so we'll do a combined sound check.

So far I've distributed somewhere between 15 and 20 pre-order packages, and sold 50 to the two dealers. The main feedback so far has been a comment from R.O'R that there didn't appear to be the usual 2 seconds of silence between the songs.

All I can figure is that there was a setting in K3B on at least one of the two machines I made masters on, that controlled whether pregaps got inserted. I know that at one point I read back the TOCs and verified that the tracks were 2 seconds longer than the files, but now that I think back I may not have done that with both copies of the master. Oops!

You see, at just about the last minute, I discovered that my usual burning program, cdrdao, wasn't writing the text metadata correctly, so I hastily switched to K3B. K3B has always been extremely reliable, but it doesn't take an input file: everything has to be set up interactively. Which is a pain in the arse, and error prone.

If that's the only problem I'm not going to worry about it too much. Next time I'm going to schedule at least a week to live with the actual master and make sure it's exactly the way it's supposed to be.

Dumb bear!