The geeky bits

[mdlbear]

The other main activity for the weekend has been getting ready to record the scratch tracks for Amethyst Rose. For quite a while I've been wanting to move the track directories from their present location in .../Tracks/ to under the album working directories they belong with, so that's a lot of what I worked on.

In my usual style, I wrote another make target (snarf-tracks) in album.make. That way, I could apply it in all the backup directories as well, and avoid rewriting some 40 GB of audio files. Mission accomplished.

Along the way I also wrote the script to push the backups to my dreamhost site. That's important not only because I'm paranoid, but because it's going to be the main collaboration site for working on the album.

One pleasant discovery in all this was that I actually have recordings of 11 of the 16 songs in the tentative tracklist. Many -- perhaps most -- will need to be redone even to have useable scratch tracks, but it holds out considerable hope that I can actually get them done in the next six weeks, i.e., in time for Conflikt.

Of course, I also discovered that there were more tracks on the tentative list than I had space for, even after some trimming. I pretty much had to go into "what can I drop without having somebody hunt me down and kill me" mode. So there will be at least three more albums coming along: Amethyst Rose (family and friends), Hackers' Heaven (hackers in space), and a to-be-named fantasy and space album. That's good: it will tighten up AR and HH around their respective themes.