The Mandelbear's Musings

Finally managed to get back to work on the album, thanks mainly to a bit of inspiration on my walk this morning. (It was a longer walk than usual -- more about that in a separate post -- and it's possible that I needed the extra time.) It suddenly hit me what to do about the back cover.

It's so obvious that it really should have occurred to me sooner: since this is an album of computer songs, obviously the track list should look like a terminal window (green on black, probably) showing the result of running the list-track-info command. The barcode would be floating above it in an image-viewer window.

It's also possible that the theme could be carried all the way over to the insert, to the point of framing the cover photo in a Gimp or Photoshop window. This would give the cover the air of mild virtuality that I was originally thinking would have to be done by mixing obviously-computer-generated elements into the background.

By the way, I'm still looking for help with the cover image; I'll confess that this idea makes me much more confident about doing the rest of the graphics myself. No way I'll do the next one, though.

In other notes, I've done a little more work on the Worldcon concert tracks. Specifically, I ran normalize-audio on them -- the various intro tracks became a lot noisier due to a 15-20dB boost; I don't think I'm going to worry about it much. Audacity's noise removal seems to work really well on them, so I may go with that. I'll probably upload it sometime this week.