A super and surprisingly very stressful day spent archiving. I've decided to remaster the two albums I made with Tor, Gunstorm and The End And The Beginning. Not, I stress, re-work them in the way I have with every remaster so far. Some of those have varied a lot (like the Burn of God or The Modern Game or Synaesthesia versions). Many complete re-recordings which are noticeably better even when the track names are the same, like The Infinite Forest or Animalia, and some, like Tree of Keys, were 90% the same with a few new or re-recorded tracks.
No, here the aim is purely one of the final recording quality, no mixing or any other adjustment. The originals were burned to CD from 16-bit files, were not dithered and were distorted quite a lot. Now I can render in 32-bit float (which is 24-bit resolution) quite easily, and my new Gothic and Cathedral Limiters can make everything much nicer and avoid clipping. See here Before and After images of Nineteen Eighty Five:
Back then undithered 16-bit was the best I could do.
The remaster process involved finding the old Prometheus files from 2009 and re-rendering them. This should have been easy, but some plugins have changed since then. In fact, I think that all of the plugins have been recompiled at least, so there's no guarantee anything will be the identical. The chorus vocals in 'AI' (which was old in 2009) used an ancient version of the peaking filter, so I needed to tweak it to get it working the same, and the echo timing of the pianos in Challenger was totally wrong, set to the default 500ms, rather than 1.5 beats... fortunately, I tend to stick to even sizes. I could hear that one echo was slightly slower so I could fix this exactly with some experimentation.
There was a bug, back then, too, which failed to switch off silent tracks. This is fine, but it means that modern re-renders of old tracks can be tricky, so I've had to temporarily switch off this 'zerosamples' feature.
The final hurdle was the last track, Leaving Home. The snare drum used a reverb effect which is now obsolete and deleted, so I've had to use the modern version, which sounds pretty much the same. Strangely, the timbre of the main lead instrument is quite different, even when it is supposed to be the same. It's possible that a fix to the anti-aliasing, or filters, or some other 'correction' over the years has changed the tone. The new 32-bit master itself may simply sound sufficiently better to sound different. The odd thing is that this track is the only one that sounds audibly different at all, despite the clearly visible difference in quality.
I had a panic moment at 11am when I discovered a new bug in Prometheus caused by a limit-check to the Set Parameter events, a new feature I included in v2.89. This took over an hour of careful work to fix, and caused me great anxiety, partly because I hadn't planned for everything to take so long at all. I'd hoped to quickly re-render these files in 32-bit; use those as output, and move on. I hadn't at all counted on the compatibility errors, or the distortion. What I'd hoped would take a morning will take a few days.
Well, the files from The End And The Beginning are rendered now, but not checked in detail. The master isn't burned. Musically, to my ears, there is almost no difference, even when comparing one directly with another. For this reason, I won't be updating the steam version of the album, or doing anything apart from burning a master CD for archival reasons... or a future CD issue.
Everything will need checking carefully, then I'll do the same for Gunstorm.
By about 3pm, the renderings were complete, so I started to archive albums, burning a new CD master copy of each album in optimal quality. Some albums, like Pi, have never been burned to CD, not even for my personal playing; I still prefer to listen via a CD rather than MP3 or a stream.
I've archived 10 albums so far. I'm not doing all of them. Albums that have been replaced, bad versions, old ones, there's no need to archive those, but I have archived versions of albums that are good enough, different enough, like the 2002 version of The Spiral Staircase. There's really no point in keeping an old copy of Animalia, or The Modern Game, or Tree of Keys, when the replacement is basically the same but better.
It's this archiving process which has taken up my past 10 days or so, and will continue for another week or so. I must and will get back to creating new music, but not (as Telly Savalas sang) today.
