I have more space on the album, so I've had a look at some old, largely complete and unused songs I could use.
One was 'An Autumn Tale', one of my oldest songs, from the explosive year of 2002. I started to write songs in that year, and about 100 songs flowed out. I've recorded or sequenced very few of those. Two from that early time that did make it to release were 'AI' and 'Open Your Eyes' as used on The End And The Beginning. 'An Autumn Tale' was added to The Harlequin Kings album, along with 'Incomplete Version', and several others that made it onto The Dusty Mirror, but that album was deleted a few years ago with no CD copies being pressed, and this is a pretty song so I could easily re-record some vocals to magic up a new version. It has a gentle and atmospheric feeling, a little mysterious, perhaps like Norwegian Wood (recalling that I'm musing on Revolver for this new album), but with more energy.
Now, looking at that old sequence from the early days of Prometheus, I found that there was a 'bug' in it. It used an engine called Random Delay, but in 2016 or so I changed that engine to accept 4 rather than 3 parameters, and that had the effect of breaking it on all of the sequences it was used in. I'd never do that now, but perhaps then I didn't have the facility to see which songs used what... now I do. So, I looked up which sequences used it and a whopping 136 do, and the vast majority used the old 3-parameter version, so over 100 tunes were a bit 'broken'. It's not a serious 'break' - the program wouldn't crash, but the sound for those tunes isn't generated correctly.
This led to a bit of a crisis moment, partly because there was no easy way to see which sequence used which version of the Random Delay. Basically, I had to load each tune and manually adjust everything, so I got going on this today. After some time I realised that the audible effect was minimal, and that the whole effect was superfluous. It was designed to stagger the timing of the notes a little, to make the instruments sound a little more 'realistic' (ie. to de-quantise) but it didn't really work because it would only delay, not move sounds forwards in time. It didn't work perfectly with layered sounds either because a new sound would stop any trailing notes from a previous sound, so, for example, I couldn't create a sound with 3 bells, each of which starts at a random time, and have the trailing bells from the old sound flow into this one.
The same effect but better can be easily achieved by simply staggering the start times of the notes themselves, a literal de-quantise, and I now have that option. So, I decided to delete the Random Delay altogether.
I then updated Prometheus a version (to v3.32) to remove the multiple nags when loading a sequence with many out-dated plugins. Until today, I had to click once per plugin in this scenario, which could mean 10, 20, 30 clicks!
After all 136 tunes were fixed, I copied them all back with a batch xcopy command, then copied over any that had changed in my albums. Unexpectedly, two recent songs used this archaic delay: Do You Know Where Your Heart Is from We Robot, and the 1st version of Cycles III - in the first case, the instrument was actually unused - the delay was there because that sequence is over a decade old. The 2024 of Cycles III didn't include it.
Then, work on 'An Autumn Tale', so that now, and 'Incomplete Version Of The Writer' are ready for vocals, and those two old songs are resurrected.
