A day, yet another day, full of work updating my album archives. My albums were originally designed in 300dpi for 12x12cm CD covers, about 1417 pixels square. When I printed these, I realised I needed a bleed, to make the image a bit larger. Over time the resolution grew and at some point I updated everything to 600dpi, images that were 3166x3166 pixels with the bleed and 2834x2834 without. This remained a standard for years, and this was (and is) generally good enough for digital releases, but a couple of years ago 3000x3000 pixels became the defacto standard for album artwork. Only about 20% of my music was desgined at that size, and some had old 300dpi covers.
So, today I've slowly updated all albums to the 635dpi standard. About 40 albums needed updating. I've tended to design full CD art for every album, even though it remains an aspiration rather than actual plan to print them. As part of this I've made previews of the inner and outer art too. A few albums had a few problems. Two used fonts which came with Windows 11 but the system has later removed (bah!) so I've reinstalled those and fixed the art. I had also completely lost the rear artwork for The Spiral Staircase, so had to remake it from scratch.
Most of the albums were simple resizes (with the added benefit of better quality scaling for fonts or vector objects) but some needed high quality work on them. Stupid Computer Music now has higher quality images than even the old CD artwork had.
My album in progress is a similar style to Synaesthesia, Burn Of God, etc.; those albums which tell a story. It seems like a good time to arrange the back catalogue to a common standard. This isn't easy... many are balanced well enough; some now well. The new Cycles & Shadows remaster sounds far better than the old version, yet it's volume level is lower than my newer albums, but then, that suits a more classical orientated album.
My music rarely sells even a single copy. Even if each album sold but 10 copies it would be a huge incentive and boost to reworking the contents of my back catalogue, but the archiving and upgrading process will continue. One main job is music notation of each album, and remasterng all to the best quality of my latest output. The latter is a continual process... I've jumped at reworking albums in the past, like Tree Of Keys, only to leap forwards in skill and ability a short time later, so perhaps it is best to remaster gradually, even if I feel better than ever now, ready now, and able now to mix and remaster everything brilliantly!
Well, the art is remastered in the album data area, but I also file album art as artworks, so need to spend a few tedious hours updating that archive too. Onwards we roll our rock.
Edit: 12 hours after starting and today's task is done!
