Woke early yesterday to record the 'Daytime Teevee' vocals, then some general singing practice which has become my normal routine. Tuesdays are a good morning for this. I have a series of karaoke songs to sing along to. John Denver songs are spot on my range and are brilliant warm-ups for me. 'Running Scared' by Roy Orbison and Freddie Mercury's 'The Great Pretender' are also good practice, and I sometimes attempt 'Nevermore' by Queen to varying degrees of triumphant failure. That song still amazes me. An interesting note (literally!) is that the 'see' of 'can't you seeee', is a C-note, C5, a good top note. I can manage it after warming up, but have not come close to equalling Freddie's performance yet; though I've come close on the other songs to varying degrees. Such is practice.
Yesterday felt like a slow day but I felt tired and ill for much of it, perhaps due to anxiety and a flare up of immuno-attacks which fill me with spasms and rashes, so I decided to slow down a little. I've continued to test Prometheus and the dithering, though the dithering and the 16-bit conversion pass every test. Half-rectangular dithering works perfectly, so there can't be anything fundamentally wrong, but 16-bit triangle dithering seems to create a consistently unexpected average. The average in float should be 0.000022888, and my float-output is, but the average is consitently 0.000024888 when converted to 16-bit then back to 32-bit in SoundForge. It might be because 16-bit is technically ranged to -32768, but I use -32767, so the lower sample (parts of this go below zero) have a slight difference to the weighting when SoundForge converts from 16 to 32 bit; but I doubt this, as that effect should be tiny. I will try to ignore this. The difference of 0.000002 over a 60-sec average is too tiny to matter.
I found another bug, that, for some reason, pressing Alt-Gr generates a KEYDOWN of 17 when pressed down (emulating a press of Ctrl) but 18 for KEYUP when the key is lifted! I've no idea why, but it means that pressing Alt-Gr will behave as though Ctrl were held down, thus blocking all other keys. Even more confusing, this doesn't seem to happen in SFXEngine, which has identical key handling. Sigh. Well, a fix is easy, as I never use Alt, so an Alt-Gr KEYUP now behaves like a Ctrl.
These changes have taken all morning. I'm keen to complete this album, but it's only half finished at the moment. I must strive and battle for structural or musical unity, but this is proving difficult. One unifying factor, as with Nightfood, is the speech from ancient television programmes. I'd like more than this. 'Fear is Everywhere' doesn't quite seem to fit after 'Daytime Teevee', even though one would expect it.
