Most of today was work transferring albums and singles to a new distributor; Testing The Delicates and The Love Symphony. These will transfer over the course of the next week.
One side effect of all of this was a new look at The Dusty Mirror. If I want to use the new high resolution (higher than CD quality) uploads, I usually need separate Stream and CD versions of an album. CD version tracks can fade and segue, and all in Sony CD Architect which can export in CD quality at most. I need to use Prometheus to export the (higher quality) master files, which I can then convert down to CD quality, thus having both hi-res and CD quality versions.
Separate Stream/CD versions of an album also has other advantages. A CD album benefits from tracks blending into each other, and changes in volume and pacing from track to track for emotional effect. Streamed tracks are usually heard alone, like singles, isolated from the other tracks on the album, so they work best at the same volume level, with a definite start and end. Another advantage is that people who stream or buy a download don't get the same album as those who buy the CD, so fans can buy both. For me, the CD version is always the definitive one, so the stream version acts as promotion for the (better) CD version.
This meant that today I've made new edits of the first two tracks of The Dusty Mirror, as these fade into each other on the CD version. The edits were easy, most of the work was registering their data, and creating new videos with the new waves. It also means a technical re-release of the album; it's a new album now, even if only slightly different. The new version is already live on Bandcamp, but elsewhere it is pencilled in for a July 11th release.
All of this took until 4pm. At that point, I updated Argus a version to fix a small bug regarding the scroll bar when deleting tracks. I improved the time stretch and insert/delete routines too.
