Warning!  Geeky post ahead!  I wrote this post to offer some insight into how I handle the preparation of the .mp3 and .ogg files that I use on the website, as well as the .flac files I keep for archives.  So, it’s a bit jargon-y.  Sorry.  But I figured someone would find it interesting or useful.

Sometimes I can be a bit OCD about the files on my computer.  Everything has a certain place, and every folder has a meaning.  The same holds true for the music files I’m working on.  When I’m nearly finished with a song, I start exporting .wav files and encoding them to various formats, including mp3 for the downloads, Ogg Vorbis for the streaming, and FLAC for my own archives.  On my file server here at home is a special folder I keep all these in called Recorded Files.  In here are four other folders, one for each type, named new waves, new mp3s, new flacs, and new oggs.  The idea is that I drop new .wav files that are candidates for release into the new waves folder, then place the other formats created from it in their respected folder.  It’s a bit convoluted, but I do have a reason for doing it this way.  In the past I would have trouble keeping track of which wave was the latest file, and knowing if the mp3 I had was from that latest wave file or not.  Now I know some of you would say, “well, why don’t you just add dates to the file names?”  I could, but when I first started working with this layout I didn’t have a lot of extra space to work with to keep multiple versions.  Plus, I already “versioned” my source files in Sonar, so I can always go back in time with those instead.  So it just made sense to do it this way instead.

Anyway, I do all my mp3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis encoding directly on my server, which runs Linux, since it’s a bit faster than my desktop and all the tools are there in one location.  Well one day I realized that I could write a simple shell script to automate creating all these different files from the original .wav files rather than doing it by hand.  Doing this would also further help prevent a situation where I’m left going, “Is this mp3 from the latest .wav file? Is the .wav file even the latest one?  Grr, I’m going to have to re-export and re-edit.”

So I wrote a script one day to do just that.  For a long time the script worked, but it wasn’t that robust.  While it did know how to recreate only the files missing from the new mp3s, new flacs, and new oggs folders, it didn’t know how to overwrite specific files.  Plus, it didn’t really handle command line arguments very well, and it didn’t handle any metadata.  So, I decided to rewrite it in Python and make it better.

The new script can look for .wav files to encode in any arbitrary directory, and can also output each format in any arbitrary directory.  It also knows how to insert some default metadata tags into each file it encodes (the defaults can be changed in the script), figure out the title and track number (if it exists) from the file name, and how to work on individual files.

So there you have it.  A small bit of insight into how I handle my music.  It may not seem like much, but having this script actually saves me a lot of time and headaches.  If you want, you can download a copy of the script here (right-click and Save As).  To run, you need Python (2.6 and newer, though an older version might work); command line tools for lame, flac, and oggenc; and id3v2.

New song time!  Listen to it in the embedded player above, or click here to download the mp3 directly.

“The Optic Nerve” is a trippy industrial song I’ve been working on since last November.  Originally it was going to be about constructed reality with a cyberpunk theme layered on top of it, but my original lyrics just weren’t working out.  So I placed it on the back burner until I could come up with something.  I finally revisited the song earlier this month when I had the idea of scouring archive.org for trippy vocal samples (this is also where I found the vocal files for I Love Penguins).  During my searching I came across a recording of Rodleen Getsic giving a talk about the 2012 prophecy.  While I don’t personally buy into the whole 2012 thing, the talk did seem to fit with the music, and her pacing was just right.  The recording was under the Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, and so this song shares the same license.

I’ve also been working on a more dance-oriented remix of it, though it isn’t quite ready yet.  But this actually brings me to my next point: where Partition 36 is going now that Inside The Beat is finished.  “The Optic Nerve” will actually be part of a new single, and will have the original track, a “vocal-less” mix, the remix, and another completely new track.  I hope to release it by the end of February or early March.

Aside from this… a new album is underway.  There’s not much to say about it yet, except that it’s going to be awesome.

For now, enjoy the new song!

PS: if you follow Partition 36 on Facebook or Twitter, and were expecting this post a day or two ago, sorry.  Blame StarCraft 2 :)

Late last year, not too long after I had released Inside The Beat, I started working on a new song that I called “The Optic Nerve”.  It had a much more noisy sound to it than my previous work and would probably be described as some sort of industrial music.

For the longest time I was stuck with what to do for a melody or verse section.  I knew that I wanted it to have lyrics or some sort of spoken word section, but I just couldn’t find anything to fit.  Searching at archive.org (which, by the way, is where I found the audio for I Love Penguins) didn’t turn up anything worthwhile, and my attempt at writing lyrics wasn’t going so well, either.  But it was still a good song, so I placed it on the back burner and decided to come back to it at a later date.

I finally revisited it a couple of days ago after finding recording of a woman giving a talk on the whole 2012 thing.  It had a really trippy feel to it, and her pacing actually matched the song’s BPM quite nicely.  But my initial enthusiasm waned after I played around with it for a few days.  Thus I forked the project, removed the vocals, and went back to the drawing board.

We’ll see what comes of it within the next few days.  I’ve since gone back to my original lyrics and have started rewriting them yet again.  But I think it’s for the best, as they’re taking on a much more cyberpunk feel that’s closer to what I originally imagined for them.

If you’ve been following Partition 36 on Facebook or Twitter (and if you don’t, you should), then you’ve probably read that I finished a new track recently.  It started out as an experiment with FM synthesis to create a slappy bass sound similar to what I used to hear in Sega Genesis games growing up.  Unfortunately the experiment itself failed, but I still managed to pull a new song out of it called “Midnight Highway”.

The song has a strong soundtrack-like flavor to it and, to me, sounds reminiscent of the track “Face Toward The Horizon” off of my last album.  During production I had a heck of a time finding a good bass sound to use for it.  In the end I found that a subtle yet deep sound worked best for what I had in mind, and so programmed one into my Moog Modular V software.  I also had a hard time deciding whether I should keep the chorus effect on the main melody, but ended up sticking with it in the end.

During production it had the file name of “Whoa 80s” due to the use of a bell sound that sounds an awful lot like something off the classic Roland D-50 synthesizer.  But as it got closer to being finished I decided to change this to its current title based on an image I saw in my head.  I could almost picture Priss, a character from my favorite anime, Bubblegum Crisis, riding her motorcycle on a highway late at night.  As she stops for a rest and looks out over the light laden city of Mega Tokyo.  Although the style of my song is quite different from the soundtrack in the anime, they still share some of the same timbres.  Thus, I decided to name it “Midnight Highway” based on this image.

I’ve attached a short clip of the song to this post, so please check it out!  I’d love to hear what everyone thinks of it.

(loop for c across "Hello, world"
  counting 1 into spaces
  do (format t "~{~a~}~a~%"
             (loop for s from 1 to (1- spaces)
               collecting " ")
             c))

;; You didn't think I'd have a *normal* first post, did you? ;^)

So…obviously the Partition 36 blog has been redesigned and moved to Tumblr. I’m still in the process of fixing stuff up, including putting the old blog posts in an archive, but everything should be up before Monday.

The main reason I’ve switched to Tumblr is so that people can follow Partition 36 and comment on entries. But I also wanted an easier way to post entries so that I can get more things written and out there. So enjoy for now, and watch more a more steady stream of posts :^)