Plug time

[avevale_intelligencer]

If you know anyone who doesn't read LJ a lot, and who might be interested in my music, now would be a great time to mention to them that I have an album out.

Now we're heading for the longest night
With Christmas cheer in sight
And should-auld-acquaintance-be-forgot-and-never-brought-to-mindness.
So be like old Jock of the Sword,
Buy a gift you can afford--
The brand new reimagined Filk Of Human Kindness!

Yes, friends, there's a new(ish) album of my songs available for download from Bandcamp.com, and clicking on the picture or the little verse above (no, I've never actually owned a copy of Sergeant Pepper, or indeed anything by the Beatles--odd that--so the scansion's probably all wrong) will take you to a page where you can listen to each and every one of the fifteen tracks and decide if it's worth ten squid of your hard-earned dosh. Songs include:

Song For Amanda - a soulful ballad of those eternal wanderers, the Nyronds.

City Of Masks - in which Mershane's experiences on Rainbynight are encapsulated in a brand new arrangement.

One Plod Beyond - a different parody of Valerie Housden's epic "Blue Flame."

Home At Last - the way you've never heard it.

and many many more, all re-recorded and most of them in completely new arrangements. Featuring one brand new song never before released on record. Comes with a PDF file that includes the cover picture featured above, track listing, full lyrics (which according to unalterable tradition aren't quite the same as the ones on the album) and the usual stuff you get in a CD booklet.

FoHK is already doing well, and thus inspired I am now making good progress on my next project:



There's now a reasonably unsquishy release date; I aim to have it out on or around DFDF, and hopefully in physical CD form rather than (or as well as) download. All new songs, and lots of brilliant musicians helping me out. So if you haven't bought FoHK yet, or you know someone who hasn't, it would be a great help if you would boost the signal and Support Your Local Nyrond!

Thank you for reading. We now return you to your regularly scheduled wibblings.

Comments

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Zander, I wish to buy. But I am more than somewhat stonkered by the richesse d'élections & my own ignorance. 2B specific, what are (some) pros and cons of the various formats?

I would like to put the album on iTunes on my laptop, and transfer it (possibly in a less-faithful but less-massy format) to my iPod.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Um. I'm glad you asked me that. mp3, I believe, is or can be of slightly lower quality than the others, but takes up less space than .WAV or .AIFF, while FLAC stands for "something Lossless Audio Compression" which means the files are smaller than .WAV but higher quality than mp3. iTunes can import mp3 and .WAV, I know that.

And that's as much as I know. Paging Mr Bristow...

[keristor.livejournal.com]

iTunes will definitely handle MP3 and WAV (if you can persuade Bandcamp to give you WAV, which I couldn't last time I tried). WAV is basically a copy of what's on a CD, plus a header, so is "CD quality" but big. FLAC is a compressed version of that (as free/open format, but a number of things don't support it) but still lossless so the same quality (about half the size of WAVs). The MP3s which Bandcamp provide are at 320 kbps which is as good as you get with MP3, there is some 'loss' in compression but they are smaller (about a quarter of the size of WAV); I can't usually hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 and WAV unless the source audio is really strange.

Ogg/Vorbis is another free format, but is about as popularly-supported as FLAC, it's another lossy compression about the same as MP3.

If you aren't constrained by low bandwidth I'd go for WAV (remembering that a full CD of 'WAV' type music is still under a gigabyte so fairly small by modern standards). But if you are used to MP3 quality anyway then go for that.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Or indeed Mr Keris. Thank you.