elegant simplicity

The September 2007 Newsletter has just been mailed out! The main news is that the new CD Too Many Goodbyes is now at the factory and the presses are rolling! The official release date to the general public will now be October 1st (sorry for the delay!), but it will be available within the next 10 days to website users . . . Stay tuned!!

Over the course of the weekend, I digitised 11 of our albums into 40 second MP3 clips at 128kbps. That's every track on the albums, totalling some 86 songs! It was a mammoth task, for sure! And there are still another 9 albums to go! Anyway, the purpose of the excercise was to standardise our mp3 offering into a unified whole. That unified whole is called the 40 Second Jukebox!

The old files were of varying lengths and varying bit rates and, because only a few tracks of an album were represented, I felt that it was time to fully show the range of our material: a process made super easy by the Jukebox I put in place last month. Clearly, 40 second clips cannot possibly do justice to our output, given the the complexity and interesting arrangements of our songs, but I do hope it will encourage more people to listen and hopefully buy a CD or two of something that takes their fancy ...

As of now, we have a new section on the site! This is called, simply, Links (located, for now, in the Flotsam section) and allows anyone to submit a link to the database for approval. All you have to do is click the Upload button, fill out the form and wait for approval, which should take less than 24 hours. All non-music related sites will be disallowed, so keep to the site requirements. I have kick started the process with a selection of links to demonstrate the categories and ranking system etc. Feel free to submit your own site or resource.

I must be on some sort of creative roll or something, but I am pleased to announce, finally, that our downloads page is now live. It has taken some time to get it ready, for such a seemingly simple page, but better late than never. It features a great selection of wallpapers (in two sizes) as well as the complete lyric sheet to the fan club only CD Aquatorium. You don't need to be a member to download anything, so help yourselves!

After months and months of testing and delays, I am pleased to announce that we have finally got our music page up and running! The MP3 player currently has around 30+ songs and extracts, complete with artwork! It looks great and streams very quickly, too. Note that downloads of the songs are not yet permissible until I upgrade the lower quality tunes into higher quality ones! After that has been completed, there will be a member page where you can sign in and grab any song you like for your own use!

Those of you expecting a newsletter in your inbox for August will be a tad disappointed. Due to my house move and various other issues, there will not be a newsletter until September. This will hopefully coincide with the reelase of the new CD!!!