I'm about to go through another hiatus - we have to go to Australia for six weeks. Which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except that I'm having all four of my wisdom teeth removed while I'm there, which is miserable to contemplate and painful on the wallet. I'm taking the laptop (of course) but I'm not expecting to get any proper work done while I'm there - too much being on show and not enough silent time being on my own and tinkering with stuff, but I have grand plans nevertheless.

The first project is to redesign minim-media.com - this is long, long overdue, as I'm sure you can tell :-) It's time to ditch the "my-first-Dreamweaver-site" look and work up something a little sleeker, more modern, more standards-compliant.

The second project is to split out my personal composition bits and pieces (and this blog) into a separate site with its own domain name. I feel that minim-media has been suffering from crossed purposes in that it's trying to be my business site and my composition-promotion site all at once and I don't think it's managing it very well, so I'm going to split out the composition stuff and the articles and so on into a separate site, and leave minim-media as business-only. You'll still be able to order scores and things through minim, but hopefully this way will make things feel a little more flexible for anyone who just wants to ask about the music rather than buying it. One always hopes, of course, to make one's fortune selling scores and recordings online, but a more realistic approach is that if people are interested in playing my music, then i'm more interested in helping them to play it than in taking their money, so a different approach is needed from my side.

The third project is one I'm especially excited about. When I left Australia, I thought I'd be away for six months, so I recorded a small amount of my vinyl collection to minidisc and ripped a few essential CDs at the last minute which then turned out to be very poor quality rips and some of them (the pop music ones in particular) are so poor quality as to be virtually unlistenable. So while I am recuperating from having my teeth ripped from my skull, I plan to sit quietly in my parents' loungeroom surrounded by boxes and boxes of CDs, ripping them one by one to an external hard drive. I've been doing a little bit of research, and an open-source programme called Max seems to be getting the best reviews for sound quality. I'm currently running tests on an assortment of formats to see what gives me the best balance of sound quality and filesize. Unfortunately, there's the added ookness of whatever format I use needing to work in SonicStage, Sony's version of iTunes, because that's the only programme I can use to haul music across to my minidisc player. I've set up my old laptop (an ancient Sony Vaio) as a music server and will be entirely cleaning off and reinstalling the OS, so everything should be shiny and new. I can't wait to have my CD collection back at my fingertips - I've missed it so! At one point last year I even came close to rebuying bits of it. Right now I'm keenly looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Veljo Tormis, Arvo Pärt, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Elena Kats-Chernin for starters. It's going to be great.

I've already embarked on a related project, with the help of djelibeybi who is somewhat of a whizz with database applications - I'm moving my recordings database out of Paradox and into OpenOffice Base. I've heard mixed things about Base, but I'm keen to be able to dump my ancient copy of the WordPerfect suite because it's just too old and installs all sorts of rubbish on my hard disk that I then can't remove. Also, obviously, it's Windows-only and I'm barely using Windows at all any more and am keen to keep it that way. OpenOffice is proving very nice so far, and as my database requirements, all things considered, are pretty straightforward once the links between tables are sorted, I'm hoping it'll be OK. At the moment my challenge is working out how to design forms for it. Hoping to sort this one out today.

The composition is going well though. We went to the Sounds Expo music technology exhibition at Kensington Olympia the other day, which taught me some stuff and planted some ideas, and I started playing around a little with the musique concrète tutorial in the current issue of computer music magazine, which has now nicely set me back on the path to working on the Satie arrangement for America which has been a long time brewing but which finally seems to be pulling itself into shape. I'm hoping to have the first draft ready by the end of this week so it can stew over the next six weeks and be ready for some sort of preliminary airing when we get back from Australia. I'm just loving playing with Pro Tools again and everything's starting to come back to me a bit, although there's still a lot I need to learn how to do. Still, there's time enough to do that...

Labels: composition, travel, website

# posted by minim @ 9:56 AM 0 Comments