Always Good News

I added “Pearl” to the music page.  I’m really happy with the way it turned out, although I’ve listened to it so many times over the course of working on it that I’m pretty much sick of it by now.

I discovered a new frustration with Garage Band: it’s ridiculous that you can’t trim the fluff off the front of a song.  When you’re recording, you usually don’t want to start playing at the very instant you hit record.  Most of the time you need to have a count-in measure before all the instruments come in.  In Garage Band, the best you can do is mute that section; there’s no way to just delete it.  That’s a basic function that shouldn’t be missing.  I wound up downloading Audacity just to cut the first two seconds from Pearl and Tinsel.

The problem then became a very slight loss of quality from the original AACs and mp3s exported from Garage Band.  Of course, the songs are pretty lo-fi already (and I like them that way), but the versions exported from Audacity introduced the teensiest little warble to the guitars — and it drove me CRAZY.  So I ended up scrapping the Audacity-edited versions and going back to the originals.  There’s a little cruft at the beginnings, but I would rather deal with that than a slight loss of quality to the overall sound.

So that’s the way I spent most of my brain cycles yesterday: rejoicing over finally cutting off the first two seconds, trying to figure out if the quality actually did change, freaking out when I decided it actually did, trying to figure out why, then going back to the originals and making sure they were still alright.  Not a bad day at all.