Spent far more time this week than I should have working on the forthcoming Wax Botanical online store yolk. Took away from musical production time some but on the plus side I have the design pretty much sorted and managed to configure an e-mail-for-media product type without having to use a third party (read as paid for) service thanks in part to this nifty plugin. As much as possible I wanted to keep the managing of products and customer data on site. One of the reasons I had considered going with Bandcamp or Topspin was the integrated e-mail-for-media widgets but the fact I can now easily create my own means the widget itself will better match the style of the store, all music players will be streamed via a single Soundcloud account (better for number of plays and analytics) and I wont have to pay for the added service. Fuckin Delighted! – and it also means I can package the individual downloads exactly as I like – multiple files, high qulaity wavs etc. For the design I kept it black and grey, to tie in with waxbotanical.com but with a nice Knight Rider red to pop up the links some :)
On the studio front I got distracted this morning while having a gander at the feature set in the new version of Samplitude. I’d considered switching over to another DAW, one that can manage both production and mastering (DDP/CD text editing etc). Cubase is excellent for production (although upgrading between versions is damn pricey – €230 for version 7) but an external editor is still needed for mastering. Samplitude does both, has an excellent feature set and is relatively cheap thou after looking thru the manual and testing the demo I could’nt see anything to replace Cubases’s Control Room. Steinbergs flagship audio editor at 600 bucks is well beyond my budget but after checking thru a few forums I came across this program which is a tad expensive but does everything needed when burning/exporting music for duplication. This means I can do all the audio editing/processing involved in mastering inside of Cubase and just use the above program when sending tracks for CD or vinyl duplication.
