Making music is one thing and getting it out is a whole different beast. After a two year long ordeal of finalising the album, conformity comes into play.
For those who wish to sample the album, it is embedded in the sidebar.
Getting the video to MTV
A long time ago, I had written a post about the ordeals of making a music video. This video had to be sent to MTV Indies. They only accept a format that is native to Mac (Apple Pro Res HQ). Neither of us own a Mac. In the end, ffmpeg’s command line encoder came to our rescue (Thanks Kostya).
We printed up the singles cover, packaged everything and mailed it via speed post.
As luck would have had it, the mail never reached the intended recipient! We did not know about it until about a month from the dispatch date. We had to re-mail the package – this time without the nice artwork.
Mastering the album
As I had pointed out to my bandmates, I would have loved to get it mastered by a good mastering engineer. This would have given us the necessary outsiders’ POV. Sadly, we were restricted by our budget. After some ear cleansing, I sought out my trusted T-Racks, Voxengo Varisaturator and TT Dynamic Range meter and my even more trusted ears for the job.
In the end, we had a nice punchy master with a DR of 10. Ugyal and I sat down to work out the transitions. It turned out to be one of our best sonic offerings. Here is a dynamic range meter log.
foobar2000 1.2.4 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1 log date: 2014-05-12 23:04:45 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Analyzed: Dark Project / Long Way From Home -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DR Peak RMS Duration Track -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DR10 -0.08 dB -12.46 dB 5:12 01-Salvation DR9 0.00 dB -10.82 dB 5:43 02-Tale Of The Liars DR10 0.00 dB -11.70 dB 3:45 03-A Long Way From Home DR9 -0.20 dB -11.02 dB 4:03 04-Duality DR9 0.00 dB -11.16 dB 3:59 05-Magic DR9 0.00 dB -11.44 dB 3:00 06-Ego DR11 0.00 dB -13.54 dB 5:31 07-Hummingbird DR9 0.00 dB -11.47 dB 4:26 08-Shadows -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Number of tracks: 8 Official DR value: DR10 Samplerate: 44100 Hz Channels: 2 Bits per sample: 16 Bitrate: 1411 kbps Codec: PCM ================================================================================
The album artwork
One of the ideas that came up was that the phrase ‘Long Way From Home’ may mean away from one’s own planet. The artwork stems from that idea. I wanted to deliberately steer clear of any cliched interpretation of the phrase.
I have a soft corner for acrylic. The cover art was painted with acrylic and permanent marker on canvas.
A bit of post processing yielded the final version of the cover.
Making the booklet and publishing the music
The booklet was the simplest thing to make. Once everything was done, we uploaded it to OneRPM for iTunes. Google Play and Amazon. Our trusted Bandcamp store also has the album for those who wish to get the HQ version of the album. iTunes and Bandcamp stores also have full booklet on download of the entire album. We have thanked a lot of people. See if your name is there (You’ll have to purchase the album though :D).
