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Showing posts from May, 2009

Tidying up the site

After a major change like the removal of Ring tones from the product range there is a lot of tidying up to do. Dreamweaver comes into its own as a mangangement tool - enabling a site wide search for references across 5000+ files. The on line free site map tool at http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp helps too with identification of remaining site quality issues - some of which still have to be fixed. Broken links caused by typos etc. A little trip down memory lane to the menu files and a follow up today to finish the job. There is an opportunity to revamp the whole side bar now but I'm going to mull that over for a while. Oddly enough the price changes seems to have gone through relatively smoothly. Although there is little in the way of automation to help with the HTML, the back end system is relatively rigourus because the prices are only kept in one database table and that is what get's charged. Because I was editing the table in Excel I was able to use sor

First New Price Structure since 2004

When we opened this site our declared pricing strategy was to follow iTunes. What we ncould not anticpate was that it would be so stable for so many years. But the dollar a track bulwark is beginning to crack and we have decided to go with the flow. So we have now implemented a new structure based on track duration. 5 minutes or more 0.99$(US) 4-5 minutes 0.69$(US) 3-4 minutes 0.49$(US) <3 minutes 0.29$(US) The PayPal processing fee has been retained for orders below 3$(US) and the 30% discounts still kick in on orders for 3 or more items. So far there has been no response to these massive price cuts - perhaps price never was an issue and music buyers are not as rational as all that. Oh and by the way we have bailed out of the Ring tone game but they might come back as freebies I suppose because they are quite nice. It was fun to do but never caught on commercially possibly because they only work on phones that can download the MP3 file from the PC.

14 New Mozart Recordings

At last we have got them launched. The production process for these recordings was a joy. It has taken a little while to get familiar with the capabilities of our new set up and the experience with the Beethoven Symphonies was very instructive. I have always loved the Mozart concertos which we have interpreted here and it was great fun working out how to arrange them to best effect. The quality of the MIDI files on which they are based is good and we now have a fairly settled mix and mastering approach which produces repeatable results. We have used the Talking Steel module before to under pin or supplement the steel drums but in the Horn concerto it comes into it's own as the lead instrument. In contrast for the Flute and Harp Concerto we used a Flute and Harp as the lead instruments and a percussion band as the orchestra but the wonders of electronic music mean that we were able to make them more prominent. We don't have complete Mozart Symphonies but the two first moveme