Instrumental Music

If we believe the Google Analytics results there has been an almost complete replacement of the first two hundred keywords leading to our site associated with this latest update. I suspect that this has more to do with a change in Google Analytics but of course we can't be sure. It's not that the areas of interest have changed but the specific form of words where we are picking up visitors seems to have changed across the board - that's spooky if it is true. However even if Google returns flattering results to me when I search on my key words, positions have not changed that much - so I think it must be Analytics that has changed. The product registration and web pages are taking longer than expected and it may still be a few days before we complete the task. In the meantime here is a sneak preview of our new Hi Fi Freebie - Bach's Crab Canon just under a minute long and weighing in at 1.3 Meg.

The new files are uploaded and so today is configuration day. There are the final checks on the descriptions to be used, prices to be set, the web page to be filled out and then the product registration on Bit Pass and our own discount shop. Dreamweaver is up and running and it looks like it might be a bit cooler today thank God so this should not be too onerous. Meanwhile the seasonal droop in visitor numbers goes on and there was a significant spike on Rank Pulse yesterday which usually presages an update so no doubt we will see more churn in our SERPs over the coming days.

As it turned out we found another hidden copyright claim in one of the pieces we had planned to record so we have abandoned that. We also think that one of the others had been incorrectly attributed to Bach and is actually a Mozart minuet so we left that out too. All part of the final checks as we go into production. We have to hand craft the uploading of our products one at a time because of the security arrangements - drudgery but necessary. Eased by the faster upload speeds we get these days thanks to our broader band connexion. Speaking of which it seems to have learned how to speed up. Our download speed has risen to 5.8Meg in the last few days although it fell back a little this morning. There has not been enough rain to dampen the cables yet so we'll see how we go. For some reason Dreamweaver has lost our site details so we'll have to re-configure that next. The files are still there as are the other sites we manage with it but I suppose it can't be a coincide...

We will probably wrap it up today! Thankfully the houskeeping we did has made the whole thing much more stable - very few crashes yesterday despite continuous use. Yesterday's recordings included Bach's Double Violin Concerto which is one of my all time favorites. I didn't really think we'd have the nerve to tackle anything like this but we have become more proficient and the pre-sets have become available. We have even included the slow movement. So we have managed some experimentation but still stuck close to our established approach. Next we need to upload the files, price them and register them in our two shopping facilities and then produce the new web page - end of week possibly for the Press Release. There is a substantial droop in visitor numbers at the moment but we are hoping that it is just the students away from their school/college internet connexions.

It is nice to be back in the game as it were. As promised we are including a sneak preview to our regular Blog readers. The sample is one of those slight errors a bit like the variations on rare stamps. Normally when producing the LoFi Clips we select a few phrases up to about 30 seconds to record but yesterday we overlooked that step on one occasion so here is the resulting LoFi recording of Bach's BMV 560 a Prelude and Fugue originally composed for the organ and re-arranged on Steel Drums and Marimba. The solo bass marimba sections are a little odd but we decided to go with it any way. Despite the LoFi recording a good impression of the full recording is conveyed in the full three and a half minutes. More house keeping on this machine yesterday including an afternoon de-fragging the D: drive where Windows 2000 sits. When I consider how stable this operating system has been it is doubly galling to see Microsoft begin to withdraw support - no IE 7 for us apparently and futur...

I don't know about you but I still can't get my head around the expansion of memory that has occurred with computers in recent years. I have been working with computers directly for nearly 30 years so there has been a bit of a change. When the last desk top arrived with a 120 Gigabyte Hard drive I divided it up into some big partitions and forgot about it. At the end of last week it became apparent that part of the instability we have been experiencing was due to insufficient memory - we were nearly down to our last Gigabyte on the C: drive. Please note that the C: drive nomenclature has not changed from the DOS on the Mainframe Timeshare which IBM provided to us in 1978 - nor has most of the rest of the basic DOS despite Microsoft's "re-write". What has changed is the amount of memory that is routinely available. On our system the thing that clogs it up is back-ups. Over six years of operation we have tried a series of different back up solutions - none of t...

Producing music on a PC involves at least four major concurrent applications: the Operating system, sound processor, sequencer and synthesizer. And more if you use more than one synthesizer. Naturally to get the most out of the system we often push that combination to the limits and we experience system crashes on a regular basis. In our case the operating system is XP with all the available updates. Hard restarts often require a second restart to get the mouse cursor moving but many music crashes will only respond to a hard restart. Our sound processor is Creamware both the software application and the DSP processors on the sound card - we have our ticks and moans about it but when it is up and running it is very very good - it can even handle a little bit of sound processing overload without throwing a hissy fit. When they occur these often they involve loosing the ASIO sound interface i.e. silence. We use Cubase SE as our sequencer and that fits our needs very nicely but that to...

As part of the run up to this current bout of arranging we loaded up lots of new presets - instruments on our two favorite synthesizers thinking that this would help provoke some new thinking and new sounds. And yes we have done some more experimentation and the Log Marimba will appear from time to time when it's staccato effects help. We have also tried some of the tempting new pads but have rejected most on the grounds that the effects are too gross and un-controllable. In many instances the quality of an arrangement is achieved through the restraint applied to the variety and complexity of the sounds combined. Where the classical composer has the standard orchestral pallet to work from an electronic music composer has an enormous potential range of instruments to use. Part of our success has been the identification of a restricted pallet of instruments that work well together. This week we have identified a couple of pads which sit nicely behind our steel drums and marim...

As regular readers know we have put a lot of effort into promoting composer mp3 keyword combinations through our site. With the recent rise of iTunes related phrases we wondered if there was a general collapse of composer mp3 combinations causing the current fall off in visitor numbers but that doesn't seem to be the case. There has been a longer term fall off on this front and this has been exposed by other movements in the last few days. So turmoil and drift now - not an easy situation to combat so I think we'll sit tight, work on the music production and see where that takes us. The system was standing up pretty well yesterday and we probably have the bones of a More Bach page, possibly including a whole concerto. The question mark as ever is over the slow movement but we might package it up as one piece rather than separate movements on this occasion because our arrangement does emphasise the contrast with the faster movements. Still finding hidden copyright messages in t...

Yes - by George they've done it and the new set up is up and running. So we are into the really fun part now - experimenting and listening and experimenting and listening. I'll start to put some of the new recordings up in the next few days - there might even be a few freebies for our regular readers. It looks like the first collection will be "More Bach". Meanwhile keyword phrases containing iTunes have taken over our top 5 and our iTunes advice page gets an even bigger proportion of our entrances - which is a shame because it also has the highest bounce rate despite our efforts to entice these visitors into the rest of the site. And our Broadband speed has been stuck below 4 Meg since Thursday. Given the heat I would have thought that any dampness that may have got into the cable would have dried out by now. It seems the algorithm is good at slowing down but not speeding up!

Yes that's what the first day was all about. The Creamware software isn't too robust so there was a lot of trial and error, ASIO driver dropping out etc and many restarts. Hopefully it will be OK once we have settled on a new default configuration. However we do seem to be making progress and we did make one test recording with the new graphic equalizer inline and today we are going to se if we can get some of the other effects working too. We now have so many pre-sets for the Moog synthesizer that it is a real struggle to find the one you want some times. It looks as if our Google backlinks have fallen again - no logic that I can see to this - not sure what impact if any it will have on our SERPs.

To day's the day - we are going to try a new software configuration for mastering as the old one is still broken and we have had no response to requests for support. We will also try some of the new Moog presets to record some new pieces. The web site is ticking along and there doesn't seem much that we can do there for the time being so we are going to try some new musical content - perhaps branching out a little from our tried and tested formula. We'll keep you posted here as we progress.

Yesterday Google Analytics was slow off the mark in producing the previous day's results and the blogging moment passed. The results are really unexceptional at the moment - a bit down on pre update levels but no obvious key word issues - just continuing turmoil. But it looks as if that is par for the course when you look at the chart for the most stable keyword on Rankpulse which happens to be 'texas' there is still a very active scene for places 4-10 while 1-3 sail above it all. Our recent Paypal incident bares a little comment. They changed their terms and conditions after they were taken over and required Merchants to sign up to the new terms. But when we tried to comply it didn't work so we wrote it off as another scam and left it at that. Next thing we hear is from a customer whose payment is turned down. Fixed the problem pretty quickly on the Paypal site although the relevant link was not very prominent or supported by any additional text. Still don't k...

The latest word on the street is that some one in Moldavia has found a way to con Googlebot into accepting enormous numbers of pages of SPAM and that Google are having to delete much of it manually. I don't think I believe the last bit but a major problem with Spam pages could explain the high level of churn over the last few weeks. Apparently Google refer to this event as a bad data push which is prosaic enough. Our usual investigative tools are still down although Rankpulse comes back every couple of days or so. But Google Analytics shows us the turmoil in the keywords being used to find our site as we continue to recover from the low visitor numbers seen a couple of weeks ago. Meanwhile back at the ranch the boy struck by lightening in the park last week was in church last evening giving thanks for his good fortune. And - fingers crossed it looks as if our Broadband connection has settled down at over 5 Meg for several days.

The recollections and ceremonies one year on were unexpectedly moving today. The courage of the victims combined with the vivid descriptions of their experiences seems to penetrate skins thickened by years of IRA terrorism. In particular the description by a victim of noticing the bomber reaching into his rucksack to detonate the bomb was particularly chilling to those of us who traveled on the tube every day for decades. The injured victims and the grieving families of those killed want a public enquiry because the perpetrators are dead, there will be no criminal trial and there is no body to sue. But our society brought up the young men who did this - gave them the experience and the values that led them to take these awful actions. With a bit of historical knowledge and some imagination we could understand what we had done to the Irish Catholic community over centuries to generate the reaction in the form of the IRA but this is different. Many of the colonial actions of the Eur...

Normally when any part of your customer service system is broken the first thing you hear is a customer complaint but if the failure prevents them becoming a customer most people walk briskly away. So it was particularly nice this week to have an issue raised by an enthusiastic potential customer who pointed out that our PayPal service was broken. PayPal have updated their terms and conditions and asked us to update our agreement with them. I had attempted this earlier without success and so was surprised to find that we had been put on limited status which meant that we couldn't accept payments. This doesn't affect out BitPass account just the discount store. Anyhow it worked this morning and we are back on song so I took the opportunity to advise all our customers of this circumstance in case any of them had been affected but not mentioned it. They say every complaint is a gift and this one certainly was. Not only that, Broadband is firing on all cylinders this morning a...

Not too much - it is very hot here and we are not used to it. You wouldn't think that air conditioning had been invented in England! Our Broadband speeds are up around 4 Meg again and the connection seems fairly steady which is encouraging - we'll see what the rain from the forecast thunderstorms does later this week. Visitor numbers are drifting up again but there appears to be turmoil with individual keywords and that is backed up by evidence on some of the charts at Rank Pulse. Although the very large spikes are over the daily level of change or flux as some people call it has been twice as high as normal for the whole of June. The most worrying straws in the wind are the disappearance of our backlinks from some data centers and the lack of information about the domain and the falling number of sites containing the domain name.

It's been a while since we re-published any articles here - that is partly because we are being more selective/rigorus and partly because we have finally managed to get clear of all the gropus we joined to access an amazing volume of unuseable material. So this arrive unsolicited and here it is: Many Ringie Dingies Ringtones are more easily understood when you understand how cell phones work. The brain of the cell phone is its microprocessor. Ringtones work with your cell phone's microprocessor and memory to create a distinctive musical presentation when someone calls your phone. Your phone, much like your computer, uses its microprocessor to tell it what to do and control all it does and works with memory where the programs are stored. Ringtones are individual programs for your phone that get placed into your cell phone memory to be brought out by the microprocessor when your phone receiver gets the message that a call is coming in. Phones that are capable of loading and usin...