Snakewater Adventures isn't the only pretentious, time-consuming and self-indulgent project i've been at this year. It's 2020. What the fuck else do i have to do?
Physical distribution of the Poor-Ass Christmas CDs has been a problem for the last few years. After my birthday party was forced to an abrupt halt in 2015 (or 2016, depending on how you look at that fiasco), i've had difficulty setting a hard deadline for them to be finished and handed out. Plus, 2017 had its own unique disaster literally days before distribution in the form of Jesse Lacey, which sent the project into a tailspin and i didn't actually finish it up or burn any discs until, uh, July of 2018. The 2018 and 2019 compilations were finished before my birthday, including art, but never burned or printed.
All that in mind, i decided that it's time to officially move to digital distribution. David suggested a Spotify playlist, but i was only able to find 14 of the 20 songs at all, and two of them are the wrong mixes. I did make a Spotify playlist in 2018, all 17 of those songs were available, but whether i gave anyone that link or not, i have no idea. Guessing i didn't since it was not set to public.
So Spotify is right out. Thus, 2020 forced my hand, and i finally rolled out something i've been plotting for a long time: online availability of the full PAC, including all art, for download. Once i mastered all the tracks and completed the art, i put them all in a handy ZIP archive and can now provide the links to anyone who'd like a download. I'm still not posting the links publicly, as this may be technically illegal, but where my friends can get them at least. Also this way, people who don't want the clutter of physical media can just get the songs and ignore the packaging, as much as that makes my heart hurt.
The other component to that plan has always been to have a full archive of every PAC available for download, so that any interested party can grab the complete collection. However, i'm not just going to toss up the existing versions, as some of them are quite bad. Some of the songs, especially on the very early editions (2004-2009ish) were sourced from unfortunately low-quality downloads i grabbed during the Napster/Kazaa era. So, they are going to need to be re-sourced and remastered.
I expected i'd need to remaster everything before 2013, which i think is the first year i actually attempted to do my own master (or at least, normalization); however, i've already gone in and assembled ZIP archives for 2016 and 2017, and found that those songs were not up to my current standard. They had to be remastered. For 2018, there is an absence of a physical disc, and also at some point i seem to have lost my original working files. I have the art, at least, and of course my spreadsheet with all the statistical data on the entire series, but i needed to rebuild the playlist from scratch. Part of me wondered if i had never done a master in the first place, if there were never "original" audio files, but as i searched YouTube for high-quality versions to use as a starting point, i found that a video for each song was already in my search history. So i have done that before.
Anway! I got it done.
So as of right now, the last five PAC volumes are in a Google drive and available for download to anyone with the link. I've really been enjoying going through the old mixes and reexperiencing them as i had before, working them as raw materials in my hand, like clay, to form my own art with them. The mixtape. The...clay mixtape...mix-sculpture...mixed metaphor.
That might be where i leave it for the year, but i am itching to get back further into the archive, all the way into the archive even. Once i get to about 2009, i'll be creating entirely new art from scratch, as everything before 2010 frankly looks terrible also.
My ZIP files so far have included both the original and remastered art, and i intend to keep it that way, all the way back to the second volume. I was ecstatic to dig through my old hard drive backups and find the original art files for every PAC...except the first one. I'm not super surprised i don't have that one, but i am shocked to have all the rest. I really thought it would be harder to find those.
I think there's a good chance i'll find the original art for that first disc burned onto a backup CD or DVD on a spindle in the basement of the house in Wisconsin someday, but that won't be any time soon. If i don't, i'll have to get a scan of the printed version next i'm back home. As we packed and at each trip home, i've told myself, i should bring the PAC CDs to California...but i never have. Maybe next time i'm back. If i can reach them, i think they're in the storage room behind shelves and totes. And whenever that is. If we ever beat Covid.
So anyway, to explain that little graphic i put at the top of the post. I've created a little icon to put on the side of the new, remastered art for all the discs. I'm calling these "The Roaring 20s Remasters," or R2R. I didn't want to just call it the "remastered version" because, come on, you know me. If i live that long i'll probably remaster these fucking things again in ten or twenty years when i get bored and have learned more about audio mixing.
I've started a Facebook group where i'm posting these links, and so far i've just invited the niche group of my friends who have been previous recipients. I think i'll make a more general post about it tomorrow and allow more of my friends to join. Still trying to keep it kind of on the DL though.
Anyway i'm pretty happy with myself.
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