I’m going to put music making, game making and web site developing aside here and write about something else today.

I’ve been looking forward to the olympic games this year, I am not an huge fan or anything - I just enjoy the competitive atmosphere and want to watch it for an hour or so every evening.

I have a Samsung PS42S5H plasma TV that I bought 28th July 2005. During the olympic ceremony, the TV goes KLICK and red pixels spread across the TV = properly broken. In sweden we are covered by law against manufacturer faults that occur within 3 years of purchasing hardware, such as a TV, despite the fact you may only have a one year manufacturer warranty. It was 3 years and a week or so when my TV broke, just my luck =) But it turns out as the first TV that got delivered to me in 2005 it was defect on delivery, so I had it replaced… so with some hope I will still get it repaird/replaced for free, fingers crossed… This, however, does not help me watch the olymic games as getting the TV repaired/replaced will take a month or more.

The solution? I’ll use my 24″ BenQ G2400W monitor with HDMI input until I get the TV replaced (or buy a new one)… My digital box from CanalDigital is only analogue outputs so I figure this is a great time to order their HD-package with the new recordable digital box that allows you to pause live broadcasts and record anything to the harddisk… Great. I place the order and 5 days after - still no delivery. I call CanalDigital and ask them where my new HD-box is and they say - hey, there’s something wrong with your account so we switched your channels off a few days ago, didn’t you notice? I say NO I haven’t as my TV is broken, what about my HD-box order, where is it? Turns out there was an error in the billig system and the order could not be placed, so they fixed the issue with the billing and placed a new order for the HD-box and switched my channels back on that I still couldn’t watch…

Yesterday (2 weeks into the olympic games) my new High Definition digital box arrives I plug it into my BenQ screen and watch the olympics in 720p for a good hour before I go to bed… a happy bunny. Today, I come home to watch a few more summaries after work and there is an error code blinking on the HD-box. I couldn’t resolve the issue myself and no metion of the error code in the manual so I call CanalDigital and explain the issue… Turns out the damn HD-box is trying to install a software update it downloaded from the satellite. The version downloaded is the SAME as the one already installed in the box… You would think this would not be any sort of a problem, but oh yes, it is a problem… So big that it can’t be fixed apparently and they have to send me a NEW box with a delivery time of 5 working days. It’s a weekend coming up now so it looks like I’ll have the box maybe wednesday next week. By then the olympic games are over.

Oh - the joy of technology. I’m sure the next box I receive and the TV will get repaired, just in time to break for the next olympic games.

=) I like to complain sometimes, is that apparent?

Continued my efforts on the ‘Imphenzia Soundtrack’ section of the site. It’s coming along nicely and it will be possible to inquire about custom made exclusive tracks and also download non-exclusive tracks in high quality etc.

More updates on this to come.

Past few days / nights I’ve been working on a photo site at SmugMug. You can have a look at it here:

http://imphenzia.smugmug.com

Photography and digital art has been an interest of mine for some time, but making music and games has always taken priority. Now I’ve gathered enough images to launch a little gallery so feel free to drop by and maybe write some comments and give some thumbs up/down.

I have also started my new ‘real life’ job today as an ‘Information Security Specialist’ so I will have to put quite a lot of focus into settling into this new job.

I am currently in discussions with game makers for the XBox and PC platforms and it sparked an old idea I’ve had for many years. I will create a sub section of Imphenzia called ‘Imphenzia Soundtrack” where I release clips of various styles of music where game / video / movie makers can listen to clips and obtain licensed or exclusive tracks for their projects. I will categorize all tracks into style and emotions and hopefully be able to provide soundtracks to future projects.

To give you an idea of music (it won’t just be trance) I sequenced together these three clips tonight:

Imphenzia Soundtrack - Dramatic - Tense - Orchestral.mp3
Imphenzia Soundtrack - Epic - Victorious - Orchestral.mp3
Imphenzia Soundtrack - Energetic - Victorious - Eletronic.mp3

The above clips are all based on the same beat and the future site will obviously have all different beats, styles, instruments and so forth.

This finally gets me a good reason to get more into orchestral and mood music in addition to ‘just’ trance. I’ll keep you all posted on the progress.

Continued remixing the track now and progress is quite slow still due to these tempo issues. The duration is now about 2 minutes and at the end fading out with the original SID will the ideas is to introduce tempo change into a more trancey beat…  We’ll see how things progress

Listen to progress so far: Laxity - Alias [Imphenzia C64 Remix]

I can definitely tell I’m back in ‘real life work now’ as I only find 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there to remix. Just when I get into it it’s time to quit. It’s 2:15 am now and I have to get up at 7:am… hmm, signing out!

Today I spent another 3…4… (or was it 5?) hours remixing a C64 track and I’ve hit the world of freaky rythms as I can’t get it to match up in the sequencer. If anyone of you reading this knows the ins and outs of music - please let me know what this rhythm is called and how to best set up beats and measures in sequencers to make it easy to work with

Imphenzia - C64 Remix

As you can hear, I want to keep the classic arpeggio chords in the background, old style but new… Maybe the remix will be finished during the week so I can post it on remix.kewd.org hopefully.

Tomorrow it’s back to work unfortunately - my two weeks of holiday are up, argh.

I have just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6 - simple enough upgrade procedure and I quite like this free framework for blogs

Last night I spent a few hours starting to remix a classic old C64 SID-track to be released on remix.kwed.org which has turned out to be a good site for both constructive feedback and acting as a channel to promote Imphenzia as my last remix released there (The Fallen) has had around 3500 plays since February 2008.

The remix I am working on now was originally driving me around the bend because the original has got an offbeat rhythm to it that I was determined to recreate before I add my remix twist to it, but I finally got it down… However… The sequencer doesn’t quite line up the measures accordingly so it is difficult to arrange the track. Well see where it leads.

I have created a VB-script that automatically checks my folder full of mastered wav-files and encodes a number of mp3-, ogg-, acc-, and flac-files.

The script will read the name each master wav-file in the folder, which for example could be “20080224_Imphenzia_You Belong_Illusion_5_Trance_146_Imphenzia.wav” and then go through the process of encoding the various formats and tagging them with information found in the original wav-file name. For example, it will extract the date, the album name, the track number on the album, the genre, BPM and original artist.

 This has helped me tremendeously as I just dump new tracks into the mastered wav-folder and then execute the script, it will only encode the new files found in the script.

The various encoded files I create are:

• MP3 (VBR -V0 –new_vbr setting, averages around 230kbps)
• MP3 (CBR 320)
• OGG (VBR -Q8)
• AAC (VBR -vbrhi)
• FLAC (-8)

I have attached the script and the necessary executables for the encoding part to this post if anyone finds use of it.

Imphenzia Encoding Script

Note: You will need some scripting knowledge to get this to work, i.e. where to change static variables tagged into the files such as copyright holder, URL etc. You will also need to put the script file and the encoding executables in the parent folder under which you have a folder named “wav_mastered” under (you can modify the script if necessary). Finally, the wav-files MUST be named according to the following method:

YYYYMMDD_Artist Name_Track Name_Album Name_<track number on album>_Genre_<BPM>_Original Artist.wav

e.g.  ”20080117_Imphenzia_State Of Confusion_Illusion_2_Trance_138_Imphenzia.wav”

Hello,

Despite my quite recent post about being on ‘holiday’ now… …the rain and stormy weather was quite inspirational for making music. I am just back from a trip to southern europe and the UK and literally spent hours and hours in the sequencer upon my return. This is the way I work, there is no point in trying to make new tracks just for the sake of making, but when inspiration hits - I best take advantage of it.

The three new tracks are called:

• Legacy 
• Legacy [Sunset Mix]
• Alien Motion

…they can be listened to at: http://www.soundclick.com/imphenzia

I should also warn you all that another experimental track is completed (more or less), but not yet released… Well, 5:30 am now so I’m off. All the best.