Music Information

In late 2020 I decided to upload every piece of music I’ve done and that is still available to this site. The website did exist prior but only had a small selection of songs I deemed worthy online. Now that nearly all songs are online, this leads to a few implications:

I don’t have the cubase projects for some of the files anymore, especially those produced from late 2018-2019, the earliest tracks and all Wylouw material. The reason for this is that I had a HDD crash in 2019 and I didn’t backup all files. What is even more upsetting is that I had plenty of songs of the 2018-2019 era almost finished and didn’t export them, so they are gone forever. In case anyone wonders: I did sent the HDD to a data recovery specialist, but they couldn’t do anything to save the files. The HDD is now recycled/gone.
Please keep in mind that this doesn’t apply to all files made since 2020. I can work with them just fine. Also some older projects did survive, but they were created with different virtual instruments and a different version of the sampler, so I have to do a lot of manual work to restore them to something similar. It’s near impossible to restore them to their exact original state, as in most files I didn’t include exact patch descriptions and I have no way of knowing them when they use that older version sampler.

On Looping

A lot of files are intended to be used in video games or other applications where they are looped. I made the decision to have the file loop twice completely and then do a fadeout in allmost all cases. Some files feature an intro and then a main loop, in that case I justed looped the main part and did a fade-out. I also did this to some files which were more a never really finished work-in-progress. There files weren’t made in the mindset that they should loop, but when they were really short and this method lead to something workable, I prepared the files that way. Still, these files may feel a bit ‘dragged on’ because of this decision.

On export and mp3s

This leads to another problem: A lot of the surviving files were just in mp3 format and also they wouldn’t loop. They would just stop mid-song. In order to fix this I converted the mp3s back to wav, made the adjustments in Wavelab and exported them back to mp3. This obviously is bad practice as the signal will be degraded this way. Unfortunately I couldn’t do anything about this, since the only surviving files were mp3, as I already stated. When I did this, I added the information “From Mp3” to the comments of the mp3 file.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t apply to all files. Also a lot of songs were available as mastered wav or unmastered wav so that I could export them without any signal loss.

On mastering

I tended to master a lot of files really loud, so loud in fact that songs have clipping baked into them. I can’t do anything about this, as these files are the only one I have left. Maybe I can mark those files in some way in the future, but I don’t think this reaches a zone of diminishing returns. If you don’t like something because of clipping, simply skip.

On the inclusion of ‘bad songs’

You might ask why I included all these files with huge problems on this site. Also you might ask why some of the songs really pale in comparison to newer files on a musical level. The reason is simple: They are intended as a kind of biography musical journey. You might still use or enjoy them, buy they just are what they are. If you really don’t like to deal with these issues and just want to listen to tracks I consider “good”, take a look at my soundcloud page and focus on those tracks or just enjoy the releases since 2020, as I’m more cautious about the production technique in these tracks nowadays.