Ya Just Gotta Laugh...

Not the usual Thursday links and stuff...

So. Some funny things happened along the way to releasing my new single, “Long Road Back”.

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Disclaimer: This Substack is free, always will be, and I receive no compensation or other benefit (except the unsolicited, occasional, and much appreciated shoutout from readers and other Substackers!) from any of the people or companies or products I link to or write about. Note some images and other material may be copyrighted by the original author or composer and appear here under the “Fair Use” doctrine. Link: Fair Use

Michael Acoustic

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Admittedly, during parts of this process I periodically, though briefly, kinda lost my sense of humor about things. Also, full disclosure, I’m pretty shamelessly promoting the song. While this should come as a surprise to no one, I am also interested in passing along my considerable number of “lessons learned” to others (Ed. Wow, Michael, maybe you should change your name to “Michael Altruistic”…kidding…).

Moving on, let me recap:

Last Thursday, there was no post because I was in a local studio watching the tracks for my song as they were mixed and mastered down to a couple of files, one .mp3 and one .wav file.

First, while you are probably very familiar with an .mp3, what’s a .wav file?

“The WAV file is an instance of a Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) defined by IBM and Microsoft.^[3] The RIFF format acts as a wrapper for various audio coding formats.

Though a WAV file can contain compressed audio, the most common WAV audio format is uncompressed audio in the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format. LPCM is also the standard audio coding format for audio CDs, which store two-channel LPCM audio sampled at 44.1 kHz with 16 bits per sample. Since LPCM is uncompressed and retains all of the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format with LPCM audio for maximum audio quality.^[9] WAV files can also be edited and manipulated with relative ease using software.” Credit Wikipedia Link: .WAV

I’ll get to more of that later or in a future post.

At the end of the session, Jay, the audio engineer who owns J Bones Musicland studio… Link: J Bones Musicland Studio … saved my song as a .wav file and as an .mp3 file on a thumb drive. The .wav was the mastered final audio file (the thumb drive is now located in my safe, BTW…).

This was a great experience! Jay Condiotti is a master of his craft, answered all my questions and was really impressive to watch as he went through our raw tracks with zen-like concentration.

I spent most of last Friday after posting to Substack and a good portion of Saturday signing up with CD Baby as distributor and (maybe) as my publishing admin (I wasn’t really clear on this so I submitted a service ticket to CD Baby, haven’t heard back yet). Part of the process was uploading the .wav file to CD Baby.

Note: Jay made it clear to upload the .wav, not the .mp3 - that’s an important safety tip!

Really not a bad experience at all, just kind of time consuming. I expected that and it was a learning experience for me. Great!

As a new artist, CD Baby gave me a discounted offer to a subsidiary of theirs, Hearnow.com, to start an artist page. Great!

I signed up and created a page which you can find at (Link:) Michael Acoustic. That was pretty cool, too. If you go to the page you can hear a 30 second clip of the song. The outstanding guitar work of producer/guitarist/guitar instructor, Mellad Abeid, really “made” this song and drummer Kenny Sager’s perfect “touch” added just the right underpinning to Mellad’s guitar(s). I’ll save the nuts and bolts of the process between us for a future post, just know that their work transformed the song into what I think it was meant to be.

And…. here’s where the “fun” begins.

In my naivete as a novice recording artist, I put down May 31, 2023 as my preferred release date for the song. Yeah, computers, digital processing - takes no time at all right? Happens at the speed of light over fiber and satellite connections, right?

Umm, no. I really had read a lot of the handy articles on CD Baby’s website, but this is one (in my defense it is sorta buried, but that’s not a good excuse at all) I really should have read (you should too if you’re thinking of releasing a song):

“What happens after I have completed my submission?” Link: What Happens Now?

This part would have been good for me to note:

“Please allow up to 5 days for inspection. We always recommend selecting a release date at least 6 weeks from the date you submit for distribution to allow enough time to promote your music and ensure your release date is honored.” Credit: CD Baby.com

Had I read that, this would not have been a surprise:

So a May 31 release was a pipe dream on my part, and I’m not blaming anyone but me, and least of all CD Baby, for my mistake in not understanding the process. If anything, passing along this experience to others who may be contemplating releasing a song is cathartic for me.

So, okay, not all that funny, but this is:

My page on Hearnow.com looks like this now:

The 30 second clip plays when you click the arrow button. Note the link to the Pandora service. That suddenly appeared a day or two ago. When you click on it, it takes you here:

Mr. Johnnie Volatile appears to be a ruggedly handsome, bearded man (so we apparently have some things in common…) who released an EP with a song also titled “Long Road Back” in 2015. Let me be very clear: THAT’S NOT ME, AND THAT’S NOT MY SONG!!!

I have a service ticket in to Hearnow.com asking them to remove the link. I intend no offense to Mr. Volatile, but he probably doesn’t want his song mistakenly associated with mine, either.

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So, ya just gotta laugh. In spite of all my mistakes, this is all kinda funny to me now. I’m already moving on to recording tracks for the second single now (looking for an “Augustish” release for that one…) and I’ll be writing more about that after I finish the “Long Road Back” history on here over the next few weeks.

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Meanwhile, as we wait for MY song, “Long Road Back”, to make it onto the streaming services, please enjoy Mr. Volatile’s completely different song that shares the same title:

Let me reiterate: THIS IS NOT MY SONG!

Pandora just seems to think it is…

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Cheers, and keep playing!

Michael Acoustic