Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Back

This is the first post here in almost six months. During this time I have rethought and reorganized my  collection of music mixes and added them to my Spotify account.

My mixing making process had become too cumbersome over the past few years. This was particularly true because of the postings of mixes as a mp3 file to MixCloud.  While that was nice to get feedback and monitor usage, it was time consuming especially when factoring in having graphics for each mix. I recently deleted my MixCloud account.

I decided to make Spotify the platform for streaming my mixes. I also decided to go back to my original mix size which was based on the 90 minute cassette tape. Over the years I had moved to one hour mixes for burning CDs but my research indicated that an hour and a half was the ideal Spotify playlist size. Therefore I reconfigured my mixes back to 90 minutes and reorganized them according to genres and time frames.

I also have continued to make mixes based on the albums and songs in my iTunes collection. I organize them as iTunes playlist, copy the mp3 files to a separate mix directory and folder and run them through a program to equalize the volume settings. I always hated having a mix with different sound volumes for songs. Then I import the mix back into iTunes and change the album title of all the songs in the mix to the new mix title.

One of the things I've come to like about this new process is the flexibility I now have with these new mixes in Spotify. I no longer have mixes that cannot be easily changed after they have been completed. They are not burned to CDs. They are not turned into a large mp3 file of an entire mix. Now I can easily move songs around in their order, add and delete songs and generally have more control of the ongoing process.

I do like having documentation of the mixes and this blog has provided that function for me. I will now start reentering my newly expanded and edited mixes here.

No comments: