theStarport / Steve_Savitzky / Albums / coffee / Xindex.html

Coffee, Computers, and Song! Preorder Extras! Thank you for pre-ordering Coffee, Computers, and Song!! It's going a lot more slowly than I'd like, but here you are: the first installment of the pre-order extras. here you'll find the current track list with ogg and mp3 files of whatever the current versions are. As you can probably see from the to.do file, some are in better shape than others. There are playlists, in "m3u" format, pointing at your choice of either oggs or mp3s. You might have to download them and open them with your favorite player. Feel free to send email to <steve@thestarport.org> if you notice any obvious blunders that you think I haven't. Sometime this month I'll have a web form up to add some interactivity; for now we're stuck with email.

Note: The official directory for the album is here. This directory is a copy of the working directory, and it's updated daily. It includes mp3 and ogg copies of all tracks, in whatever state they were in at the end of the day. At the moment, their undisclosed location is only available to people who have preordered the CD. After all, they've already paid for it. The rest of you will have to wait.

Status

See the to.do file.

It's all very ad-hoc and a bit hard to read, but then it's really just for my own benefit. There are additional notes in the individual track directories, but I'm not exporting those yet. (And I'm probably never going to export the actual track projects. For one thing, it would take a very long time. For another, I don't have enough space available on my ISP's system. Audacity projects are big.)

All you really need to know to read one of my to.do files is that "o" marks an unfinished item, and "*" marks a completed one. "-" marks an alternative, and eventually "->" marks the one chosen. "~" marks something I've decided not to do. Most of my directories have to.do files; for example, here is the one for my software tools directory.

Additional status-like information on each track can be gained from some of the listing files pointed to by the directory-header file, conventionally called HEADER.html. You will find one in every one of my directories; they're very handy for navigating around a directory tree using a browser.

Tracks

Warning! These are automatically generated from the most-recently exported .WAV file in each track directory. They're not necessarily in any shape to be heard!

0x01	(01)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Cicero in the Twenty First Century
				More than 2000 years ago, the Roman orator Cicero wrote ``Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.'' It's amazing how little has changed.
0x02	(02)	[ogg]		The Programmer's Alphabet
				My first computer song, based on various sailors' alphabets.
0x03	(03)	[ogg]	[mp3]	The Mushroom Song
				Wrote this one while my job at Zilog was going down the tubes. They'd just hired a CEO named Sack, and that's just what he started doing...
0x04	(04)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Stuck Here...
				Ever wonder what it would be like to have your mind uploaded into a computer? You could live practically forever...
0x05	(05)	[ogg]	[mp3]	High Barratry
				The company now known as The SCO Group was once called ``Caldera.'' I'd always wondered why it was named after a kind of gigantic crater caused by the collapse of a magma chamber.
0x06	(06)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Bugs
				A big favorite with kids, for some reason, based on a poem I once read in Datamation magazine. It sometimes acquires topical verses.
0x07	(07)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Demon Lover
				I wrote a story that included a description of a duet between a singer/songwriter and an AI built into his guitar. So of course I had to write the song to fit the description.
0x08	(08)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Guilty Pleasures
				This was actually written in realtime---I finished it at about 2am after everyone else had gone to bed.
0x09	(09)			The Little Computing Machine
				Written while listening to Golden Bough singing ``The Black Velvet Band'' and wishing I could afford an Apple ][
0x0a	(10)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Silk and Steel
				Another song about the AI guitar. I still don't know the full backstory behind this one.
0x0b	(11)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Vampire Mega-Byte
				An old Silicon Valley folktale from the days when men were men and transistors were germanium.
0x0c	(12)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Paper Pings
				Sometime you just have to parody your own song before somebody else does.
0x0d	(13)	[ogg]	[mp3]	I Wanna Be a Webmaster
				Some of the numbers are a bit dated, but it's amazing how little has changed in the last 10 years.
0x0e	(14)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Daddy's World
				I wrote this one for my older daughter based mostly on some of her favorite computer games.
0x0f	(15)	[ogg]	[mp3]	TEOTWAWKI v2.0
				As it turned out, the biggest problem the doomsayers of 1999 had was how to dispose of the leftover canned-goods. But they may still come in handy.
0x10	(16)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Uncle Ernie's
				Inspired by a now-defunct surplus joint in Oakland called Mike Quinn's.
0x11	(17)	[ogg]	[mp3]	The World Inside the Crystal
				My first serious computer song. You can always tell the programmers in the audience. They've been there, and they know.
0x12	(18)	[ogg]	[mp3]	Someplace in the Net
				The Usenet, and alt.callahans in particular, is what made me realize that cyberspace is a place.

Performers

• Steve Savitzky -- vocals and guitar, percussion, tablesaw.
• Robin Baylor -- vocals on "Programmer's Alphabet", "Paper Pings", "Someplace in the Net".
• Callie Hills -- vocals and flute on "Demon Lover", "Silk and Steel"; flute on "Cicero in the 21st Century" and "World Inside the Crystal", vocals and pennywhistle on "High Barratry".
• Kat Savitzky -- vocals on "Bugs", "Daddy's World".
• Joyce Uggla -- vocals on "High Barratry", "TEOTWAWKI v2.0", "Mushrooms", "Little Computing Machine", "Guilty Pleasures".

Other Credits

• Label Artwork -- Bob Daverin of Eagle Unlimited Enterprises
• Album Cover and Photography -- Beckett Gladney (artbeco.com)

Equipment

• Guitar: "Snuggles", a 1952 Martin O-15 that I found, in rather bad shape, at an estate sale and purchased for an embarassingly small price.
• Microphones: My studio vocal mic is a CAD E200, a large-diaphragm condenser mic. The guitar mic is an AKG C1000S.
• Computer: All recording is being done on a homebrew Linux box, currently with an AMD CPU in a very quiet Antec P150 case. At one point I was using a fanless 1GHz VIA C7 CPU, but although it did a good job of recording scratch tracks, it didn't have quite enough computrons for overdubbing. The soundcard is an M-Audio OmniStudio 66. To reduce the load on the CPU, graphics are offloaded to a 500MHz VIA-based X terminal. Field recording for, e.g., sound effects is done using a Macbook Pro laptop with an Edirol UA25 USB interface.
• Software: The recording machine's OS is mostly Debian Etch, with a low-latency kernel from DeMuDi, the Debian Music Distribution. All recording and editing are being done using Audacity.