You might recall that I was pretty positive about elasticStage since they allow small musicians to do one-off or small-run vinyl record production and their quality was pretty good given the price. But there’s a few reasons I cannot currently recommend them and have taken my various links and reviews down:
Even though they have difficulty keeping up with the manufacturing demand for actual musicians, they’ve gone into supporting AI musicians, and are (as far as I can tell) the manufacturing partner behind Suno Vinyl
They have had a huge uptick in quality assurance problems and miscuts; I’ve had to get some of my personal copies recut and the process for getting them replaced was pretty difficult, and I cannot in any good conscience require that listeners have to deal with them in case things go south
Other folks might still be willing to work with this company in light of this but I personally am not.
If there are other short-run vinyl manufacturers who have a better track record and a reasonable price, I’d welcome suggestions. (I already know about Kunaki. They’re a bit expensive and their reviews for vinyl are pretty bad, unfortunately.)
Over on Reddit, someone asked about TooLost, and I mentioned that I used to use them and to avoid them like the plague and I said that I’ve been using Symphonic. They had some followup questions for me and I felt that my answer was detailed enough that I should also post it as a blog post here for future reference.
This is sort of a followup to my previous review about them; nothing has really changed but I’ve had more encounters with their support side of things that I have a more detailed picture on what it’s like to work with them day-to-day.
So, anyway, while I’m not planning on dropping Bandcamp entirely just yet (and will still be uploading my new releases there for the foreseeable future), here’s some of the other places I sell my music.
When I first released Deadnames I mostly only included the various in-progress forms of what would eventually end up on Transitions, but I also included the original and Plus 5 versions of 120 MPH, which I’d updated for Love and Monsters.
I think I had also meant to include Safety in Numbers for the same reasons, but it ended up slipping my mind. Maybe I thought it would get its own separate release somewhere? But I have no idea when or where that might be.
So, last night I finally got around to remastering the original version and adding it to Deadnames, so if you already bought that album digitally, you should now be able to redownload it and get the updated audio.
The CD version was already at pretty close to the maximum length of a CD, and adding Safety in Numbers to that pushed it way over, so the CD version that’s available now is missing the two hidden tracks in favor of Safety in Numbers. I only know of one person who actually has a physical copy of Deadnames other than myself, so I don’t think that impacts anyone.
But anyway, updating the files on my Ko-Fi shop made me also realize that Bandcrash had a stupid bug that was preventing the MP3 files from getting the cover art tags (which is something I really should have had a proper automated test for, but the state of that code’s tests is kinda abysmal). So I’ve now reuploaded all of the MP3 versions to Ko-Fi and itch.io, so in case anyone’s actually bought any of my albums there, you’ll want to redownload the MP3 version from the respective library.
This also wreaks havoc with the Musicbrainz metadata! I’ve submitted some updates there although who knows how long it’ll take to get accepted.
Anyway. This whole thing affects, like, ten people. But I figured I’d post about it so people would know.
Trans Academy is hosting Trans Pride VR, and on June 14, which just happens to be fluffy’s birthday, fluffy will be participating in a panel discussion about music production. Come on by to hear fluffy waffle about everything! Join group TRANS.7885 for access.
Afterwards, fluffy will likely be celebrating by jamming on instruments in places around VRChat. Alcohol and/or cannabis may be involved, venue permitting.
The assumption some people have is that I got a whole bunch of people together to perform in sync, but that is absolutely not the case. Instead, every single critter, and many of the visual props you see, are on their own separate chromakeyed layer, composited using DaVinci Resolve, each one acted by me personally.
