In the spirit of holiday consumerism, I've knocked down the price of enigmatics CDs to $6.00, which is a paltry savings of $2.00. The sale is available only through the Eponymous 4 official site, since Amazon and the various digital services set their own prices. This discounted price is available all the way through Christmas Eve.

I decided on this sale thing pretty spur of the moment, so it may be a bit late to get mail orders turned around in a timely manner this far into the season. I figure it's worth a shot anyway.

If you live in Austin, you can arrange to buy a copy from me in person.

This EP is pretty chilled out, so it might make for some good cold weather listening. It's great for more "mature" listeners who aren't much into the rock and/or roll.

— Posted: 2008-12-11 11:21:25

CD Baby delivered enigmatics to a few more online vendors. Of course, you can download it from iTunes and Amazon, but if you prefer, you can also get it from these services:

• Rhapsody
• PayPlay
• GroupieTunes
• TradeBit

enigmatics is also available from Napster, Ruckus, Didiom, Lala and rVibe. Inprodicon will be delivering it to the Nordic region, and eMusic may carry it eventually. (We'll see.)

It's slightly early to be talking about the holidays -- as if the Christmas lights already on sale at Target aren't any indication -- but I still have plenty of copies of enigmatics available, and uh, not a single one has sold at Waterloo. (Yeah, I check sometimes.) I think it would make nice chill out music for the coming colder months, so think about it as a stocking stuffer.

— Posted: 2008-11-08 12:21:47

So last time, I presented a video for a song that wasn't even on enigmatics. This time, I actually have a video from enigmatics!

"enigmatics IV" is pretty much the de facto single from the EP, so I decided to "shoot" a video for it. But I did it the hard way -- instead of shooting actual video, I took a series of high-speed pictures, more than 8,500 at the end of it. I strung those pictures into Womble MPEG Video Wizard to create the footage. I then edited the final video in Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

YouTube, however, was very uncooperative with encoding the final results, and I spent all day Sunday uploading and deleting, uploading and deleting. I finally installed an evaluation version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition to render an MP4 as close to the suggested YouTube settings as possible. The lo-res version still looks like crap, but the hi-res version doesn't screw up the picture too badly.

Here's the video, as close as YouTube can offer it.

[UPDATE, 08/03/2008, 15:08] YouTube has gone out of its way to make sure music videos uploaded to their site turn out to be absolute crap. The latest offense is an automated compression that absolutely crushes the dynamic range of a video's sound.

That's the final straw. I figure I've got enough server space to host the videos my own damn self. What I trade in exposure I retain in a proper viewing experience.

— Posted: 2008-07-14 10:32:19

I bought a tripod last week for my digital camera with the intention of using it to make a video for enigmatics. The idea I have in mind requires me to take about 4,000 pictures. It's hard to explain.

But the tripod also let me experiment with the video function in my camera, so I moved some furniture around, pointed my camera to the wall and shot a video for a song I haven't yet really released, titled "What I Deserve".

I edited the footage in a shareware MPEG video editor and got these results.

(The enigmatics video is going to be a long time in the making, though.)

— Posted: 2008-07-07 09:16:57

CD Baby sent enigmatics for digital distribution about a week before the official release, and now it looks like iTunes and Amazon have it available.

I'm rather concerned about the preview files on Amazon -- they sound like crap. I hope the actual encoding doesn't sound like that. If anyone buys the MP3s from Amazon, please let me know how they turn out.

Thankfully, the iTunes files are available under iTunes Plus, which means you can purchase them free of digital rights management. I was concerned about that -- I was hesitant to allow CD Baby to distribute any content to iTunes if it were crippled by DRM. They aren't, and I'm absolutely fine with it.

eMusic, Rhapsody and Napster are also supposed to part of the digital distribution, but none of them have yet added enigmatics to their listings. I'll check back occasionally to see when it happens.

And of course, CD Baby has offered enigmatics as a digital album since day one, so if you're budget and/or environmentally conscious, download is the way to go!

— Posted: 2008-07-01 22:48:23

enigmatics is now officially released!

I've got plenty of copies right here, and you can order it directly from me. Amazon also has the disc in stock. I also dropped off a few copies at Waterloo Records in Austin, TX over the weekend, and it was stocked on the floor when I visited on Monday.

CD Baby has both the CD and a digitized version for sale. The digital version is $4.95 (I figure $0.99 per track.) Prices will vary with other services.

Although I'm no longer streaming the album here on the official site, that doesn't mean you can't hear it in full elsewhere. I've put all five tracks up on Myspace and Last.fm, just in case you want to try before you buy.

— Posted: 2008-06-24 10:01:05

From June 12 (today) till June 24, you can listen to the entire enigmatics EP at the official Eponymous 4 website (that is, right here right now.)

enigmatics will be released (more or less) on June 24. Amazon and CD Baby have already received their stock from me, so they should make it available to you right around that time. I'll be dropping off the CDs to Waterloo next weekend.

The digital release won't be so co-ordinated, and enigmatics just might show up before then. I'll be checking a few digital retailers from time to time to see if it's available.

If you don't want to wait till then, you can pre-order the CD right now, and it will be shipped to you on June 17.

— Posted: 2008-06-12 09:37:22

The enigmatics CDs arrived from the duplication plant yesterday, and I've already sent a few copies to CD Baby and Amazon. I'll be bringing a few more into Waterloo Records right around the release date.

But since I've got the CDs lying around the apartment, there's no reason I can't start accepting orders for them now. So enigmatics is now available for pre-order! You can order it here, and it will be shipped a week before the official release date. That should be enough time for the CD to arrive by the actual release date.

As mentioned before, I'm using PayPal to accept payments, and PayPal will deduct the balance immediately from your account. I wish there were a way I could wait till June 17 to do that, but alas, I'm not running a sophisticated enough operation to support it.

Even though I'm making enigmatics available on Amazon, I have to admit I miscalculated the pricing, and I'm not going to get much from selling there. You can pre-order the CD from Amazon as well, but it won't ship till the release date. Plus, you have to pay shipping if you don't opt for the Super Saver Shipping. If you buy from me directly, shipping is already included in the price, and it may even arrive to you early.

I'm not entirely sure when enigmatics will show up on the digital services. CD Baby is handling that aspect of the distribution. With any luck, it should show up on iTunes, eMusic and Amazon MP3 around the same time as the release, if not a few weeks later.

— Posted: 2008-06-05 08:19:01

I posted the second track of enigmatics over at Metafilter Music, a site on which I've embarrassed myself numerous times. Head on over to the site to listen to it. It's so exclusive, I'm not even posting it to Myspace!

In case you didn't see the late edit to the previous post, enigmatics will also be available on Amazon. Here's something funny: my music blog, Musicwhore.org, has an aStore. So I get to sell my own CD from my own aStore. Gotta love that recursion!

— Posted: 2008-05-22 21:46:24