DIY Audio self publication starting out

   I recommend having a modest exploratory budget in mind if you intend to seek out a niche in the self publishing world of music and are a newcomer. 

   Gear requirements for a modest (non smartphone setup): 
   -Microphone(s)
   -DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software (e.g. Ableton Live 9 or Protools) or some DAW platform  (e.g.  Tascam and a number of manufacturers can be found providing gear through places like sweetwater.com).
   -USB interface (if using DAW software option).
   -Laptop or Desktop or possibly Tablet (check your DAW software hardware requirements to make sure both USB interface and hardware meet software specifications).
 
That's technically about it to get started.

A little primer on mics:

Shure microphones have been a nice versatile gig and studio recording microphone.  While home studio recording budgets are more easily fashioned using any number of condenser mics now on the market.  A basic setup will require likely a laptop/desktop/tablet if you want decent audio recording though the reality of smartphone recordings are equally here to stay.  Native smartphone recordings are likely going to be very rudimentary for room recordings relative to home studio setups.  Unless you know what you are looking for in a microphone...I highly recommend entry level stuff if you are new to the business.

DAW software...I recommend going with larger scale suite options that provide unlimited track options and studio effects packages.  At least this allows you to in house much of your track mastering and studio effects needs for audio production purposes.

USB interface...what are your purposes and needs...if you are a solo musician that need only record yourself and maybe a single instrument at a time, the simplest interfaces likely work (e.g. 2 mic inputs and 2 1/4" stereo inputs) probably will work fine.  If you need to do live session recording work with more than 1 musician, you may want to investigate larger scale interfaces that furnish more simultaneous inputs. 

Laptop and Desktop.  I've used mid line processors for laptops or desktops alike.  Your audio interface will do the Analog to Digital work so really whatever remains necessary for computation in audio is generally pretty well handled for many home studio applications...your audio interface hardware setting will need be set to ASIO for input (which directly has the audio interface) handling (much like a video card has a gpu) audio based computational work. 

Learning to record:
I'll omit particular guides on recording and mastering (beyond scope of what I wanted to cover right now).    If you make time and effort to record, you'll likely be recording something and learning to use your gear.  Otherwise, not.  Anytime spent recording is better than no time or time that need be structured in highly choreographed ways.  The more people that have to be recorded will likely mean tighter and more restrictive scheduling unless you work around this...in other words, do you have to have everybody in a music group there to record at any given time in order to record and the same goes for mastering?  Spend your time doing scratch work to learn.  Plenty of scratch is how you learn to get better at what you are doing.  The best time learning about audio engineering may come in your own company doing this work whenever you can...doing this on your time not others.

Publishing to Video sites.  Many musicians actually use either slideshows or a single photo still for, for example, Youtube publication.  Here are some things to keep in mind:

Windows, Mac, and iOS furnish native movie making programs that allow you to import your audio file.  The simplest self publication  here uses a photo still of your choosing and creating a video length of that still filling out the time span of the audio file being interlaced with that image still.  You can get, of course, more creative and build slideshows or integrating video of your choosing.

More premium video production services:

You can invest in things like Adobe premiere or Adobe Cloud subscription.  Here you can build more complex choreography of video work here.  There is likely a bit more of a learning curve both understanding how to work with animated transitions that weren't template ones.  Though Adobe does provide templates as well if you hadn't wanted to learn the ins and outs of editing timeline curves for animating effects and transitions.  You may want to learn things like audio video synchronization when using separate audio and video recording (non interlaced sources).   

At the moment.  H264 is a common high definition standard for video publication.  Likely your video editor will give you mastering format options for the video type that you want to produce for a given social media platform (at least it should). 

Self publications to sites like Google Play, Amazon, Apple Store and Spotify:

Sites like DistroKid  allow you to publish your music by handling all legal work necessary to get your music copyright recognized...you pay a yearly subscription fee (entry level is a small annual fee) and you keep royalties on your music sales.

Self marketing: 

Uploading your music to Youtube, or getting yourself setup for any given market online or otherwise, isn't a likely guarantee to music sales, and unfortunately, even marketing online may not be either.  Far from quality audio recordings can actually be quite successful and mostly this relates to how any recording artist(s) sell themselves in a social way.  If you are niched in a collector's market, you may have decent odds depending on the media type that you are selling (e.g., vinyl and CD may provide better returns than by mp3).  Though as I've read, you likely want to avoid being excessive with twitter, facebook or any other social media spam when engaging with people socially.  Positives would include getting reviewed and featured in zines, music journals and so forth, and potentially having higher levels of exposure through sites with larger scale traffic.  Word of mouth and festivals are likely a bigger positive to social exposure.  Having someone's ear is different than having hoped they stumbled upon you in a vast sea of audio. 

 Home studios have been liberated with higher quality audio production tools that are more affordable, but the pool of interest in doing such has also increased.  If the acceptance of a culture around poorer quality audio production recordings is a testament that successful social exposure need not correlate to higher quality gear, if you are entry level into this market, I wouldn't bother trying to raise significant money to pay either for a recording or for the gear to do such.  It is a waste unless you know what you are doing. 

Maybe Amazon reconsiders on its conscribed NDA reminder?

  Hehehe...just saying!  :)

New Economy part 3 in series

  Given the ever increasing rise of machine intelligence,  humans will increasingly not be able to compete across greater spectrums of machine automated production modes.  This isn't merely in manufacturing or transportation sectors but increasingly affecting service sector economies.  Nonetheless I think we are entering into a new chapter in social and economic history...could we be ready to affirm in our own soon to be social history the birth of the Machine Intelligence Revolution?  This has broad impact to civilization and the ways that we will live in the future.

Questions to consider:  why is there mostly scant thoughts with respect to existing impacts?  And why consideration without so much consideration to social and economic displacements?   Is it sufficient and fair to argue that the luxuries of such revolution should only increase worker productivity while marginally having impact to worker population numbers, for instance? 

New Economy part 2 in series

   Certainly if less permanence were true and that anything were paid by task and template, the notion of employment as worthwhile comes measurably one's effective response and analysis.  Income diversification were arguably present to the degree that a measure of self worth were given less so by the perception of self worth but by the measure of worth.  How many tasks have you completed (for metrics)?  What is your rating (for metrics)?   Answer to be presented...or rather a range of task submissions for a task presented before a contract or even necessary details should be a given.  AI chatbots find ways in abstracting project goals in such a way without compromising proprietary concerns (or that anything of the NDA) need ever be signed.  The creative mind is valued, yes, for its supposedly intangible alchemy, but ever increasingly the template world and all approximation of the creative mind is encroached upon.  Where ever the creative mind?

Left at the base of the artful mind.  How are lives are an artful process has some intrinsic meaning...as it were to the design of self engineering.  What happens to works and so much definition and value is placed to the abstraction of lives relative works...works transcend lives but in the future?  

And while we cling to what we can touch and feel for its value, that alone, drives the future of gold...or that artificial scarcity is replicated by way of the lesser cosmic events creating such elements in the first place or that atoms elsewhere could be so diffuse as to maintain even higher levels of scarcity...future makes arbitrary the alchemical mind which has spun gold from ideas alone!  There is only delusional consensus that anything has value in the future...and that is the future economy.  The notion that we must believe much has value when scarcity no longer exists.  What is the future of desire?  What is the future of wanting?   

Dreams, Desires, and Aspirations

    Venturing into the foray of self publication, self broadcast, or anything else. 

    You have tried the self publishing world briefly.  You found ways to do epub formats and then having your e-reader handy tested the format to verify that your little collection of short stories could be read through a few times.  When to do:  A few weekends out of the year or when in a forced insta hire layoff!

    You ventured into self publication of music.  You generated more spotify notice than anything and paid at fractions of a penny for each listen.  Who actually buys an mp3?  You bought your own album!  When to do:  See time permits above...or otherwise when the unheated garage is tenable to practice sessions!

    You whizzed through another country at a blistering pace with camera firing in tote and attempted to market your natural landscape photography.  Having below entry level camera gear and nothing more would make far from justice the prodigious residence of imagery that should exist on market.  You might actually buy your own stuff on 500px.  If only having placed yourself on the NYTimes best seller's list, a marketing trend might suffice in giving you notice.  You pay yourself for zero sum net loss/gain and something out of nothing makes something!   When to do:  Any scant deal for government subsidized flight trips abroad with enough accumulated savings makes this two week sojourn possible! 

    You'll market your prowess in scripting languages, anything erudite making COBOL sexy again!  You find yourself fluent in the way of knowing lookups...mastery being no longer necessary, your mind is being read and understood better than you might have been able to express.  The vast language of machines could do much interpretive reading on the sequencing of natural language.  The designer you worked from one system into another, leaping on dev trends.    When to do:  boredom sets in.

    You'll sublet a room in your house.  Unless city or state regulators say otherwise.  In that case, it were likely utilizing some obscure 19th century law relating to people with hats walking where they shouldn't be...or pertinently the obscurum of commercial versus residential zoning.  When to do: Several weekends out of the year!

    You'll invest pocket change in the new stock.  You lost a sum in bitcoin.  IRA/401k account!  When to do:  the last time you drained the retirement account.

    You'll taxi people.  Everything to become as tiny as a rickshaw navigating the maze like corridors of a city sprawling into the sky.  You are at the base of everything.  When to do: this is your job on Wednesday!

 

     You'll leave an instant hire job for another opportunity.  Career transience is one's intelligence in knowing that office is a shared space in the tropics for a few afternoons with billowing storm clouds ominously overhead.  When to do:  This is your job on Friday!

     Your mind maps will be commerce.  So to your thinking processes which could be a commodity.  You will teach people how to live again.  Personal philosophy coaches and lifestyle administrators abound.  When to do:  This is your job on Tuesday!  

   The rest of the days of the week are given to the resilience of repurposing your life and the things around you!  A new mall has opened up down the street with explicitly that purpose even if stores exist in providing rehabitation of old habits.  You move like a modulus on the branch of time, always who you are and you should be!

     

Call this redefinition

   Call this redefinition.
   Measure is by analytics.
   You have resurfaced the you that remembered a fragment of a line
   Educate oneself to know what could be remembered
   What is to learn? 
   No more marketing tomorrow!
   All of this will be automated in time! 
   No more sales! 
   No more mentoring!
   No more law! 
   

Eventful and uneventful

    Half a day and a year and a half later.  An eventful milestone passes nearest to the holidays.

    What can one say about that time?  The shroud of secrecy that claims any that knows without claiming to know, pretends without pretending.  Corporate schedules are routed like circuitutious liabilities and all the passive journals in writing with digital eyes.  Rotating through and through, stacking through the heaps, that class that asks for much.  Another aims her scanner at you and feigns to sleep, that is a place where much substance is made of anything beyond its due.  All hyperbolic in presence is the world of suspicion there in store.

Stack the heaps.
What remains seems endless with false corporate cheer.

React Firebase Deployments

   Some helpful hints to syntax errors, notably as related to 'npm run build' and 'firebase deploy' as related to syntax error shows either an older version a 'build/static/js/mainxxxxx.js' build or a current version but seems to be referencing an older version of this.

1.  Updating the 'index.html' file on new deployment.  Important to do this.  You can add a space in the file (or some character which makes the operation of the file functionally unchanged), for instance.

2.  In the Firebase console under the hosting tab, you may need to rollback to the current deployment, or at least ensure this has happened.  I have found that any new 'firebase deploy' command hasn't fully ensured updates of all deployment files to the latest deployment batch.

I have also experienced old cached site data remaining even upon refreshing firebase server data.  I am not certain why this seems to be more so the case either with 'firebase deploy' ments or 'firebase serve' (local hosting), but with chrome browser, you can do a refresh load with ctrl+'reload'.  Seems to remedy old data in the browser system. 

My current experience as of 12/13/2017