Inching ever closer

So here's the plan, and the timetable:

Sept. 13 -- Album (deluxe double-CD edition) released in stores
Sept. 20 -- Electronic version of the album seeded to Bittorrent
Sept. 27 -- Electronic version of album available for download from harveydanger.com

Of course, one of the good things about doing everything yourself is that you can change the dates if need be, but at this point it's highly highly unlikely that those dates are going to change.

Hopefully each event gives us a bit more data to help us prepare for the next event; Erik is working hard on preparations to make sure we don't get hosed if everyone tries to download the album at the same time. That's the nightmare scenario: everyone's trying to get it, ensuring that nobody can get it. Walking into the online release date blind, with no idea who/how many people are going to want it, seems needlessly foolish.

I'm hoping the early start for bittorrent will alleviate some of the load on our download servers; as further incentive we're considering encoding at a higher bitrate (192 vs. 160kbps) for the BT distribution. We'll also likely release it in both MP3 and OGG formats.

Of course, the album sounds great even at 160 Kbps encoding. All you purists, of course, will have to purchase the CD for the "uncompressed" version. All you real purists, of course, will have to contact me for the 24-bit true resolution master. :)

At some point I intend to write up the reasoning behind why we're doing things the way we're going to -- hopefully I can get on top of this huge to-do list and start working on it -- if only to answer the questions that keep popping up.