Well, it has been a short while since the last update, or should I say, flurry of updates which occurred in August. Its now halfway through October and things have moved on…. and are still moving on.

The most important one is that the day job is no more. No more real life to get in the way. I have, with effect from August this year, on reaching the grand old wizened age of 60, retired from the IT profession that I had inhabited since my mid to late 20’s. Never say never again that I wont go back into it or some other job at some point in the next 18 to 24 months or so, but as it stands at the moment; there isnt an impetus to do that and there isnt an intention to either and I dont expect to re-appraise that much before Spring next year.

So, I can return to a place where I was about 14 years ago, where it was possible to devote my time to my creative passions without having to share the time with a job and even better, without having to commute. This is obviously a big step and one that has been pretty much 42 years in the making and I hope I can make the most of the years in front of me to be as productive as I can be.

The next most relevant matter is that the house move has been completed and the studio room has been mostly set up (I say mostly, because the room has most of the hardware that will be required to run the studio and most of it is in place, but there is still quite a bit more of “trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot” where there is additional instrumentation or other relics of the old studio that still need to live somewhere and as I hinted at last time, the new room is significantly smaller). Ergonomically, things are better and the new Glorious Studio Compact desk is almost a third of the size of its predecessor, which is going to take some getting used to. I am going to seriously try to have better organised cabling than the old room as well, but that is going to be a game of jenga that is barely starting at the moment. Some of the existing cable sets will be adequate, but others, I sense, are likely to be a nightmare and certain items of hardware that I use as part of the regular workflow are maybe not quite going to be so easy to hand as they used to be.

Never mind, its something that is underway as I speak. I’m hoping to have all of the legacy hardware stuff dealt with by the end of next week, mainly the migration of 14 years worth of data from an old iMac and a Mac Pro 5,1 which has served me very well for the last 4 years to a Mac Studio M1 Ultra. There are more recent iterations of the Studio available, but after a lot of research, the M1 Ultra because of its high core count was deemed to be the most suitable option and the one that delivers best bang for buck.

As it stands at the moment, the biggest boat anchor on the migration process isnt believe it or not, the transfer of data (some of the disks will just be taken out of one array and placed in another and all the software programs will need to be re-downloaded and installed anyway (now that is going to consume some serious bandwidth))… its the deletion of the legacy data from the old 5,1 system.

As I look at the screen now, there is something like 3.7million files currently deleted and a whole s-pile more to follow. And until those are completed I cannot dismount the disks and add them to their new array. It will be good for productivity when I can clear this old equipment out of the way and sell it on so that others may get to use it as successfully as I have managed to. The 5,1 still works and while I’m typing now, it is flying along, but when you start shovelling some serious coal on it and expecting it to deal with modern plugins which are ever more demanding, it starts to creak and groan and even though its incredibly adaptable and updateable and is built like the IT equivalent of the old BMW E39 5-series – massively, massively overengineered for its time – I dont think anyone at Apple seriously thought these things would still be going nearly 20 years later. Given how throwaway the PC universe is, nearly 20 years out of a Mac Pro is…. well, way beyond what my expectations were. I dont want to scrap the main one or its two Tepid Standby machines, but I guess I’ll soon find out whether there is a market still for them, especially when whoever is buying them is going to have to come and collect them from Warwick. I have no intentions whatsoever of sending them through the post. Not a hope in hell.

And the other major matter of importance, which I didnt really expect to go in this direction, is the souring of the relationship with Soundcloud and Soundcloud Pro in particular. This has now broken down irrevocably and in due course, all of the material that I have historically had with Soundcloud will now be moved off of that platform and on to Bandcamp. I will no longer refer anyone to Soundcloud in order to hear any of my material apart from initial releases.

The crux of the problem revolved around monetisation, which was mainly the whole point of Soundcloud Pro. As I have repeatedly said, I didnt get into this to make money and will never charge for my work, but if someone else is running a streaming service or acting as a middle-man for a streamer and is making money out of my art, it is only fair that I get a percentage like everyone else. And, given that in its first two weeks, Monochrome seemed to do better than I had ever expected – Scarlet & Gold getting 1600+ plays in the first two weeks, more than I’ve ever had before – it became something that I became keen to sort out and to get as many of the tracks registered with PRS as possible and getting all the necessary data such as ISRC codes and the such like and then getting the tracks ready on Soundcloud Pro. So far so good, one would think.

Well, yes and no. Some of the uploading process can be a bit tortuous where a lot of the practise is automated and needs (in my very humble opinion) far too much validation and verification and I found that I kept on getting snagged by an automated process of Soundcloud’s which kept asking me for licensing details for my tracks because they were concerned that I had been using unauthorised samples, etc. This became particularly protracted when I uploaded the tracks that had been generated with Suno AI, forming the most recent release of mine, The Echo Of Unmade Miles.

I made sure that Suno was credited accordingly and was absolutely open and honest about AI’s part in the creation of these tracks and who did what. But, Soundcloud’s algorithm kept on rejecting them, asking for clearances and licenses and then it started happening to regular tracks that had no AI in them whatsoever, such as The Last Word, from Monochrome and they kept on getting rejected and rejected. This eventually pissed me off enough for me to complain to Soundcloud, after their AI bot proved utterly useless in trying to get me an answer to why this kept happening. Initially, their reply was lamentable. We will get back to you within two weeks but we’re extraordinarily busy. Coming from someone who has spent 20+ years in delivery of IT services, that was bad enough, but what followed after the first two weeks was laughable; sorry that it has taken this long to reach out to you, if the thing is still a problem, please reply to this ticket or create another one. Oh dear.

So, I did create another one, and another one and another one, particularly where it was related to the Suno created tracks. Eventually, got a rather sniffy reply about there being no generative AI content permitted on Soundcloud Pro and here is where it got interesting, you cannot use AI content at all on Soundcloud Pro unless you do it through one of their existing AI partners, and it lists 8 or so firms.

The first one at the top of the list, if you check them out, is a generative AI firm. There is a very … bitter, very prejudicial atmosphere around the use of Generative AI in the music industry at the moment, some of it very nasty and sneery. What Soundcloud really meant in this case is that you couldnt use Suno generated AI content, because they, Soundcloud, had already got a partnership with another Gen AI firm who probably gave them better margins and quite likely demanded that Suno should be excluded if the deal was to go through.

So, they dont have a problem with Gen AI per se, but only if the price is right. And a lot of the current fuss from industry insiders is that they dont have a problem with it in the publishing and label world, so long as they get a cut of it. Screw the artists and the composers, (much as there is much howling and wailing about “will someone please think of the poor artists”, the same ones they’ve been ripping off for generations with sharp practises, selling access to the artists work for streaming for a pittance), the main thing so far as they are concerned is that the copyright in the recorded works that they possess has to have a special licence, (which will obviously cost more for Gen AI producers like Suno), although in reality, it doesnt matter. Suno and other Gen AI producers train their engines on material already out there and the labels and publishers and the likes of YouTube dont give a flying one as to who listens so long as it chalks up another stat. The allusion that I had in my previous peice about it being absolutely no different whatsoever in the way that Difford and Tilbrook used to write, or Elton John and Bernie Taupin absolutely holds water. The only difference is the speed at which it happens, and the speed at which it learns. Takes humans a lifetime, takes machines mere minutes.

And as I’ve also been on record as saying, once the industry brings the AI world to heel and creates its own inescapable licensing jail, the amount of labels who will create their own AI based acts who will no doubt perform in future as holograms, (as per the most recent ABBA shows in London testify to), acts who dont in reality exist either because they are dead or because they were a creation of fiction in the first place and therefore will never be paid for what they allegedly create, will never have any kind of royalty/audit trail whatsoever… those who know the industry even in passing, know that they are indeed cynical enough to make this happen and I fully expect to see it well within the next decade.

But as I often say…. I digress. Suffice it to say, I refuse to play this game with Soundcloud Pro where I have to prove to them that my works are created without the use of unlicensed samples although their AI engine can accuse me of having done so without any evidence whatsoever in return for a piffling streaming rate. Im absolutely not going to tolerate that at all and it was clear that Soundcloud were not going to budge, so I quit. I told them where they could put their account and how far up they could insert it.

It also got me thinking about a new strategy for how I publicise my art and it is likely that this blog will co-exist alongside another format, such as a substack or something similar and I may use both together to generate more views of the art that I make. I still wont charge for it, that will never change, but I will need to work on a better way of increasing visibility. And ordinary Soundcloud may still be a front door at which some of the works may initially be publicised, but I will never ever go back to Soundcloud Pro. That is over and done. Watch this space, as they say.

And there are currently 4.1 million items deleted or deleting off of this particular legacy system. I think I’d better be prepared to settle down for the long haul where that is concerned, LOLZ.

But enough of all that. I stand at the precipice of a new way of creating and a new start in life for my art, I continue to contribute to the motion picture project Dogs!…Waiting To Be Loved as a voice artist and the advent of not only Suno but also other AI vocalising platforms such as the impending release of IK Multimedia’s Re-Sing offer some great potentials to go back and review some of the AlterZero and early KOAS works to see if they can be rolled in more glitter – or more diplomatically, be given a new lease of life. Plus there were some very old AlterZero tracks that never really made it to being recorded properly and were never properly captured and had justice done to them…. it would be nice to use the opportunity to be able to bring some of those old songs to life… White Flag Surrender, Paradise In Four Miles, Time Wont Change Things... those three in particular deserve to be made as good as I can get them.

And, in the meantime, AI assisted or not, I still intend to make good use of the time I have now, writing and composing and releasing from a newly inspired creative space.

4.3 million now and still counting. I’ll update you more when the new room is completely ready. It wont be too long…. and just as I finish this article, so does the deletion process.

Perfect timing. I’ll keep you all posted. Thanks for your patience and sticking with me.

Oh and just for clarity… the saved picture is not a real one, its AI generated. When the real room is done, I’ll share it.