Jamloading…

It’s on. Points of Departure is on its way to Jamendo.

Indeed, it has been a journey.

I played every instrument on the album, with the exception of the drum tracks. Last time, I used live drums; this time, I used Hydrogen and Renoise for the percussion tracks. I made this decision so that I could make use of a wider range of drum sounds: I only have a minimal kit, and since we’re about to move to Virginia (probably to a smaller house), there’s no point in giving myself a packing problem later. Already I wonder what I’m going to do with the three conga drums.

Jamendo has been good for me. It’s a good home for my music, and a great place to find the type of music I like to listen to.

Today I took a look back at the performance of my three previous albums. Below, I’ve given the download statistics for each of them as of today, March 31, 2008:

	days on Jamendo	total downloads	downloads per day
evolution	490	1117	2.28
handmade	414	972	2.35
La vie sous la mer	167	482	2.89

For each album, I calculated how many days it has been available on Jamendo. This allowed me to determine the average number of downloads per day. Since evolution was my first album, it makes sense it has the most downloads. However, when the downloads per day is considered, the newest, La vie sous la mer, is clearly in the lead.

None of this would have been possible without Jamendo. Also, I have to give credit to my computer system. I run Linux (a combination of Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio). There is a lot of high-quality audio software for Linux, all free. Further, finally, a few companies are starting to offer commercial audio products that run on Linux (such as Renoise).

The good news is: Jamendo fully supports free software. Right now, I’m uploading my tracks in .flac format. They will be available for download in both .mp3 and ogg vorbis format (which I recommend). Even the software program I’m using to upload my music, Jamloader 3.0.4, is open source — and even comes Ubuntu-ready as a .deb package!

With all the changes I’m about to go through — ending my life in Florida, starting over in Virginia — the future looks pretty uncertain. Jamendo has been going strong since January 2005. I hope that, wherever I go, it remains my home.