Monday 28 May 2001

Having sat up editing until 3am on Friday night, I had a real day off on Saturday (this doesn't happen often), and did some gardening in the sunshine.

I thought I'd finally finished the edit last night, but there was a little technical problem to surmount. For reasons far too tedious to relate, most of the album was recorded 24-bit at 48kHz, but CDs are 16-bit and run at 44.1kHz. Simply writing it to CD will leave it sounding slow and flat, and converting it is a very complex mathematical process which hi-fi buffs like Linn Records' customers can get sniffy about. After I'd run up a stressful series of software and hardware problems, eventually Tony Kime came over to the house this morning and calmly got it all to work. 

So now that I have a CD to listen to, I'm sitting in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden, surrounded by trees and hiding from the howling gales outside, thinking out the final running order. It's a great place to work on a summer evening: no phone, no electricity, just a pot of tea, and a CD walkman with some cheap speakers nestling amongst the seedlings.