alionsonny, now also on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify!

Some of you folks told me, that buying my music is too complicated. Directly from me this was the case at all, but also via the (awfull slow) Routenote Shop you told me it is too complicated. And escpecially Europeans told me that at RouteNote "I have to pay in Dollars". Well...

But now, there's no excuse for you all, because on iTunes, you can buy the albums "Alion - The Original Soundtrack", "XperiMental Reggae WorX" and "Electronic Spacerock "international in the currency of your country. The album "Reggae?" is not yet at iTunes. I have to ask why. Additionally you can get all four albums on Amazon and on Spotify. There's no music of mine available yet on eMusic, but maybe my distribution partner did not get this done up to now.

So, let's go! There is really no reason left, why it should be impossible or inconvinient to buy one or the other of my albums!

AlionLive Madeira - Part 8 - Santa Maria de Colombo is online!

Yeah, it is quite a time, since I uploaded part 7. Some personal problems simply kept me from doings stuff, but now I am back again with full force. Well, and then there was another thing which made me intentionally not upload that video earlier. Some time ago my internet provider offered me a VDSL 50 line for the same price as my old ADSL 3000 line. I instantly said yes, because, especially when uploading videos, connection speed matters. And how annoying it was to be forced to cut longer videos into portions of 15 minutes length, so I got part Xa to Xb. This was, because a 15 minutes video usually took 5 hours (!!!) to upload. Ok, recently I got it down to 3-4 hours with a more efficient compression, but that was still too much. With my new connection, I get a video, which formerly took 5 hours to upload, uploaded in 11 minutes (!!!). And this is why I got the new part, part 8, with it's 50 minutes playtime, uploaded in 33 Minutes. That's just great!

Ok, part 8 is about the trip on the replica of the ship Santa Maria on which Columbus sailed toAmerica and which I announce in the last 2 parts. The background music is from my orchestral soundtrack album "Alion - The Original Soundtrack", about which you can read in this older blog post. The album is, like 3 other albums of mine, available for sale on my Routenote shop and soon on iTunes, Amazon MP3, Rdio, Spotify and many other sites. And now, without futher words, 50 minutes of AlionLive Madeira in one piece. get something to drink and eat, because this will be a looong ride ;)

Finally! You can now buy my music online!

While I am still working at my own shop, I found another way to distribute my music. That way is called Routenote. Routenote distributes my music (soon) via Amazon MP3, iTunes and emusic and their own distribution site Routenote Direct. And there you can allready buy the following albums:

XperiMental Reggae WorX (Remastered 2004)
Reggae? (2009)
Alion - The Original Soundtrack (2010)

Soo you will be also able to buy the album "Electronic Spacerock" (2010) there. The distribution via the MP3 portals mentioned above will take some time. I will inform you as soon as possible when this happens. Unfortunately I cannot distribute my other 3 albums "Early Xperiments in Dub", "This is not really Reggae" and "Excursions in Time & Space" with Routenote, because Routenote only accepts MP3s with a minimum quality of 192kbps and I don't have all songs of those albums in that quality and am, for various reasons, not able to re-render the tracks in the required quality. You can still order those albums directly from me. Just drop me a mail and we will find a way.

Now I am quite happy to have found that way of distribution and am waiting that you make me a rich man ;) And to do this, the best you can do is to visit my shop at Routenote by CLICKING HERE. Thanks for each purchase! It helps me to further produce music with full force.

Progress at the alionsonny webshop - complete redising of alionsonny.com

Yes, it all takes a bit longer than I expected. First I had not thought about some things and had to find solutions for a variety of obstacles, relating specifically the synchronization of the main site and shop. I honestly admit that I had thought of some things not at all so far, such as a safe way to use a single database for both sites. Now everything is conceptually clear and must "only" be implemented.

I wanted to build the shop based on the PHP class library of alionsonny.com so far. Why reinvent the wheel? When I was at the point of letting the shop take shape, I noticed that in the PHP-class collection, from the alionsonny.com over the years a lot of redundant code garbage has accumulated . This would ultimately lead to delays and confusion over and over again and make the whole anything but efficient.

For this reason I decided to make a blatant cut and redesign the class library based on my present knowledge and remove remnants of earlier days rigorously. This will make the code a lot more efficient, manageable and better. For this purpose it is necessary, to review each and every bit of code, just to see where it makes sense to make changes. Most likely a large part of the whole stuff will be kicked into trash and reprogrammed.

And while we are at reworking the classes for the shop, why not also give alionsonny.com a complete overhaul? Good idea! I have long thought about giving alionsonny.com a nicer appearance. Also, the CSS is pretty loaded with artifacts of past days and years and rather confusing. So that's just when you add something new all the time. At some point, quite simply a whole lot of stuff is inside, which is no longer either used or is redundant. So I will take a close look at just about everything from HTML to PHP code, CSS style sheets to the graphics and rework it.

Visitors to alionsonny.com I can reassure: It is not an "open-heart surgery.", because the whole thing is just too extensive. Instead, I will tinker with all the changes first here on my local development environment and then upload. So you'll most likely see nothing of the whole thing until I've finished it all. Then, one day, you will visit the site again and BOOOM: Everything will be new, nicer and better;)