Instrumental Music

It has been a long time since my last post. Moving house and all the associated tasks have absorbed a lot of time and energy.

But the promised reequipping has occurred and after the latest update for Cubase Essential it is nice and stable now and the last major hard landscaping task is almost complete.

In celebration we have started to tackle some even more major works and - the height of hubris - a complete Beethoven Symphony is on the stocks. We have developed a New World orchestra with our customary steel drums and marimba in the "stings" section supported by a vibraphone and talking steel. Talking steel also handles the brass section while Ocarina and Pan Pipes take on the wood wind and the flutes are assigned to steel drums.

Still a bit more refinement required on the mix but it shouldn't be long now...

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again.

I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making.

In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Google's algorithms are churning again this week - not a peak but a bit of a surge.

Our main beneficiary seems to be our iTunes advice page which is nice but not very productive for us.

It is very odd that something we wrote a couple of years ago should be so popular in an area where you would expect much more professional help to be available.

Our ISP service has been/is being upgraded so I'm waiting for any fall out from that. OS Commerce have a major update on the stocks so I'm hoping that any significant consequences for us can wait until we tackle that one. From an operational point of view our biggest problem seems to be downloaded files lost in the bowels of the XP operating system.

Also noticed today that our ISP have increased the maximum bandwidth of our package dramatically so I'm thinking of putting sample players on a lot more pages.

We have a few fans who seem to go through our whole sample library and we will have a look at how we could make that easier possibly by playing them one after another off the same page.

The threat of the record companies coming in and trying to supplant the iTunes business model is something we need to take seriously and develop a response. Fortunately we already know a bit about making advertising work with our music but we will have to ramp up our game to respond to them.

Yes - the errant postcard turned up thanks to a nice bit of informal mail re-direction and Google have now satisfied themselves as to my bona fides to the extent that they are willing to make payments into my bank account and present adverts on our site!

The added confidence that this seems to give potential customers is also evident in the renewed trickle of sales. Some interesting optimisation opportunities in the light of this experience - onward and upward.

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We have been quiet for the last few months while I have been tackling some other projects.

The website has been doing well without much in the way of intervention but in the last couple of week we exhausted Google's patience with us on the latest stage of identity verification - I lost the postcard with the PIN and requested the replacement sent to our old address! The absence of relevant adverts seems to be having a very negative effect on sales which is very odd.

We have also seen the seasonal surge of visits from new i-pod users to our remarkably popular help pages but hat has ebbed away now and visitor numbers have subsided a bit.

So this is the year to sort out a few basics and return to the creation of new and original arrangements with some new software and hardware.

Yes it has been a long time.

The new house has preoccupied my thoughts and time and is still doing so.

This is just a short update.

Visitor volumes are riding high but volatile. Sales are strengthening too. After the massive spasm of updates on Google there have been lesser by relatively frequent spikes of activity on Rank Pulse indicating that Google has become more active in updating rankings. The new webmaster tools also show the shifting patterns of positions and search behavior.

It is coming up to Halloween and Danse Macabre by Saint Saens is top of the charts for a few more days again this year.
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Just a quick comment to note that the churn of SERPs on Google has died down again after the longest period of high activity I have seen since I started to use the Rank Pulse site.