After 7 years of silence (well, disregarding the two side projects “Live at Enyen” and “Zonelet”) we have finally been able to release our desperate grip on 9 new songs and set them loose upon the world. Here is the track list for the new album:

1. Sleep in Secret
2. 100 Thirty Five
3. 67 Times
4. Hotand
5. Smile
6. Kiddo
7. Slide Off The Map
8. Surfing
9. New Skies

7 years is a looong time to work on an album, but I think we finally have the “how to make music while being separated by time and distance”-thing sorted now. Anders being based in Denmark and me (Jens) currently living in Japan, the making of this album involved a lot of digital data traveling back and forth over the internet web tubes and a lot of e-mail and skype-meetings. All vocals were recorded by Anders in Denmark and sent to me for further production, with the result that I haven’t actually ever met any of the vocalists in person! I hope I will have a chance to put a face to the vocals sometime.

On that note, many thanks to all the musicians who participated on this release:

• Jana Oberender
• Marie Raabye
• Anke Struve
• Karen Poulsen
• Joannes Holm
• Christian Meyer

The album is available as a digital download from www.subdelay.com now so go check it out! CDs are currently in production and links will be posted on the site as soon as they become available.

…and on a final note, we promise, PROMISE, that the next album won’t take another 7 years to see the light of day…:P

The album “Zonelet” is now available in CD format including full color artwork and a 4-page booklet!

Marking Sub Delay’s first full-length instrumental album, the CD can be purchased directly from Amazon’s CreateSpace from today. Set to follow are the rest of Sub Delay’s discography and of course the long-awaited new album so stay tuned!

I was asked to put up a wishlist for this year’s Christmas so here it is!

• LiveScribe Pulse Smart Pen

  

  A pen that records your writing as well as sound. Jamesbondarific!

• Reveal iPhone case (black)

  

  The iPhone looks its best without any cover at all but since I don’t want to break because I dropped it or something, this ultra-slim case might just be the thing.

• Headphones MacStyle Skin (13” MacBook Pro Unibody/Battleship Grey)

  

  This would look great on my MacBook (I hope).

• Bicycle computer

  Any kind would do really, as long as it is wireless and shows me how far I have gone

• Beatport t-shirt (Size L)

  

  I spend way too much money on Beatport…Maybe I shouldn’t be turning myself into a walking advertisement for them?

• Bicycle pump

  One that works with road-bike tires that is (I forget if they are “French” or “German” or whatever). I have a small one for emergencies but using that every time I need to pump my bicycle tires is a bit of a chore…

Hmmmm….can’t think of anything else right at this moment…Except for crazy expensive stuff. Guess I’ll update this post if I think of more!

Working on the new version of subdelay.com I came up with a couple of plugins for Rails that although functionality-wise are dirt simple turned out to be rather useful. Therefore I have decided to open source them on GitHub and also do a little writeup here on the blog.

VersionMaster

First up is VersionMaster. I needed a simple way to manage a version number (eg. “v1.0.8″ etc) for the site, in order to keep track of minor and major updates as I changed things around and added new features. More importantly, I wanted to have this happen automatically whenever I deployed a new release using Capistrano. I first took a look at toland’s app_version but it didn’t quite do what I needed so I came up with my own little implementation.

Using VersionMaster

Install the plugin using

script/plugin install git://github.com/balvig/version_master.git

The file “version.yml” will be copied into the config directory:

You can edit this file to manually set the version number or use the rake tasks below:

You can also use the built-in Capistrano recipe to update versions when deploying (which is how I use it):

You can then use the constant APP_VERSION in your views or elsewhere to display the current version.

Get VersionMaster from GitHub.

Hurray! The new version of www.subdelay.com I wrote about a while back is finally done. Visually I have kept it in the same style as the previous version so the overall feel of the site should be familiar, albeit with a few notable changes:

All music is free

Yep. All of it. Full-length streams and downloadable 192 kps mp3 versions of all tracks are now available for free. Tracks can be downloaded individually or as an album package complete with full-color artwork. I encourage everyone to download and share the free mp3s with as many people as possible! Of course, for those who care a little bit about sound quality, high quality 320 kps and FLAC versions are also available as paid downloads, with CDs going to become available soon.

Blog & Twitter aggregation

Anything posted on the blog, Facebook or Twitter related to Sub Delay will be aggregated and shown on the site so you can also stay up to date with the latest Sub Delay news.

New artwork & albums

As mentioned, we are consolidating all our music under the name “Sub Delay” and the artwork for the albums has been redone to reflect this fact. The two Zonelet EPs have been combined into one full-length album including a new track “Inlet”. Also, album covers are now embedded into the audio files so they look great when played in iTunes or on your iPod/iPhone/iThing.

iPhone optimized interface

I love my iPhone just as much as the next guy so it only seemed natural that the new site should support this format. Accessing the site with an iPhone or iPod Touch will present you with an optimized interface that takes advantage of the device’s touch screen capabilities.

No more Flash

A bit ironic given it seems like only days ago I was writing about implementing the site using Flex, but even though a working Flash version was almost completed, after a while I realized that it would be much more efficient to do the whole thing in good old HTML (thus the 3.1 version number).

If you haven’t done so already go and check out the new site (and music!) at www.subdelay.com (if the new version doesn’t show up at first try refreshing your browser a few times).

Version 1.2.2 of MapDiary is now available in the iTunes App Store. This is a maintenance release that resolves some memory issues that could otherwise cause trouble for people running iPhone OS 3.1.

MapDiary now correctly calculates and displays local times based on the actual geographical location of your posts. This feature currently relies on the free Geonames web service which can be a bit unstable at times (a fact I found out the hard way…), thus when this service is unavailable the application falls back on the time zone set in your Twitter settings.

Thanks to everyone currently using MapDiary! Seeing posts pop up from all corners of the world on my little app is great fun.

Just in time for…me not to have time to play with it at all