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Octava Records

My longtime friend Xavier and I are planning to start a record label. It took me a while to find a suitable name. The name is actually a term I used in the early 1990′s to describe the bass-line style of my old music project at the time, UBM (Underground Bass Masters). The style had very jumpy octave and fifth intervals, therefore making “Octava” a suitable and descriptively simple name.

www.octavarecords.com is now online, it’s just basically a splash page at the moment. I wrote a newsletter subscription code for the front page today, so anyone who signs up may be updated of the official launch. I’ve done massive amounts of work behind the scenes on the administration panels and database structure mostly. I’ll soon be into the front-end user interface stuff.

I basically created an editor in php that I can use as a common editor for all the various database functions, much like how scaffolding works in Ruby on Rails. If you’re not familiar, there is a screen cast called Creating a weblog in 15 minutes to show how much it can speed up and simplify things by not repeating a million lines of code. I basically lay down definitions in my php pages containing information about the database structure, such as:

• Database row names
• Database row type (e.g. Integer, Boolean, Text, or even things like File. — As an example, the code will make things like Boolean appear as a check box when editing or adding new entries.
• Friendly names, displayed as labels, such as ‘Name:’
• If the database is storing integers to refer to another database table, such as artist id #1. This section also includes data referring to the table ‘artist’. Giving definition to the id number that’s stored as an integer.
• And a few other options.

The common included file will then generate pages to Display, Add, Edit and Delete database entries based on an array of information describing the database. It’s been a lot of work creating the code, but it will simplify things in the long run, because I’ll be able to re-use the code in other projects.

So, basically, I’ve just been über-geek lately… Perhaps it’s time I buy one of those illuminated wi-fi signal status detector shirts from ThinkGeek? Oh well… What am I talking about? Take a look! You, too, are entangled in this infernal cobweb of a net, so I know you want one!

Octava will be the new home for my various music projects and collaborations, past and present. Including: The Underground Bass Masters, Polaroid Kiss, and Audesi. I will also be producing and mastering new music by Xavier Orengo.

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