Oy and vey - what a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in and not a good one. Despite being told yesterday that we'd be approved within forty-eight hours, I got an e-mail this morning saying there were still major issues to be resolved. I then had a half-hour phone conversation about them - a lot of information coming at me, much of it technical - but nothing to do with the liner notes or anything like that - I think we're fine there. There are some additional credits to add, they wanted the names of the session musicians for both scores (it's an AFM requirement - but they've now come off it and we can put that on our website - I talked to the AFM and all is well on that front - whew!). But they asked me to go back to using the original cue titles from the cue sheets - which they'd never sent me. Now I have them, but I don't like the cue titles and we're trying to come to some agreement about using mine - it requires me to do a lot of paperwork so that they know which cue title on ours responds to which cue title on their cue sheet - not sure how it will all play out, but the worst case scenario is will use the originals - they're boring, but, you know, we'll do what we have to do. They understand they're throwing all this at me very last minute and the guy I'm dealing with is really terrific. I won't know the outcome until tomorrow. There is a song from each film on this CD and we have to credit the lyricist of each even though we don't actually use a vocal version of either song. Then they additionally may want us to asterisk each track where the song's tune appears - that's a lot of asterisks (I think they want it so it's easier to pay mechanicals) - they have that info on the cue sheets, so I'm hoping just adding the lyricists credit will suffice. If not, you'll see a lot of *******s on the tracks. They also asked for track timings - I don't like them and have not done them on our CDs, but I agreed to do them, since it's easy. I then spent ninety minutes on the phone with my mastering guy trying to make sense of the cue sheets and we got it so that I could at least create a documentation of what comes from where on our CD - in one case it was pretty simple, but in the other some of the score was not used, some was truncated, and they re-used cues like crazy. Of course, on our CD we present the music as it was recorded, so it's very difficult to correlate it to the cue sheet. We'll see how my documentation works for them - I'm really hoping it does and that we can keep our track titles.
