We're so close with the new AD product I can practically taste it. Adam is doing the OS X builds today while I assemble all the materials we need to sell it. The only things remaining are some minor housekeeping, presets, and the manual.

I'm not dropping any more hints at this moment, except to say the following: it is a sequencer/synth (groovebox in the pidgin of our business, although I believe that term is mis-applied, as it doesn't really groove, and it certainly isn't a box). The UI is blue, it is quite strange--the strangest plug we've ever made, and that's saying something--and people that make IDM, ambient, and minimal will be exceedingly happy with it.

So, don't expect to hear much from me until it is released. We're in the final Death March phase of the operation and I'm sitting in my darkened office muttering the St. Crispin's Day speech to myself. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

As promised, here's some initial numbers for Resistor, the EP I put out on Bandcamp last week. (If you're just joining us, scroll back a couple posts for the full skinny.)

Plays
Bandcamp has a fairly extensive stats system, and shows you the difference between plays on the site and plays via an embedded player, and also shows you how many people played the whole song versus people that just played part of the song. I personally don't think that latter information is useful, unless the partial plays far outweigh the normal plays. In this case, they do not, so we'll just lump 'em all together.

The long and short of it is that I got 7,255 individual song plays. This is naturally heavily weighted towards the front of the album, with Metatrak alone getting roughly 40% of all plays. This isn't surprising in the least, as you all do what I do, which is listen to the first 10 seconds of the first song, and make a snap judgment on whether to listen to more. The embedded plays (plays from either here, CDM, and Matrixsynth, the only sites that embedded the player to the best of my knowledge) accounted for almost exactly half of all plays.

Sales
In 10 days, I received a total of 148 paid downloads, for a total of US$655.17. This works out to an average of US$4.42 per download. As a pay-what-you-want album, this bit is significant, I think. The first and second days, the vast majority of the payments were US$5.00. For the most part, anyone that contributed more, I probably knew them, either as long-time fans of my oeuvre or people I talk with often. The average has gone down significantly in the last couple days, as have the purchases in general, but right now, we're at US$0.09 per play when you put everything together. This is a very high number by any metric you could care to name, and in that regard I count the Bandcamp experience as an absolutely smashing success.

I think it's worth mentioning a couple of things at this point:

My third SMG album, Burn, sold 64,000 copies its first year of sales, and is now up in the quarter million range, according to Soundscan. The amount of actual cash money I received in artist royalties from that? US$0.00. So, in that respect, Resistor is a far more successful record.

The actual cost of making the EP is tougher to pin down. It's pointless to figure in the cost of the gear itself (roughly US$28,000 at current values) as I didn't buy it expressly for making this collection of songs. I also don't value my time in dollars earned, but rather in accomplishment. Time that doesn't result in accomplishment (that I can point to and say "see, I made this!") is time ill spent, and thus a cost, in my stilted worldview. But since the time spent on this resulted in the accomplishment of the release, it is at parity in this particular case.

If I was to relate these figures to the release of an actual CD, like we would have done as recently as three years ago, this would be an incredibly dismal failure, I wouldn't lie to you. But the obverse is that my wife and I didn't have to fight over cover art and bios for a couple weeks, we didn't have the massive front-loaded costs of the pressing, and we didn't have to package hundreds to thousands of CDs and go wait in line at the post office several times a day for a week.

I purposefully did essentially no promotion aside from my post here, Twitter, and asking Matrix to put up a blurb. Peter Kirn put up a nice post on CDM of his own volition, and there are some various other mentions here and there, as well.

Which brings us to the next phase. Now that sales are essentially idling, I'm able to do individual promotions and see the direct effect, and I'm looking for some suggestions and ideas in that regard. What would be the proper course of action at this juncture? We have a little money we can spend on advertising, but I'd rather keep it in the free realm, for obvious reasons.

Step 1: Stumble bleary-eyed to the bathroom and do the things that Men Do in the bathroom in the morning.

Step 2: Get a Lo-Carb Monster, my MacBook Pro, and a pack of cigarettes, and go outside on the porch to properly EQ my nicotine and taurine levels so I can function in polite society.

I'm actually still in the middle of Step 2 as I write this, so it might be a little gamier than normal. I was perusing my RSS feeds just now, and I've set up several search feeds for Phoenix Craigslist. One of them has "Drum Machine" as its string, and today it gave me this little gem:

Roland TR-505 Drum machine/Sequencer $200

This is another piece of my collection that I regret to let go but I haven't been using it much in the last couple years and I'd rather get some $'s out of it and have someone making use of it as part of their collection of classic electronic musical instruments. [...]. This unit is still very popular for its cool sound and its old-school Roland sequencer which has a "feel" that has no comparison. A lot of pro's still insist on using the 505 as a click track when working with Pro Tools because it adds a little life to your music as opposed to an ultra-modern click track (metronome) which has absolutely perfect time, the 505 and 606 have very close to perfect time but tend to have a little bit of "push and pull" to them that is the sound and feel of classic hip hop and music from the golden age of MIDI :)

Now, whatever with the 505 itself. It is obviously not a favorite of, well, anyone. This is largely because it sounds like shit, and is most assuredly the red-headed step child of the TR family. (We only say this because we've never heard Madonna's infamous TR-404.) Whether it's worth $200 -- and it's not -- is between this guy and the witless sap that buys it from him. Since this is Phoenix, that witless sap has probably moved to the San Fernando valley by now, and is currently working as a grip on Anal Amateurs 49.

(Cue several comments from people that own a 505 and are trying to make themselves feel better about paying actual money for it, plus the mandatory "it sounds awesome circuit-bent!!!")

Pro Tips: There is no "golden age of MIDI." The 606 doesn't have MIDI. No self-respecting hip-hop producer would ever admit he used a 505 on a record. Pro's [sic] don't use the 505 as a click because of its "feel." It has no feel. It's a 505.

Seriously, dude: just because it has "TR" in the name doesn't make it magic, and no amount of con on your part is gonna change that.

I feel bad about leaving that previous post up for 5 days, especially since Matrixsynth just turned five (CONGRATS!) and he posts more in a week than I do in a year. In my personal opinion, though, he needs to be medicated. He's making the rest of us look bad.

Anyhow, the Bandcamp experiment is a smashing success. I will say that we used to move a lot more units when we printed real CDs and stuff. On the other hand, it was a gigantic pain in the ass to pack and ship them all (Hello, four trips to the post office in one day) and it's really, really nice to have making the album itself be the hard part of the operation. I'll put up a numbers post as soon as I have a bigger pool of data, but suffice to say that my experience with Bandcamp is, on the whole, quite positive.

The album is also in iTunes now if that's your thing. Since the audience here is largely musicians, a majority of whom have released music digitally, I won't go in to the vagaries of why I'd rather have a Bandcamp purchase than an iTunes one, given the choice, but it should be fairly obvious even to run-of-the-mill consumers.

And our newest game show: Feature Or Bug? While we build these AD products, there are a lot of cases of Shit Just Not Working Right. I'm generally in favor of trying to harness the event for repeatability, and Adam is generally in favor of making everything so it doesn't, like, crash and stuff. Somewhere in the middle is where our product line lives. Now, before all the "I'm with boobs" comments come, which will make Adam look bad and me look cool, it is worth mentioning that the bug that resulted in that particular audio file is absolutely not something that can be included in anything. It's a seriously unstable situation, and making the customer's system freeze up is generally accepted to be a Bad Thing.

But that said, it does sound kind of cool, doesn't it?

I just put the finished Micronaut EP, Resistor, up for sale on Bandcamp. The Micronaut page is here. I put it up for "pay what you want, at least a dollar," as I'm relatively interested to see how it works out. The Bandcamp site is fairly easy to work as such things go, and gives you a nifty embedded player to use, to wit:

I'll also be placing the album in Tunecore as per usual, to spread it to all the other services. Once it has been up for a month, I'll do a "Numbers" post like you often see the big iPhone devs do, so you can see exactly how it worked for me, as a relatively known artist. (Relative to, say, my sister, who is not.)

Regarding the album itself, it is what I feel are the best tracks of my weekend work over the last year and a half. I completed 15 tracks in all, but (as I hinted in the last post) I feel that the majority of them were quite derivative. I'll probably put them in my Soundcloud account for interested parties.

Most of the instrumentation in these tracks is hardware. Adam often says that his day job is software, so when he makes music he wants to use hardware, and I'm beginning to be of the same mind. When you've spent the entire day staring at a monitor tweaking presets, there's something inherently more visceral about grabbing a knob and getting an immediate and satisfying result. This isn't to say that "analog" is an important aspect. While it's true that the majority of synth sounds you hear come from the MKS-80, Source, TETR4, Mopho, or CS-5, there is a fair amount of digitalness in these tracks as well, in the form of the TX802, TX81Z, and AlphaSyntauri. (Most of the pads on these six tracks are Syntauri, which will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with that box.) Anything that sounds like a piano is a piano, namely the lovely Yamaha CP80B that takes up half of my office. Drum sounds come from a variety of sources, but in most cases are either the TETR4 or a real 909 I had borrowed for a while in PDX. There is some Tattoo, notably in DSP3 and Metatrak.

This entire album was mixed to stems, out to my Mytek 8x192. I used the internal summing buss of the Mytek to sum the stems. I have a Dangerous D-Box, but I feel that the make-up amps in the Mytek (which have a rather API quality to them) add a nice color that the incredibly transparent D-Box lacks. The only two reverbs used are Eos and my Lexicon 300 hardware unit. Since I use the Lexi as a digital insert, and it basically predates the thought that someone might want to use a higher sampling rate than 48, that's the rate I work at. Obviously, the AD line gets a heavy workout here, and I also use the H8000FW as a pair of inserts. Usually you'll hear that on the pad sounds, as that's where it's happiest.

Nerdgasm aside, and on a personal note, whether you like the music or not is utterly unimportant to me. I finally feel (after four full-length albums and one EP, natch) that I'm finding a voice for the Micronaut project that matches my internal music. I'm pretty happy with these tracks and their abstract nature. Next up is the final mixing for the RT60 album. We're not putting that out in public until we can get vinyl pressed, though. Essentially working out how to pay for it at this juncture.

Man, this was a tough week. I find myself at (or possibly over) the limit of the number of individual things I can successfully focus on. We've got the next AD product chugging along, I'm doing some contract software work for another company, I'm trying to finish DronestationX, I am one mix away from having this Micronaut EP done, and somewhere in there we managed to ship off a metric fuckton of t-shirts and an MKS-80, and I wrote my monthly column for Computer Music.

Sometimes I don't have any issue with this many plates spinning. We managed to release 8 full length albums of my own music (plus quite a few records from other people) in the first half of the '00s while I worked a full time job. Social life? Not so much, but it was Chicago. Half the year was a wash because of shitty weather anyhow.

Nowadays it's tougher, though. Ever since we moved to Portland in February of last year, I've had terrible anti-completionist syndrome. (The dreaded ACS!!! O NOES!) I start a lot of songs, but I don't seem to finish many. Well, that's not strictly true. We're one track away from the holy Finished land on the RT60 full-length, and that track is mostly recorded. I have actually finished about 15 tracks for this Micronaut EP; it's just that 10 of them didn't make it past my internal A&R dude for whatever reason. (Mainly that reason was "this sounds like a Chosen Lords outtake...")

Anyhow, long story short, my shit is a jumbled disaster right now. My office looks like Hurricane Cables And Floppies passed through, immediately followed by Tropical Depression Empty Monster Can. It's sort of a fractal mess, where every individual pile of shit is a mess unto itself, continuing down to the size of a rack screw. I've found that going down to the bare metal is really the only solution to this scenario, so as soon as these two albums are completed (O, Happy Day!) I'm gonna go to Home Depot and rent myself a front-end loader, clear this shit out and start new.

Some various things to report upon, in no particular order:

1. I put my MKS-80 up on the 'Bay. 'Tis here. Pool not included. That bad boy is done sold.

2. My lovely and talented missus is packing the Full Of Techno shirts as I write this. All the US orders will ship bright and early Monday morning; I would be shocked if they weren't in your greedy little hands starting Wednesday. The non-US ones will probably go out Monday evening or Tuesday morning at the latest.

EDIT: All USA orders have shipped. Foreign orders will all be out Tuesday morning.

3. DronestationX, the iPad version of Dronestation, is nearing completion. I've added a few features, and given it a UI much more suited to the iPad's form factor. I'll be submitting it to Apple at some point this week, and at some point after that it will either be approved or not.

4. In Phoenix, 5" long flying cockroaches fall from the sky. We were having a dinner party when the first one showed up, and one of our guests was all like "you'll probably never see another one again. They're really rare." Well, I guess we're just lucky then, because our back yard is starting to bear a striking resemblance to Klandathu. It's really, really unpleasant.

This methodology naturally brings to mind the work of Diego Stocco, which I find incredibly fascinating and inspirational. Every time he puts up a video, I actually set aside a block of time to dissect what he did and think about its ramifications, and as a musician, that's about the highest complement you can give another musician, I believe. Obviously, Mr. Stocco's main forte is sound design, but I find what he does with the sounds to be extremely refreshing, and the resulting music is fulfilling without being oppressively songish.

This all dovetails with my favoritest band of all bands, Neubauten, who are the unquestionable masters of creating music out of the detritus of modern society. And there's a lot of detritus to go around. They've got much more traditional in their old age, as the video below demonstrates, but they still use essentially the same tools today that they did early on. They're just better at bending those tools to their will.

I propose that sound design and songwriting using invented instruments requires as much practice and virtuosity to pull off as, say, being able to play Dueling Banjos. It's doubly impressive for the fact that the instrument didn't exist prior to the musician imagining it as such. But ultimately, it's all pissing in the wind if the song itself isn't interesting to a non-musician, right?

So we had a board meeting over at ADHQ last month, and decided that we wouldn't drop any info at all about the next AD plug until the day it went on sale. The reasons for this were largely marketing-related. When I put up the videos on YouTube and the teasers here before-hand, they get a shitload of views, and we were hoping that if we were gonna get those anyhow, we might as well take advantage of the situation and actually have a product, you know, for sale and stuff.

It's killing me, I gotta be honest.

I want to talk about this thing soooooo bad. Adam completed a crucial puzzle piece today, and now the thing actually works, after a fashion; it is missing a large chunk of personality, but it has its brains, for the most part. You already know that it is an instrument, of course. I can also say that it is generally aimed at percussion-oriented duties, although it isn't a drum machine, in the strictest sense of the phrase, and it can do music just fine, as long as you aren't too particular about what the word "music" means.

The only other thing I can say is that all the pieces are in place now, and it's really just a matter of hooking everything up at this juncture. Everything we needed to invent for this plug has done been invented, so the license-plate making part of the operation has now commenced.

God damn, this is killing me.

Updates! Updates! We got 'em. Whether you want 'em or not is another matter entirely.

First up, the next AD product is coming along nicely, except that Adam has run in to one of those things that he has a knack for running in to, the which I don't fully understand. I code vicariously through him. But we're truckin' along. That will be next, then the other half of the Discord3 update.

Speaking of the other half of the Discord3 update, a note came through the VST dev list today that 64-bit Cubase 5.5 for Mac is available as a dev preview. We'll have D3 OS X 64-bit ready before it is actually released.

In other news, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that our good friend Hugo has released a new sample set, volume 3 in his excellent Taped Drum Machine series. 'Tis here. This one is my current Goldbaby Favorite, because he thought to include an RZ-1, which is the drum machine I used to make my very first demo, back when I was knee high to a short goat. There's also a Kawai XD-5 up in that bitch, which is a hidden gem in the world of drum synths. Or at least it was, until I mentioned it. Go watch the eBay prices rise now.

And finally, in non-synth news, as a late birthday present (because on my birthday I was, you know, in Idaho) I got the Camera Of My Dreams, a Mamiya 645. It isn't exactly the model I wanted--I was eyeballing a Pro, because I'm pro as fuck and having a camera that says "Pro" on it really just sums that up nicely--but it came up on Craigslist here for a price I couldn't refuse. I just ran an expensive roll of film through it, and it is now getting expensively processed. I decided to forgo the expensive scanning; I thought it best to wait and see if I could actually take pictures with the damn thing and if they were actually worth looking at. We'll know this afternoon, I guess.

EDIT: As you can see from the image above, I got the roll back. This camera takes fucking amazing pictures, but is unforgiving as hell. Gonna take some learning.

I've got this thing in my head that needs to get out. Unusually (for me, anyhow) it's not music, but rather a piece of actual physical art. It is driving me quite crazy; to say I'm obsessing over it would be to understate the matter mightily.

Now, I have absolutely zero training in fine art, unless you count surrealist experiments in grammar school with construction paper and paste. So I'm not entirely sure how to realize this particular piece of... what? I guess it'd be called sculpture, except it will hang on the wall. See? I don't even know the word for it.

But the whole zero training thing has never stopped me before. I didn't know how to sing, play an instrument, or write a song before I started a band (one which, let's be honest, was rather derivative but still managed to move quite a few albums), and I didn't know the first thing about code, 3D modeling software, or Photoshop before joining with Adam to start a plug-in company (and we all know how that worked out). As a rule, I don't consider prior knowledge or experience particularly important to the realization of any given goal.

I've always found people that are highly trained and skilled in one particular facet of creativity to be somewhat intimidating. Being a Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None sort of person, I admire the singular drive that creates mastery, but only as a spectator. I'm simply not wired that way, as far as I can tell. I often set out to learn a particular skill, but I'm always distracted by the Shiny at some point in the process, and end up traipsing off in to parts unknown.

Anyhow, as a return to the subject, in order to realize this particular piece of wall-sculpture, I need a fairly large supply of a very particular thing: 1" x 6" boards that have been in the Arizona sun for several decades. You'd think this'd be relatively easy to find here, what with the preponderance of abandoned dwellings and businesses that dot the landscape, but so far in my travels around the state I've only found one suitable source, and these were still being used as a roof. I was tempted to take 'em anyhow, but I thought about how pissed I'd be if I lived out in the middle of nowhere and some Big City douchebag stole my roof while I wasn't there, and that tempered my acquisition syndrome somewhat.

So the search continues, and I'm left with the lingering understanding that the creative process is never easy, nor should it be, no matter what form the end product takes. There ain't no autotune for this particular endeavor, and it has made me appreciate my normal creative process immensely. Don't get me wrong: if you work for a commercial music house, get your looptastic autotune on, by all means. But in the comfort of your own home studio, is "easy" the best path? Does the end result lack credence because it was easy to make? Or is the one that fights the hardest the most satisfying in the end?

64-bit Version. The installer now lets you install either or both 32- and 64-bit versions. It attempts to make a guess as to which one you'd want based upon your system, but you can override its naive plans if you so desire.

Minor bug fixes. A couple little this-and-that touch ups. Notably, we've taken a stab at the "bleep" bug that occurs occasionally when the Granular engine is at extreme settings. It definitely occurs less, but I have one report that it is still occurring. I'd like some more info; if you can get it to occur regularly, save an .FXP file of the settings and mail it to me.

Anyhow, this is, as you full well know, our first 64-bit Windows release. We've tested it as thoroughly as we're able, but please write us via the AD site's support section if you run in to any issues.

The OS X 64-bit builds will be along presently. We're still puzzling that side of things out.

Driving on the Y axis through Nevada is quite an experience. There are three possible North/South routes through that state, and all three are, for the majority of their routes, 2-lane highways for which the term "straight as an arrow" was coined. I often joke that on a road like that I could just bungee-cord the steering wheel to the brake pedal and take a nap.

On a drive like this, I usually don't listen to the stereo unless I need a little pick-me-up. I generally just cruise in silence, and it's good medicine. You can get in an extremely strange head-space driving in a perfectly straight line at high speeds for hours on end. Some of the odder AD products (like Replicant and our upcoming one) are the result of exactly this. And some of my weirder music, too.

I realize most people would go bat-shit crazy on the 9-or-so hour straight-line drive through Nevada, but I relish it for this very reason. What's the thing that gets you in your Special Place?

Pure win.

Anyhow, I'm home again. 3600-odd miles driven in the last 5 days, and I didn't even have to play a show. Saw some interesting shit in Nevada, ghost towns and such, but that's about the sum total of fun things to report. We didn't have time to do more than point out the window and say "hey, look, interesting shit."

So it's back to work today. I'm mostly caught up on e-mail, and I apologize for taking my time replying to some letters, as I had actual internet for a total of about 3 hours the last 5 days, and digital cell phone service for less than that. I don't think many people actually appreciate exactly how desolate most of the United States is, even in 2010. Coming back on a state highway in central Nevada, we went for over an hour at one point without seeing another living soul. The only sign that man had been in that area at all was the road. Makes for an interesting drive.

But anyhow, while I was gone, Adam successfully made x64 Windows builds of a couple AD things. More on that shortly, I'd imagine. T-shirts are being printed, and I'll have an arrival time soon. Other than that, I have nothing more to report at this juncture. Still decompressing. My SUV is filthy, too. Whee.

In other news, I'm leaving for Idaho tomorrow morning to deal with the excitement of having a reprobate mother. In a perfect world (and we all know this world is far from perfect) I'll be back on Sunday. In my experience, an internet connection (hell, cell service, even) is a bit tough to come by where I'm going, so my participation is going to be spotty at best for the next few days.

In the past, when I've bagged on Idaho, I usually get either a comment here or a couple e-mails about how great that state is and how I just don't know what I'm talking about, and furthermore what a prick I am. Let me mention, for the record, that anyone that is planning to write me to enlighten me on how awesome Idaho is (a) doesn't know that I spent a fair portion of my childhood and many months of adulthood there, and (b) is out of their motherfucking minds. That state is beautiful, no lie. It is also full of the most racist, stupid, vile redneck assholes to grace this continent. Thanks, but I visit your shit only begrudgingly, and leave as soon as I'm able. You're the DMV of states, basically.

Anyhow, ranting aside, I'll be in and out the next few days. Don't break anything.

I was going through our thousands of photos, looking for a particular image I took some years ago, and while I was at it, I pulled out some pictures that might be of interest to AI readers or SMG fans, and put 'em up in my Flickr account. The set is here, and I put descriptions where appropriate. One bonus funny moment included. But there's some fairly epic gear stuck away in a couple of those pictures.

When that and the next product are done, we're going to lay in to the product line with a double-bladed axe. We're combining several related products in to one, which I will talk about at the appropriate time, and updating the UIs and functionality of virtually everything else. It'll be an interesting fall at AD, and that's a promise.

In T-Shirt News, we are just over the half-way mark for pre-orders, so keep 'em coming. I'll do a final push starting tomorrow to get the numbers over the hump, but if you were planning on purchasing, and haven't done so, get up on that shit. And the first person that writes me after the pre-orders are done and says "ZOMG I CAN'T BELIEVE I CAN'T ORDER ANY MORE! WTF?" is getting beat about the head and shoulders with a large trout. I know it sounds odd, but it has happened every time.

Pictured above is the AI Full Of Techno t-shirt. (Click 'er for bigger.) It will be printed on 100% cotton in a 4.3 ounce weight (normal "cheap" shirts are 6 ounce), three ink colors. The shirt is $20, or $22 if you're a 2X type. Shipping depends on quantity and locale. Paypal only.

I'm going to stop sales and make the t-shirt order on Monday, but I'll mention at this juncture that the minimum number, in order to keep this pricing model, is fairly high. So we need quite a few people to get up in this whip. I don't really have the money right now to cover any overs, so if you voted "yes" in the "I'll Buy A Full Of Techno T-Shirt" a few months back, now's the time to cowboy up.

Anyhow, the order page is here. Spread that link around and get your peeps on board so we can work it.

EDIT: Orders all done. A couple three weeks to make 'em, and they'll be shipping.

Now, I don't particularly care for the song itself, which is pretty thin. And she's obviously nervous as hell, being her first time on TV and all. But there are some interesting things about this performance that are worth noting. Chief among these is that this is an actual girl, that can actually sing and dance, performing an actual song, with an actual band that can actually play.

It's really sad that this is worth noting, since this was the norm not so very long ago. But when you've received a decade-long barrage of nasal-voiced scale princesses with backing tracks and indie rock shoe-gazes that look down on any aspect of virtuosity and performance in favor of some hazy concept of "independence," this is really quite a relief.

So, apparently Sean Combs has decided to save us from ourselves. Well, more power to him, I say.

That's all we're willing to tell right now, unfortunately. This will be the strangest product we've made, and that's saying something, as we have some fairly strange products.

In other news, the Full Of Techno t-shirt will go up for pre-order on Monday or thereabouts. Looks like it's going to be the same price as the previous shirts, $20. That was tricky to pull off, as it has three colors where the others only had one. I'll put up the final artwork over the weekend, and we can go to town on it.

And finally, the new AI site (which has been idling for a couple reasons) is essentially done, so one day Real Soon Now, you'll visit and the site will look completely different. It'll still be orange and white, of course. There is also a full mobile site for smartphone users that makes things pretty easy to deal with in that context.