For questions, concerns, or to discuss getting your music for sale on this website,
contact: herb@deluxeherbs.net

For legal concerns (such as a copyright dispute) please email herb@deluxeherbs.net
Please note that every artist for sale on this website is intended to be fully original music, with the artist themselves being the rights holder. Every artist is onboarded manually by me (and I also run their music through apps in an attempt to see if they're infringing), which helps reduce people uploading infringement material.

About Deluxe herbs and herb sauce

Artists set their own price. They are paid 88% of each sale via Stripe Connect. I take 12%, but I also eat the credit/debit processing and Connect fees from Stripe. I do this to make the math way easier on everyone and hopefully entice more artists to the platform.

How I got here:

As I learned over the course of maybe 10 years how to mix and master my own music, I realized a couple of things. First, that I really enjoy listening to music mixed with lots of dynamics and texture. However, this generally means that the song is a bit more quiet than its modern counter parts, and thus it won't sound as good on cheap cell phone speakers, and it also may require slightly better physical gear (amps, speakers, etc) in order to really hear and appreciate those textures. If I used plug-ins that break the laws of physics, such as intelligent limiters, I could get the loudness back, but now there's a modern shimmer over the track, and all the textures have been brought to the forefront. So, you don't LOSE as much of the textures when using those plugins, but the dynamics that makes them "textures" in the first place is gone. In my opinion, those plug ins make the mix sound basically the same as a mix from a completely different genre. This isn't some universal rule, just a simplified explanation I guess.

The second thing was that I was hitting a wall in terms of headroom due to the fact that you have to crunch all of these instruments into two channels with a headroom of 0.0 dB in the digital realm (and like +3 to +10 on an analog mixer). So, if I had more channels to play with, I could spread out that energy and have not just better performance of my compressors, limiters, amps, speakers, etc, but I could retain a lot more of the fidelity of the original tracks and get the loudness I wanted at the same time. My mix busses, amps, and even speaker cones could all work more efficiently. The end result is the same song, but with more live texture, dynamics, fidelity, soundstage, etc. We are talking 4 channels right in front of you set up symmetrically. Dual stereo.

After releasing my third album, see you space fish!, I got back into Python programming. During the course of diving back into the world of coding, I had an idea. I wanted to make a program that could easily play 4 channel (or more) audio files, while easily interfacing with your soundcard or audio interface (as long as it has 4 or more channels out, which is fairly common these days), so that audiophiles and even the common music listener could easily access 4 channel (front facing) music. I also wanted it to be as easy as possible for music creators to create and share these files. I also learned that surround sound is best for movies and games, and that for music, sounding like you're in the middle of the band actually is a non-enjoyable gimmick most of the time. (P.S. If you've ever been in a band, then you'll know why in ear and on stage monitors exist: because it sounds like crap sitting in the middle of the band). Plus, it requires a sweet spot in the center of all the speakers where things sound good; deviate from that and it sounds poor.

So, I began working on the program (herb sauce) in Python, which uses the Sounddevice and Soundcard packages (among many others) in Python (props to their respective creators), and eventually came up with the .herb file format. I decided to create my own file format for 2 reasons: A) .wav files have a header structure that doesn't list the header length in the header and also doesn't support metadata (track info) and has some unneccessary redundant information within its header, and B) I wanted it to initially be uncompressed lossless, so using FLAC (which is compressed) was out of the picture for the moment. Eventually, I want to come up with my own lossless compression algorithm, or add support for 2+ channel FLAC playback in herb sauce.

herb sauce may be written in Python, but using Pyinstaller, I (or yourself) can compile it into Windows/Mac/Linux executables. Feel free to run the code on its own though, you'll just need to use pip to install the required packages.

Eventually after finishing the first version of herb sauce and ironing out many of the bugs, I began coding this website using basic HTML. The end goal was to help sell my own and other artists music preferrably in 4.0 (front facing) .herb format. So here we are. Bring out the sauce.

Things I want to add to herb sauce:
-Support for album art referenced in the same local folder as the .herb files and displayed in the program (I don't think I want to allow people to embed actual image data into a .herb file. I want them to stay just lossless uncompressed audio files).
-Support for .herb file playlists.
-Support for a seek feature.