My friend Ryan has done it again. He has written another timely sports song - this one about Notre Dame and their current losing ways. It'd be funny if it weren't so true!

If the video doesn't load for you here you can go to youtube and watch it.

#Music #Sports

My friend Ryan is at it again. This time his bardic humor is directed at the Patriots and their recently discovered cheating ways. He has penned a song titled "Shady Brady and Bill Bellicheat" which is not only funny but makes you wonder how much of their success is actually legit. I'm sure Browns fans have been wondering. So go check it out and, if your a Pats fan (Dad), face the music.

#Music

My friend Ryan Parker has produced a new music video - this time the theme is about being the second best in your sport. It is a hilarious look at the life of a pro athlete who could have been the best if only he were born in a different generation.

A cool little sidenote but Ryan and his daughter Julia were featured on Monday Night Football (as part of the "Rowdy Friends" feature) on ESPN last night singing a song he wrote about the Bengals. Here is the video of the two of them singing. This is the first year ESPN is doing this and Ryan and his daughter were the very first fans to be featured. It was really cool. I'll try to bug him to put up a video of it.

#Music #Sports #Entertainment

I was listening to NPR's all songs considered podcast last week (I'm not sure which episode though) and they featured a song by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (I had never heard of them either) and I thought - "WOW! What a great song." It was a slow and haunting song that had few instruments, maybe an acoustic guitar and piano, and their two voices intertwining in an eerie harmony. It was fantastic. I'm still not sure what the words are because I get caught up in the sound of the song so much (which is pretty rare for me). There is so much emotion flowing flowing it is hard to focus on the details.

Mesmerized by this one song I went to Amazon.com to buy the album "The Swell Season" is one of the best albums I have heard in a long time. Starting from the first song "In The Arms Of This Low" all the way to the final track "Alone Apart" it drags me beneath it's emotional tide and doesn't let me back up for air until it is done and spits me back out. The music isn't harsh at all, its soft and slow and mellow and, in a very weird way reminds me of my favorite Pink Floyd album "The Final Cut" due to it's pacing probably more than anything else becuase, trust me, the music and singers don't sound like Floyd at all.

I can't even begin to accurately describe the album. It isn't revolutionary or groundbreaking but it is beautiful. The two singers voices complement each other so perfectly, and the compositions are so smooth that I feel utterly content listening to it. It's wild and calm all at once. I highly recommend this album.

The singer Glen Hansard is the front man for an Irish Rock band called "The Frames" - I found one free song for download on their website and it was pretty good too. As soon as I get a good chance to hear a full album of theirs, and if I like it, I'll buy it and let you know what I think. The female, [[Marketa Irglova]], is a Czech who has a great voice that sounds small compared to Glen's gruffer vocals however I don't really know much more about her.

#Music #Entertainment

Ok, it isn't quite that easy - but almost; I've done the hard work of building a revenue stream from listening to music - you just need people to care what your listening to, have a blog, a last.fm account, and an amazon associate id. With these ingredients you can, potentially, make money simply by listening to music. How? Well, I'm about to tell you.

First off you need a blog and a way to display RSS feeds in your blog. I use wordpress and a plugin I wrote for it called FeedList. FeedList is pretty easy to use and is what shows "My Recent Music" on the homepage of this site. Secondly you need a Last.fm account. Last.fm is a cool service that provides a way to keep track of what music you are listening to. It then makes that list of music available via an RSS feed. That RSS feed is then consumed by the wordpress plugin FeedList and displayed on your blog. Nothing to difficult yet I hope.

Now, however, instead of using the last.fm RSS feed in the normal way I created a Yahoo! Pipe that will convert your last.fm RSS feed into a different RSS feed. This new RSS feed contains links to Amazon.com instead of last.fm and each link has, embedded in it, your Amazon associate id so that when people click on the link and buy that music from Amazon you get a referral fee.

That's it. You listen to music, last.fm collects the info about the music you listen to, then Yahoo Pipes grabs that info and sends you an RSS feed with amazon links that you can then display on your blog for people to click on. I told you it was easy!

OK so that is the easy overview. Here are some more complete instructions:

1. 
   
2. Create a last.fm account and keep your username handy
   
3. Download and install the last.fm plugin that works with the program you use to listen to music with. The plugins are about halfway down the page.
   
4. Create an amazon affiliate account and keep your amazon affiliate id. If you don't you can use mine strictlymovies-20
   
5. Setup a blog using wordpress, or some other blog engine, just make sure the one you pick has a plugin, or the native ability, to display RSS feeds on the blog
   
6. Use the following URL as the feed URL you want to display in your blog.
   

   
   	http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=7d20665c0dc0240fd18516ec360efe21&_render=rss&amid=...
   

   
   Just replace YOURUSERNAME with your last.fm username and YOURASSOCIATEID with your amazon associate id (or mine; just note if you use mine I will make money because you are listening to music).
   
   
7. Get people to view your blog; tell your family and friends, write blog posts, etc.
   

You can make even more money by showing ads on your blog (google adsense) but using your music to automatically generate ads is a lot less intrusive and far more personalized to you. So, go on, give it a try!

#Music #Geekiness #php #Code #ThisSite

Occasionally someone asks me for my advice on software for a specific job such as image editing, or in this case, managing their digital music collection. While this question hasn't come up recently it has in the past so I thought I would share my answer here. I have used winamp, microsoft's media player, itunes, foobar2000, and a few other's before finally settling on MediaMonkey - it is a fantastically feature rich tool that does almost everything I want it to - and what it can't do out of the box I can add thanks to the fact that it supports user created scripts/tools/plugins.

MediaMonkey adds all the features I wish winamp had (my previous favorite tool) while also supporting all of the plugins that are written for winamp. Additionally, MediaMonkey makes it easy to update the information about all of your songs, to create playlists, find music, create CDs, convert CDs a to digital format, organize your music on your computer, download album art, synch to your mp3 player/phone, and a bunch of other stuff - it's almost ridiculous how much this thing can do.

However, if you have a ton of music and you need to get a lot of album art there isn't a quick and easy way built in. Fortunately, thanks to the user script feature, someone has created a great tool to query Google and to get missing album art. - it's the script titled "Batch Art Finder" and it works very well.

While there are some problems with MediaMonkey they are typically pretty trivial and don't do anything to tarnish my overall excellent impression of the package. I can't recommend it highly enough. You can get a nearly feature complete version of MediaMonkey for free (same with winamp) however I liked MediaMonkey so much I paid for the "Gold Version" which gives me some additional search and playlist creation tools. Give it a try and let me know if you like it.

#Music

Today I was reading an opinion poll at newsvine.com about "The Most Importan Songs Ever Written" - while I don't really have an answer to that question a bunch of others did chime in. Two of the respondents reminded me of two great songs that both touch on very heavy topics about humanity. The first mentioned Sarah McClachlan's song "World on Fire" - combined with it's video it sends a pretty strong message about creating change where it is most needed.

The second song is one I hadn't heard in a very long time, Bob Marley's "War". It has been so long since I heard it that when I first saw it mentioned I thought he must have confused it with the song of the same name by Edwin Starr. However, a quick search reminded me of Bob's timeless song about racism and inequality.

I highly recommend both songs. Other tracks that were nominated in the poll included "The Happy Birthday Song", "Ride of the Valkyries", and "Imagine" plus many others.

#Music #Commentary

#Music #reviews

I use GAIM as my IM client. GAIM is an open source application that can talk on most of, if not all of, the most popular instant messaging networks such as ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, and Google (Jabber), plus it can communicate with my work network (Sametime). What a great tool!

On all of these chat networks you can specify an "Away Message" even when you aren't really away. Basically this is a little note that says something about you or what you're doing. Some people, myself included, kind of like to make this little message more dynamic. For instance you might like to show what song you are currently listening to. With GTalk (and others) you can show the song title pretty easily but GAIM doesn't have this feature built in. What's a music loving braggart to do?

As is the case with many applications now-a-days you can extend the software with a plugin. Thankfully, someone took the time to create a "MusicInfo" plugin for GAIM. The newest version of the plugin only works with the 2.0 or later version of GAIM (currently GAIM 2.0 is in beta, but is running pretty well).

I have tried out Trillian (the free version) in the past, and GTalk but still go back to GAIM. GAIM is free but supports more stuff than GTalk app and Trillian's free version (doesn't support Jabber/GTalk). With this cool plugin my away message will now be broadcast to all of my contacts regardless of what network they use. Nifty indeed!

#Music #Geekiness

My friend, Ryan Parker, is at it again. This time he has put together a song and video about why the Dallas Cowboys stink.

This is a really funny song written from the perspective of Bill Parcells.

#Music #Sports #FunStuff