worthy<-MUSIC

Come To My New Home

Hello there.  Long time no see.  This little post is to invite any of you who are still visiting this site to come see me at my new home on Vox.  I've been messing around with TypePad's new service for some time now and slowly it has won my attention.  I've not really been into any of the social networking applications thus far, but this one's combination of blogging, music, books, and photos along with multi-level privacy settings makes it attractive to me.  It doesn't allow for custom designs yet, but I spend enough time on that stuff on my primary site, Raleighing.

Over on Vox, I think I am going to be doing more of a traditional blog where I just ramble on about whatever comes to mind.  Not sure how regularly I'll be updating it, but it will certainly be more often than I've been updating worthyMUSIC.

Here's the URL:

http://raleighing.vox.com

Hope to see you there.

Holy Redesign, Batman!

How's this for a facelift?

For whatever reason, I got a wild hair up my butt tonight to throw together a redesign for this stagnant site.  So, this is what spewed out of my head, through the tips of my fingers, and onto your screen if you are reading this.  Not sure if I'm going to love it in the morning, but I'm diggin' it right now.

While spending most of my writing and designing time over at Raleighing.com, I have learned quite a bit of CSS, etc. and I just wanted to see if I could now put it all to use in one fell swoop and viola!  It worked!

So does this mean I'm going to actually start writing over here again?  I think maybe.  Probably not as in-depth, but I've been listening to some good stuff lately that I'd like to write a little about.  We'll see.  I am still not very inspired by Rhapsody these days.  I've even started subscribing over at eMusic a little although their selection always leaves me a bit disappointed.  But, I do like the fact the songs are in VBR MP3 format.  Great quality without all the DRM annoyances.

Anyway, stay tuned for further developments.  Things are still a little rough around the edges around here and I'm too tired tonight to fix them... so don't cut yourself.

Happy Holidays

Yes, I'm still alive.  Yes, I am still a Rhapsody user (although the past few months have been quite trying).  No, I am no longer tracking which albums are still having problems.  Rhapsody has mostly fixed the issue with just an occasional album popping up here and there with the Helix error c00d0bbe.  I have asked my contacts at Rhapsody for the best place for everyone to submit tracks with the problems and I will pass that along here as soon as I hear back (could be after the New Year).

My current issues are around Rhapsody's interaction with the 2.51 version of the firmware for my iRiver H10.  It's all screwy.  I'm actually using WMP10 to sync Rhapsody To Go tracks at the moment, but even that is occasionally problematic.  At least it is a hell of a lot faster than Rhapsody's sync.

Anyway, not really sure what the future holds for this site.  My of my blogging efforts these days are focused on raleighing.com.  That site gets exponentially more hits than this one ever did which is weird since its audience is strictly residents of the Raleigh area.  Shows how far off we are from really having an active and excited user base in the online music world.  Personally, I think I am in serious need of another breakthrough of sorts to keep my enthusiasm up.  My struggles over the past several months would have driven away all but the most technical and most dedicated, which I know most consumers aren't.  We are still several steps away from the mainstream, and Mr. Jobs is certainly no help either.

I have the next week off so I may get around to publishing a Most Worthy 2005 list.  We'll see.

Happy Holidays!

You talkin' t' me?

So, have you missed me? Yeah, I know... wishful thinking. Anyway, I do apologize for not posting for the past couple of weeks. I have taken on a new account here at work and it has had me up in lovely Secaucus, NJ for the past two weeks. Long days followed by business dinners has left me very little time to post... hell, very little time even to listen to music... GASP! Then when the weekends come around they are jam packed with all the things I couldn't do during the week, including spending time with my beautiful wife. So, the website has taken a bit of a backseat.

I'm back in town this week so I should be able to post. Plus, I am now a member of the Rhapsody-to-Go service so I can take my music with me. I have some opinions of the service (not all positive) that I will share in one of my posts this week. But, suffice it to say that overall I am enjoying being able to "rent" music to take with me in my car, etc... just a bit annoyed at how difficult it was to get it working correctly.

But, before I write about all that business, let's start things back off with some positive news. Last post I talked about the major performance I had coming up. Well, things went pretty well. That piece is such a bear, but I think we pulled it off. And I am not the only one. I've posted a couple of links to reviews that have shown up. One from the local Raleigh paper and one from a website focus on North Carolina music.

http://newsobserver.com/lifestyles/story/2345008p-8723275c.html

http://www.cvnc.org/reviews/2005/042005/NCMC.html

A bit exciting, eh?

Well, I will get on to the regular posting now. Not really sure which disc I'll write about next. Perhaps the new Ryan Adams which I am really enjoying... We'll see...

Slight Hiatus

Ok, little break here. Not because I'm enjoying a nice vacation or anything (I wish). No, it's because I have a performance this weekend in which I am performing the bass solo... So, I'm nervous and playing the recording of the piece over and over and over and over and over again so I know it like the back of my hand. While I've done quite of bit of solo work, this is the first time I'll be singing the featured bass solo part in a big work for soloists and chorus. I really hope I don't screw it up. The conductor has not even heard me sing yet... just hired me based on a suggestion from another... so I have this fear of going to dress rehearsal tomorrow morning and his eyes getting as big as saucers as he realizes the mistake he has made.

So, no cool indie stuff for me today. I have been enjoying the new Martha Wainwright disc this week and was just starting to get into the new Of Montreal disc too before I had to focus on this piece I'm singing. I don't think I like the new The National album too much and The Old Haunts really aren't my thing either, but I'll probably still give them both a couple more listens to make sure...

Wish me luck.

Ok, I Lied

Welcome to my new, perhaps temporary home.  I am now hosted at TypePad and will give it a full go for the trial period to see what I think... So, 29 days left before I have to decide if I'm going to start paying to keep all three or four of you informed.  Actually, while I do love keeping people informed about music, I think this site is more about therapy for me.  Nice to get my head off of the rest of the stuff in life (i.e. work, fixing up the house, mowing the lawn, etc., etc.) and write about my favorite subject.

Anyway, feel free to comment.  Go easy on the design comments for a little while as I just started this one last night and I am still learning how to tweak on TypePad.  I am currently testing the Plus account level which gives you customization abilities but not complete access to the HTML... so I am working within those constraints at the moment.  I'll probably bump up to the Pro level at some point during the trial to give it a try too...

Oh, and I am going to keep posting on Blogger too in case I decide to go back... so you don't officially have to adjust your RSS feeds if you use an aggregator to read this.  As you can see, I imported all 130-ish posts from my Blogger site, but it didn't happen as cleanly as I had hoped so I'll be taking some time to get all the old posts cleaned up...

ooo fun...

Woohoo, I'm Goin' Bigtime!

No, just kidding. No bigtime for me. I just finally got around to forking out the 8 or so bucks for a domain name. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but am just now doing it because I am starting to play around with some other blogging tools/hosts, etc. and don't want to have to keep telling people new URLs if I make changes. So... drumroll please... from now on, please go to:

http://www.worthymusic.net

Exciting, don't you think?  Yeah, me either.

For now, I am going to stay on Blogger, but I am looking at some other possibilities like Typepad, WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern, etc. but all of those cost some level above free, whether it be for the software itself or, in most cases, the web space to host it. So, I am testing out a bunch of stuff to see what I like. I think the biggest reason for me wanting to make the switch besides my curiousity is post categories... something so simple, but just apparently not something Blogger will be adding any time soon. Also, I like some things like the TypeLists in TypePad, etc. We'll see.

One added feature of actually paying for it would be that I could hold someone accountable when things don't work. I've been having a lot of problems with Blogger lately but since it's a free service I get what I get... sigh...

Chris