Musical Holocron

A long time friend and musician buddy of mine named Derek has a whole set of his work and recordings up on Bandcamp for free right now! You should definitely go listen to them and download them all now because they may get revoked back to regular price at some point. DB is a solo singer/songwriter, guitar player and all-around instrumentalist and recording engineer. Basically he's a machine with a soul. I've known him for a few years back when he was the music minister at our church, but when he wasn't doing that he was also recording his own albums, his band's albums and other people's stuff too. His own personal sound is somewhat folksy and country, but he rocks pretty hard on much of his releases. He has a good ear for balance and punching his voice through the center of the music. His lyrics are visceral and personal.

What are you still reading this for? GO now or click on the embedded box below to listen to one of his albums. But be sure to grab as much of it as you can right now. If you feel like paying for it, there's a name your price box, but if you put a zero in the box you get the download link right away.

I've written briefly about Derek previously, but I've been listening to his stuff a lot more lately. Be sure to visit Derek Brink.com for more about his music and what he's planning soon. Need more?

Labels: genre/blues, genre/christian, genre/folk, music, music/artists, music/artists/derek-brink

# posted by ArcoJedi : 23:52  0 comments

I posted previously about my buddy Vinny's remix efforts. I may be late on this one, but he's done it again! This time there's some world music influence and a ton of other stuff. Check it out on Indaba Music.

# posted by ArcoJedi : 02:07  0 comments

Photo credit: Claudia A. De La Garza

One of the things that has always bothered me since the early days of mp3s (Napster era), I'd constantly find music files that were improperly or incompletely labeled. Sometimes the lookup service finds the wrong information at the time the CD is ripped. Sometimes a user types something by hand that is inaccurate. Sometimes the information is technically "correct" but has capitalization or situational issues. As a music collection grows and grows, it can get pretty difficult for us music fans with slightly particular preferences regarding accuracy. There have been services for this kind of thing, but I've never trusted any of them far enough to actually test them. What sounds promising is some that acoustically tag stuff in a method similar to Shazam or SoundHound, and then apply some filtering. But to my point of view, there's just no way to do this 100% heuristically (yet) and I don't want to devote huge swaths of time to organizing my music collection.

You know who should step up to get this right? Google. And lo and behold, they appear to be taking steps in that direction on Google Music. I noticed these "suggestions" started popping up recently and thought I'd verify they were widely available. See this post on an unofficial blog writing about Google: Google Play Music Offers Tag Suggestions. It is still quite time-consuming and prone to possible inaccuracies. But since a large portion of my music collection is migrating to Google Music anyhow, it is worth using.

Labels: free, music, music/artists, news

# posted by ArcoJedi : 00:51  2 comments