It looks like the folks over at Creative Commons got a new look on their web page. The new website is a little easier to navigate and utilize their tools for both publishing content and finding content. I have written about what I feed to be the importance of Creative Commons licensing previously here.
Praise and worship music in the Christian music industry is usually comprised of two variations. The first is the dull and boring, puts you to sleep while sounding like everyone else. The other side of the coin is a well known Christian artist/group creates a praise and worship CD. In my opinion little good comes out of either one of these with a handful of exceptions. The first exception being the Exodus project put together by Michael W. Smith (Smitty as he’s known on the “inside”). This project was a various artists project with several artists recording original songs. The second is Jars of Clay’s own album Redemption Songs, which took a different approach, focusing on century old hymns that you would be hard pressed to find in any church hymnal.
But, there are people out there that are trying to change the sterotype of praise and worship music. People like, Jeremy Camp. On is fourth studio album, Beyond Measure, Jeremy Camp continues to work on breaking down walls and proving that praise and worship music does not have to be mundane. The first thing a new comer might notice about Jeremy Camp is that he does in fact know how to rock out. From the opener “Tonight” you know that you are going to enjoy this album. There are very slow periods on this record and that is a good thing. From the confessional aspects of songs like “Beyond Measure” to the quieted requests on “Give Me Jesus” you can not help but enjoy Jeremy’s voice as he praises God and does it rocking.
I have long held that if praise and worship wanted to have more of a hold on the youth audience, it needed rockers. Third Day does a really good job, but they are not strictly limited to praise and worship. Jeremey Camp might not be strictly praise and worship either, but his albums so far have been very much along those lines, at least lyriclly. Jeremey Camp is a rock artist and you only have to listen to a few of this songs to realize that. I am very happy to see that somebody is looking to praise God while rocking out. We need more people like this. Like I have asked my friend on several occasions, “Why can’t more people do praise and worship like Jeremy Camp?”
(Click the album art image to purchase Beyond Measure from Amazon.com)
[Technorati Tag: Music]
[Technorati Tag: Christian Music]
[Technorati Tag: CD Review]
This article is part of the series What to Buy Christmas This Christmas. This series of articles goes over this season’s biggest items and their competitors. Helping you, the reader, make informed purchase decisions this holiday season.
Christmas is growing ever closer. And this year people have several decisions to make in what technology to buy. Over the next three weeks we are going to be look at several hot products for this holiday season and the pros can cons of each. Hopefully this will give people some insight on what gifts to buy for their friends and loved ones so that they can buy with the confidence that they will be giving a gift that will be loved for years to come. The items we are going to start with are the Microsoft Zune and the Apple iPod.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft finally released its own, in-house built, iPod competitor. After several attempts at the digital market crown and failing on their various endeavors. Microsoft finally decided they needed to release their own portal media player. The hype surrounding the Zune up until weeks of its release was high. Everyone wanted one to play with and everybody was curious. Microsoft held the list of missing features back until just days before the Zune’s release and even had reviewers sign an outrageous reviewers agreement. Microsoft gets points for the set up, but fails to follow through. The Zune was released to less than stellar numbers and the cat was out of the bag on what it could not do. But just because the Zune can not do some things its competitor can’t, does that mean it is a bad product?
This article is part of the series What to Buy Christmas This Christmas. This series of articles goes over this season’s biggest items and their competitors. Helping you, the reader, make informed purchase decisions this holiday season.
Christmas is growing ever closer. And this year people have several decisions to make in what technology to buy. Over the next three weeks we are going to be look at several hot products for this holiday season and the pros can cons of each. Hopefully this will give people some insight on what gifts to buy for their friends and loved ones so that they can buy with the confidence that they will be giving a gift that will be loved for years to come. The items we are going to start with are the Microsoft Zune and the Apple iPod.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft finally released its own, in-house built, iPod competitor. After several attempts at the digital market crown and failing on their various endeavors. Microsoft finally decided they needed to release their own portal media player. The hype surrounding the Zune up until weeks of its release was high. Everyone wanted one to play with and everybody was curious. Microsoft held the list of missing features back until just days before the Zune’s release and even had reviewers sign an outrageous reviewers agreement. Microsoft gets points for the set up, but fails to follow through. The Zune was released to less than stellar numbers and the cat was out of the bag on what it could not do. But just because the Zune can not do some things its competitor can’t, does that mean it is a bad product?
For the past few days I have been using MusikCube to listen to music on both my home and work computers. MusikCube is an open sourced music player that was just released in a version 1.0 form. Initial impressions are that I like the player overall but there are some interface items that I feel need to be looked into a little better. What I did like about the software was its small system footprint and its responsiveness.
The overall interface takes its queues from iTunes with your main browser on the right and your playlist list on the left. You can drag and drop to add files to a playlist or create a “dynamic” playlist. To begin with, the dynamic playlist feature needs some major work. To create a dynamic playlist you have to type in a SQL statement so that the software can query the SQLLite database that stores all the song file’s information. This is not going to work for regular users. It works fine for geeks and people who will actually go and read up on how to make something work, but normals joes do not do that and will look at this with disgust. On the bright side though, it gives excellent control over the dynamic playlist creation to power users.
Another thing I really liked about MusikCube was something called the “Collected” playlist. This was used to browse and play music that you have downloaded or ripped that you are not quite sure you want in your actual library. This allows users to kind of try new things without having to mix it into their main library.
I did not get a chance to play with the device side of things (connecting external hard drives, iPods, and other music players) so I can not comment on how well it integrates with music devices. But I have noticed that its use of ID3v2 tags is very limited. While iTunes allows you to edit a large percentage of available ID3v2 tags, MusikCube is limited to around 8 or 9. I am a metadata nutcase and the more information I can edit about a track, the happier I am so MusikCube loses out on that front.
I think that MusikCube 1.0 is just that, a version 1 of the software. I would really like to see MusikCube increase its overall support of ID3v2 tags and work out some of its interface quirks. I still encourage you to check out this great piece of software.
[Technorati Tag: Music]
[Technorati Tag: Technology]
Michael Koby 