p e n g u i n d e v i l

As always, pondering a way to get more music for less dough, I decided to try something that I hadn’t done for quite a while. Most of “my” music I listen to through the iPod, not in the home. But since I am most attracted to music in the LP format, this means that I have a lot of music that I haven’t heard much. So I’ve decided to expand my listening range by mp3ising some LP’s, which is a chore that I haven’t put much time into for quite a few years. Enough years, in fact, that OS 9 is now far behind me and the program that I used to use for this process, (CDSpinDoctor), is well beyond usable. So I scooted the stereo around a bit and searched around and came up with the program Audacity at Sourceforge. Well, it works very similar to the old CDSpinDoctor and it works well! Since it still is a bit labor intensive, I only did two albums, but they were good choices. Both were bands that I discovered via a free song downloaded out the on the internet, which led to getting a hold of the LP’s. What this tends to lead to is one song heard many times and the other songs heard rarely, or never. Well, now after getting these two great albums on the pod, I feel ready to burn some more!

Of all of these LP’s that I haven’t played (or only rarely), I picked two that I have long been waiting to hear in their entirety Eljudner’s “Daudingekvider” and “Moribund” by Koldbrann. Both are great additions to my mp3 arsenal and it’s great to have them available. What will be next?

In the name of this process I must give proper respect to two organizations, One is Sourceforge. I swear it seems like I get more and more software from them: Audacity, Abiword, Niceplayer, ScrobblePod, FFmpeg… The list goes on. They seem to have a program for every need and it’s a great project! All software should be open source… If only I had enough programming savvy enough to contribute to any of these projects.

And secondly, Northern Silence… not only are they a great label with tons of great stuff, but they are great to deal with. if you, like me, are stuck somewhere outside of Europe you probably know how hard it is to find quality Black Metal around on vinyl. And even with mail order you can have a hard time finding really great stuff… especially on LP. But Torsten has all sorts of baddies! It’s a great label with awesome bands, nice vinyl (hundreds of choices!) and lots of great shirts that not only aren’t available in the USA but they have them in sizes smaller than the elephantine sizes that tend to be available here. Highly recommended!