The Music Blog

It is fascinating to simply think about or study the evolution of music and music consumption within the last few decades. From the vinyl records and cassette tapes of our parents, to the CDs and mp3s of today, the way we acquire and enjoy our favorite music has evolved and is continuing to revolutionize itself.

Remember the Walkman? When Sony’s iconic portable cassette and FM device came out, music listening became a very personal experience. People could now take the music they liked, customize their playlists, and listen to it anywhere they were. More innovations such as the Discman and MD players followed soon.

As the compact disc began to rise in popularity, the sound quality also improved. Music lovers also began to be more discriminating about the clarity of the recordings, and big, bulky studio headphones found their way onto the streets more and more.

Then came the mp3, fueled by the Internet revolution. With music captured digitally and at an even better quality than its predecessors, fans began to use their computers for getting and sharing music at faster progressions. Digital music players like iPods became an everyday item. Now, online streaming sites feature customizable playlists, and you can also store your music on cloud services for accessing anywhere with an Internet connection.

Learning music has also transformed. Almost any resource or lesson can be obtained online. If you do not want to spend hundreds of dollars to learn the guitar, you can get online lessons, and many of the best guitar lessons online have webcam sessions with professional instructors so you get that personal interaction with an expert.

With all these improvements and advances in music, one can only guess where we will be a few years from now and how we will be enjoying our preferred music styles.

I am not the first person, and probably not the last, to have lost all of my music due to a hard drive failure.  This is not a big deal to everyone, but if you have tens, even hundreds of gigabytes of music, chances are a hard drive failure is devastating.

Dealing with a hard drive failure can create months of inconvenience. Restoring your old music, work, and photos can sometimes be impossible, and when you have some old exclusive recordings, you really are losing what means the most to you.

The real truth is that there is a good chance your laptop hard drive suffered problems because it began to overheat.  Your hard drive is the most susceptible component to heat inside your laptop. Even small amounts of excessive heat can cause issues, but large amounts of heat over long periods will begin to cause errors, and eventually complete failure.

The good news is that you can use a laptop cooler to help reduce internal laptop heat. A laptop cooler can reduce your internal laptop temperatures, and can vastly improve the lifespan of your hard drive, keeping you music safe.  I personally live the Zalman notebook cooler,  Which provides fantastic cooling, with low level noise levels!

Tracy Darrell Adkins, you know him as Trace, was born on January 13, 1962 and is currently a country music artist. His debut album, ‘Dreamin’ Out Loud’, was released in 1996 with Capitol Records Nashville.  Since that time he has released 9 more studio albums as well as 3 greatest hits collections. His latest release was “Proud to Be Here” that hit stores in 2011.

From those albums he has charted more than 20 singles on the country charts with several number ones including “This Ain’t No Thinkin’ Thing” in 1997, “Ladies Love Country Boys” in 2007, and “You’re Gonna Miss This” in 2008.

Trace also managed to get a number 1 hit in Canada with “I Left Something Turned on at Home”.  All of his albums have at least reached gold, with most of them eventually going platinum.  His 2005 album, “Songs About Me” has already been certified double platinum in the United States.  (Platinum is reached by selling one million copies)

Trace Adkins lyrics are known for their southern boy representation as well as the bluntness of his words. His single “Arlington” raised a lot of eyebrows when it was released do to it’s representation of a fictional soldier who was killed at war and was being buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

In addition to his successful music career, Adkins has made appearances on television.  He was on the game shows Hollywood Squares and Pyramid.  He even made it nearly to the end of Donald Trump’s “The Celebrity Apprentice” before getting ‘fired’. His deep voice and southern drawl has also helped him land voice over roles such as the recurring character Elvin on King of the Hill and he has done several jobs for KFC and BC Powder commercials.

In 2007, Adkins released his autobiography A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions from a Free-Thinking Roughneck.

Audio Converter

 When you are really into music collecting the process of cataloging and organizing your collection can be tedious and technilogically challenging.

Many of us have analog collections of records and cassettes that cant be replaced. But these recordings are not always in print or the new “remastered” versions are over produced and too vanilla. So in the interest of space and browsing we convert the files into new digital formats and try to organize it all with one master software.

Personally, I also download alot of live performances from collector and archive forums that share legal music. Often audiophiles use very specific formats that will best showcase the music without any loss. Many of these formats are not popular in commercial applications so need to be converted in order to play on consumer grade dvd and audio players.

For this you will need an Audio Converter to change your file formats into ones that your commercial electronic devices can recognize. I had the special task of finding an Audio Converter for Mac  and I was successful in my search when I discovered Imtoo. Unlike most mac conversions they actually have the full feature suite and options that are available to PC users.

 Watching the fire dwindle out in the cabana that Saturday night was the perfect close to a stressful week.  It was our first night at the new house. Our tired collection of movers joked in contentment. Their bellies were full of local wines and gas station pizza.  

The pool came with the house. It was an above ground pool with an old 70′s style attached deck. The past owners had done substantial earthscaping and had created a raised steppe lawn that continued the shape of the pool across the horizon. Likely, from the sky, the yard appeared as if was an Atzec design or a Pop Art bullseye.

Blues was playing across the speaker rocks. They hummed and bopped with T-Bone Walker. It was magical and a welcome change from our old hums. The hums of car engines and the bops from passing sound systems.

My blue ipod sat on the swimming pool covers stacked neatly in the shed. We were looking forward to converting the shed into a changing room and summer home for our family rabbit. But for now it served as the perfect location for our pool supplies. The fountain, chemicals, liner repair tools (already needed!) and various implements that made our home ownership finally seem so real.

Guest post written by Antonio Benton

Well, I’m a recent motorcycle owner and I don’t think I could be any more excited. I’ve dreamed of having a motorcycle for such a long time and saved up my money to treat myself with one. Now I’m just trying to get used to it. I already got my license and am busy buying gear so that I can be completely set for riding anywhere I want on my bike.

I don’t have that many friends who own motorcycles, although I hope that more of them will get them so we can ride together. So I’ve been going online for all of my motorcycle information. A few nights I was online looking up motorcycle information and while I was doing that I found some www.get.wildblue.com/. I read some information about them and after a little bit of time, I decided to sing up for one of those rates for my home internet service.

While I was browsing around online, I found some really good motorcycle riding tips. My wife has been so worried about my safety while riding, so I’m staying aware of that to appease her worries.