Instead of hearing Gregorian Chant yesterday, I had a flashback experience to being on a plane in Charlotte, NC and, at the last moment a horde of sweaty women came stomping down the aisle and sat in the rows behind me...raving about almost missing the plane and running through the airport being on the way back from a missionary trip to Africa.
Interesting, but hardly noteworthy. Until the plane was cleared for takeoff.
At this point this Pentecostal group all began praying and shouting in tongues. Loudly. Very loudly.
At this point my friend Peach, if she was there would have said, "Oh, m'God!"
I said to myself....with all this prayer going on if a plane's going down today it's going to be this one. But things were fine.
What does this have to do with this forum?
I boarded a plane yesterday, got in my seat and began to hear humming behind me. The same melody over and over again, in a man's voice. The melody was different, with a sort of hopping rhythm and melismatic phrases. Over and over again. At first it bothered me...5 hours of this to look forward to?
I mean the fact that the movie was a dud was bad enough.
Then I got it. The three orange-robed Buddhist monks were right behind me! Neat.
Takeoff was fine and then they all fell asleep until we landed.
OK, folks, now we're getting to the exciting stuff!
I've processed the recordings for Monday's Compline, Tuesday's Lauds, Tuesday's Mass, and Msgr Wadsworth's plenary lecture. I also have a recording of Ed Schaefer's breakout session on Semiology.
This morning, I finally had a chance to listen to Msgr Wadsworth's presentation about the Chants of the New Roman Missal. Absolutely amazing!
But because I was listening closely with iPod headphones, I also was distracted by the background noise. Not that people were eating dinner, but that MP3 recordings tend to add lots of strange sounds on top of that.
All MP3 recordings have this problem to some degree or other, and you'll notice it on these recordings on my website. The reason I give you this version is because I want these tracks to be accessible to the largest possible audience. Even if you have a slow internet connection, or some prehistoric computer, you should be able to play these. And they shouldn't take forever to download.
Rest assured that the original recordings don't have this problem, and in the coming weeks I'll produce a version using the full quality WAV format. They'll take a lot longer for you to download, but the quality will be quite amazing.
If you have specific tracks that you'd like in the high-quality format, let me know, and I'll do those first.
I'm hoping to get to the rest of the recordings this weekend - thanks to all who have volunteered to upload files! I'm overwhelmed.
After that, I'll try to produce the packaged zip files (so you can download the whole file set much easier) and the high-quality versions. I was also wondering how hard it might be to produce an RSS file so people can have iTunes or other podcatcher download the files automagically - anybody know how to do that? I'd rather not do it by hand, since this is hundreds of files.
Compression artifacts? Absolutely, and I find them annoying myself. See my response to this thread from last Sunday to see why I'm doing it that way.
The uncompressed versions will be forthcoming, it just takes more time. Many thanks to you and the others who recorded the source uncompressed, and then were extremely patient on the upload process.
I've now uploaded Sunday's Mass. It appears that Bruckner's Ave Maria wasn't sung at the end? If you must have your fix, here it is from the 2008 Colloquium.
I've now added the tracks for the New Compositions on Saturday. It will take a while longer to split out each song individually and stitch together the pieces, so please be patient with that.
This gives such great hope for the future of Catholic sacred music!
Thanks to the gracious help of our friend Chonak, I am now able to embed a media player on the web page so you can stream the recordings without having to download them!
I've also been creating ZIP files so you can download an entire Mass at once. Takes awhile, as these are huge files, but well worth the effort. I would strongly recommend downloading a WMA version first, because if you can play it (on iTunes or Windows Media Player or whatever) then you have the highest quality version.
For you techies out there, notice that I've also created an FTP account so you can download the files faster using FTP. If you don't know what those letters mean, then don't worry.
It's a little tiresome, isn't it, when someone asks for help with bugs, and then you tell them about a bug, and they say they don't have a problem on their end, and they just move on?
Kathy, your point is valid, but it is a part of the reality of technical fixes and bugs that if the technicians can't reproduce the problem, it can't be fixed. This is why it is important to report when the issue cannot be reproduced. Sometimes people interpret this as "it's not my problem so it must not exist." That's not it at all. It is just a matter of narrowing down the source of the problem, and it's appearance in some settings and nonappearance in others become an important part of the diagnosis.
OK, Kathy, here's what would help diagnose the problem. Please send me the version of operating system you're running on, and the version of your browser. Then let me know WHICH of the music player boxes you were using, and whether all the tracks in that box were affected, or just one. And whether the song also identified itself as Cold War Kids or as what I had put in there.
You can send me this directly at carl@dierschow.com, no need to bore everyone else with technoid details as we get this worked out.
OK, it appears to all be fixed. Thanks for the help, Kathy! Let me know if you see any more problems - no doubt there's errors scattered through the page.
(It was a really bizarre IE bug, totally illogical, but what we've come to expect from IE!)
Imagine my delight and surprise that my double descants edition of "Come down, O Love divine" were selected for the June 14th Mass at SMC XXI. There was, however, a quirk in timing, since I had recently revised the double descants for better voice leading and effect, so the edition used was somewhat out of date. Nevertheless, I was greatly moved to hear the live recording of the Mass with the earlier edition. The newer version is attached, and a synthesized MP3 recording (with oboe and English horn doubling the descants) is also available from CPDL at this page.
I think you'll find the newer version is much better.
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