I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. The songs I used this week are, “All Over the World”, “One Life to Love”, and “How He Loves”. They may not be very recognizable, and I kept wanting to go from 4/4 to 6/8. In fact, most if it ended up being in 6/8. This is the last podcast of 2008! Until next year…
The only song I used this week was “Mighty to Save” somewhere in the middle. The rest is original. I kind of got in the habit of picking songs out of The Connection Church worship set list, but since we’ve been doing mostly Christmas songs the past few weeks, there hasn’t been much to choose from lately. I actually recorded yesterday but decided to edit, mix, and post today. This podcast is the closest I’ve ever been to 30 minutes. I could do a special podcast of Christmas songs. I actually have a little bit of time on the 24th for this. If there are at least 5 comments to this post requesting a “Christmas Podcast” by the end of the 23rd, I’ll do it. Otherwise, my next podcast will be a week from now. I hope all of you have a blessed Christmas!
First of all, sorry for the downtime today for those of you who couldn’t get the podcast, download, or play from the website. This was due to me attempting to switch hosting providers. I ended up switching back since I couldn’t figure out why the podcast was breaking. I don’t think I’ll be trying to switch again for a while – so much time wasted on this. Since the change involved playing around with DNS, reaching the site may be a little sketchy for the next 24 hours until the proper DNS records get propagated all over the world.
With regards to the “Play Now” feature - I discovered that the problem had to do with the 48k sample rate of the podcast so i had to go through all 19 previous podcasts, convert them back to wav format with a 44.1k sample rate, then back to MP3. It took a while, but it’s been done and the pages and posts have been updated. The good news is the file size will now be a little smaller with no noticeable loss in sound quality. All future podcasts will now be posted with a sample rate of 44.1k. Wow – I had no idea that maintaining a website could be so much work!
I just had to share some of my favorite pictures of SanBan over the past few months. He is the CUTEST kid in the world. Of course, I’m a little bias. I hope you enjoy them. They play in chronological order.
This has actually been broken for a while. Some of you may experience garbled audio if you try to use the “Play Now” feature available in the MTPB Blogs, downloads, and archives. This appears to only affect Flash Player 10. A workaround would be to either use the “download” link, subscribe to the podcast, or downgrade to Flash Player 9. I’ve tried this version on both a Mac and a PC and it works fine. I hope to find a solution soon and will let you know when it’s fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Even though I only missed 1 week, it feels like a lifetime. It really felt great to sit down at the piano and worship today. I kept the podcast original this week with the exception of a different variation of the song “Love Inside” that Jeremy introduced to me yesterday. I’m just blown away at how great God is and by how He can love us the way He does!
Jeremy came over today and we did a really rough “unplugged” recording of two new songs he wrote. I used the R-09HR to record them – the same device I use to record the MTPB blog. The piano seemed to bit too loud in both songs… We tried to compensate on the second song by moving the recorder closer to Jeremy and the guitar, but that didn’t help much. We only played through them a few times before the final take. Today was the first I’d heard them and I really like them both! Soundwave will be recording these songs and more in either 2009 or 2010 for our new album. It’s gonna rock! Please let us know what you think:
There was quite a bit of stuff going on today so I decided to do the podcast tomorrow. I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of the new Soundwave song ”Love Inside” in it. It’s going to be a good one – stay tuned!
I was able to search through the text of a database backup from a month ago and replace the PodPress settings record in the corrupted database! I don’t know why I didn’t think to try this last night/this morning. At any rate, the iTunes Store has the podcast cached from when things were broken so if you try to subscribe through iTunes right now, it probably won’t work until they update the podcast, but things should be good to go by tomorrow. The “play” and “download” links on the website are working, and if you use anything other than iTunes for podcasting, you should be good to go as well.
On a side note – you might be wondering what kind of vacation could possibly be had in Sonora, TX. Well, I’ll be sure to blog all about it when I get back. God bless!
Last night around 8:00 PM, I was trying to fix the MTPB WordPress Stats. It hasn’t been working since I updated to 2.6.5 a few days ago. I read something about modifying the theme to fix it. When I did this, Podpress broke and began complaining about the same thing. I worked on it until 4:00 AM this morning and tried everything I could think of including restoring the website completely from a backup. I’m pretty sure it has to do with a corrupt database entry which I do not have a recent backup of. At any rate, I am completely exhausted and fed up with Podpress. I have totally run out of ideas so I will ask around and try to get some help on this. Unfortunately, I leave tomorrow with my brothers out to Sonora on vacation and will have very little time to work on this till I get back next week. In the meantime, the podcast directory where you can manually play and/or download the audio files is here. I’m really sorry about this. Also, there won’t be a podcast this week since I’ll be out of town.