Stereo is one of my favorite dual albums, with its counterpart Mono, all of which comes from mastermind Paul Westerberg. I’ve come to realize that I get attached to music that has sentimental appeal, and even more so when it can hit the gut on a personal level as though the lyrics are being drawn straight from your soul.

Glenn Case tried to put his skills to the test by playing the entire Stereo record by his lonesome. You have access to the entire digital album (just mp3s) with no nickels or pennies attached. The cover effort is definitely tolerable. A song or two might not have the flare that Paul puts in, but it proves they are well-written songs. Paul pretty much did things on his own with this double-disc and the raw output makes you feel better than anything else that could be raw (I can’t rock too hard with raw vegetables or raw wounds).

So take your downloads and run. Or just sit back and soak up the noise. There is much more you can do with it, but you need to start somewhere. That’s what I did; I started to truly listen to music. I found some powerful things on my journey. I am now building my own highways and hopefully you can see where I’ve been, you can take the same path, or you can bathe in the personal history of humankind.

Wordpress updates are often needed for security fixes and the most recent additions (v2.5) to usability are pretty nice. The negative end of things is correcting plugin bugs, confirming database integrity, and revising my custom-developed theme. Luckily I don’t have a heavy load of intricate sites that all need updating, but even the few that I oversee need to be tweaked for a smooth ride across the interverse. I’m still looking around for plugin alternatives, minor error corrections, and an eased mind.

I’ve already put a few enhancing tools in their place. I even got over the terrible native tagging system and managed to ditch UltimateTagWarrior without losing my favorite goodies.

And here’s where I’m heading:

• Replace AJAX commenting plugin
  -replacement no longer necessary
• Look into Database errors stemming from table wp_post2cat
  SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY cat_ID
  -SOLVED! It was an outdated sitemap generator.
• Find alternative or fix for secondary blog theme features.
• Believe I can fly

Just about everything is where it should be. I guess updates aren’t bad at all.

The yearly festival known as SXSW offers the universe at large the ability to download a slew of free mp3s in the form of a torrent. This year as well as most are full of indie noises and some of the more popular acts like Bloc Party and other recognizables. Some random stranger decided to consolidate a page that had all previous torrents including the most recent one since 2005. The goodness can be enjoyed in this direction. Everybody has their own taste, so get ready to delete a handful of tunes if you have any selective likeness for music. I like weeding through for gems so this is a treasure hunt for me. The torrents should take a while to download, so just let utorrent sit around until you can open your present and unwrap your music in ears.

Any of the new musicians with a guitar that consider themselves folk artists might not have ever listened to music from real old folks. I have nothing against the newer, acoustically pretty sound that is called folk today, but I figured I’d bring things into better view to see where folk music comes from- everywhere and everywhen. I am no purist but I like the dawn of recorded sound and the culture that it documented. It’s a school for the recreational song lover; it’s a leisure education of musical entertainment.

Back when folk was revived in the 50s and 60s, there existed a man named Harry Smith who compiled a set of 78s for an album on Folkways Records. Almost anybody who was anybody had heard the songs or at least a few. The compilation became sort of a bible of folks songs that would spread the folk scene. I have not heard the whole collection, but I am aware of a good handful of the tunage.

In fact, seven ancient tracks are available on the Internet Archive for your mp3 needs. Wikipedia has the recordings on the bottom of the entry of the anthology.

Continue your collection with Lead Belly, Mississippi John Hurt, Henry Thomas, and the list continues.

Archivist Jim Blackwood has done an excellent job pulling off a quality matrix recording of Calexico, the indie/mariachi/alt. country rock band straight outta Tucson. The results can be downloaded for free at the always legal archive.org. The band has a few unique qualities, and their output is probably a preferred taste. I enjoy a handful of what I heard in the bootleg, especially the covers toward the end (*Falling Rain). Remind me to pick up Link Wray’s album.

Some websites die, progress for the worse, or benefit for recreation. Ideas get recycled, reinvented, abused, and improved. So it goes with web-based audio technology. If you need a replacement site or are just looking for new ways to listen to free music without trouble, then read on.

Albumbase is Dead

There once was a site called albumbase.com that pointed to complete albums uploaded on Rapidshare and other download sites. It has been down for some time, but more and more smaller communities are returning in their place.

Album Hunt is a similar service that offers full album archives to registered users. After signing up, searching is as simple as typing the album name or the artist. The only problem is the downloads no longer work after a while or if someone uploads a copyrighted album and it violates the hosting terms of service.

Musire is another free album downloads source, but it doesn’t require registration. Places like these thrive on confirming broken links and fresh uploads. The more users, the more chance of a growing selection.

Online Media

SeeqPod is an interactive search that functions like a web music player.
Features in-browser controls for instant listening, as well as playlist management to add, rearrange, and delete your queue of song files. This is not made for downloading, since it gives no option to save mp3s- only to sample them.

Radio.blog.club is a search tool that lets you preview each result (it actually lets you play the entire song) to the right of your search. When you are ready to share it or post it, copy the code to embed the mini flash player to your blog, email, or other internet destination.

Pandora

If pandora is giving you the same old recommendations with the same songs, try finetune which offers basically the same thing.

Happy musical adventures to you all! If you haven’t already, be sure to check my original 11 search engines for finding mp3s.

Since the beginning of January, Alexa Redirect links have been deprecated and no longer function. They work as a prevention to get to your site.

It used to be possible to inject your link with a forced redirect from alexa: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://liquidparallax.com would tell Alexa someone is going to my homepage. It was debated whether this would send info to your rank. In any case it could harm your Google Page Rank and make links inaccessible when the redirect is down or is broken, which has happened.

There is plenty of talk on how to increase your score. And along with it all is bad advice or misinformed instruction. Another myth: installing the website widget has no standing on your numbers unless one of your site visitors decides to use the toolbar as a result of being curios about your widget.

There is no way to increase your Alexa Rank beyond what your site is capable of performing. You can boost your site’s traffic rank for Alexa if you actually have traffic. A rank of 1 means you have the most traffic that has been monitored by Alexa (right now it’s Yahoo.com). Each number is a position, and you can’t get any higher without having Alexa users visit your site more often than those ahead of you. There are probably billions of domains out there, and it will only get harder to maintain low numbers as the internet expands. And if you just start getting involved you can get noticed by Alexa.

What to really do

1. Install Alexa status for your browser. A non-invasive solution would be to install firefox add-on SearchStatus, which takes up less space than a tab, and can rest in your status bar. For Internet Explorer or for Alexa’s very own browser display, download it from the source. This is the only way to contribute to Alexa’s traffic directly- by being a user.
2. Make sure visitors of your site are users of Alexa by following the above download.
3. Have quality pages; don’t just focus on your main page. Instead of having one page get a ton of hits, make all of your pages worthy of being popular. Unique pages count as part of your rank. So instead of Visitor A going your homepage, Visitor A could visit all of your pages, which would be more helpful with your rank. Refreshing pages does nothing, so don’t give your bandwidth a workout by having your readers boost your traffic hits. Visits are read on a daily basis, so there is a potential for 365 views by the same person of the same page. In addition to Page Views, Reach is counted as part of the formula for your rank. So your best bet is to have a wide audience instead of a few close friends go to your website.

These facts are all you need, and they are what count. Don’t believe anything else except what comes from the source.

A technical way of utilizing all this knowledge would be to set up an automated browser script to visit random pages of a domain within a day [Not that I want to do this for this purpose, but does anyone know of a freeware program that could easily cycle through pages within a domain]. Having multiple Alexa-persons using the script on your domain would yield good results on an emerging site or an unadvertised site. Better yet would be to have legitimate content and quality material that would bring repeated visits from actual readers.

The year is about through and I’d like to scan through the past of liquidparallax.com. I’m usually the person who scolds other site for doing “This Month’s Best Posts Roundup,” but this is slightly different. In over a year of doing this blog, I’ve never put myself in an egocentric position and said “Internet users can’t get enough of me. Instead of being more useful I’ll just repeat myself.” Au contraire my friends. It is my hope that you do not have to suffer through recycled material. Nobody cares for used underwear, and that’s where I don’t come in… There does come a time, though, when things get overlooked especially when I first started this site and nobody really saw it. I’m not a fan of number crunching accounting type stuff, so I like to keep non-fun math out of things. That’s why I’ll skim through some of the pages that get a lot of traffic without getting statistical, and I’ll jump into some pages that haven’t received any recognition and give some background to my madness.

Most Popular

Arbitrarily choosing the first 6 with the most hits this month.
/2007/07/11/ultimate-list-of-free-legal-mp3-music-downloads/
This is my most popular page, offering a treasure trove of days of music listening, with hours spent on finding something for everybody. I still update this, but tend to add good finds in new separate posts. This should be your first stop if you want to expand your collection without googling through useless garbage.

/2007/04/12/ten-best-places-to-search-free-music/
Oddly enough, this lists 11 search engines or searchable music-file-crawling sites. The better ones are listed at the bottom, and a few that I already knew of but forgot have been posted in comments. G2P, for example is a pretty good choice similar to my #10 selection. I made this because my old favorite music search engine died.

/2006/12/11/347-exercises-you-can-do-without-equipment/
OK, so it’s a little over a year since this came to be, but this is a lifespan recap. I’m glad people are searching for this and finding it. People are not always lazy! If you have a room that won’t fit sports equipment or exercise machines, or you just don’t want to pay a gym to use sweaty equipment- Try a few of these exercises. I try to do these on occasion. Since then, I’ve got an exercise ball that is both good for light to moderate exercise and strengthens core muscles for those with back problems. I wrote this to consolidate exercises I knew of. I knew if I didn’t do this, I’d forget to. And I needed some self-inspiration to stay active more often.

/2006/11/26/threadless-clothing/
A short and pointless post expressing my liking for the designs made for some of these shirts. It beats me why of all pages this had to be popular. Blame Google for making this rank the 5th domain spot on a search for “threadless clothing.”

/2006/10/16/how-to-get-rid-of-acne-forever/
A guide of advice for acne sufferers of all ages. Just clean your face at least once a day (preferable twice a day), apply Benzoyl Peroxide to affected or potentially affected areas and leave it on to dry. Then apply acne-safe (not pore clogging) lotion to keep skin in shape. When I was younger, I did a bunch of research on treatments, and this came on top.

/2007/06/09/windows-itunes-scripts-downloads/
The XP/2000/Vista version of Applescripts. Basic, but effective javascript-based tools to create playlists, adjust data that would otherwise be impossible without hacking iTunes. Makes iTunes do a few more things. I created this post as a test to explore scripting that I wasn’t familiar with; Plus I use iTunes.

Personal Faves:

Seven more that didn’t make the list that I find are just as enjoyable, if not as helpful to me.

/2007/10/19/mp3tag-actions-empower-your-digital-collection/
This one is getting popular, but doesn’t make a top spot. A handful of great mini-tools for keeping music tags in line. Works for iTunes or any other player that’ll read id3 or tags from mp4 or any other filetype. I use these for my own use often and figured they would benefit others.

2007/12/09/funny-answering-machine-voice-messages/
If you’re a jokester like me, you like fooling people or pulling a leg or two. Humor is medicine for the frowney clowney. It’s the next best thing next to exercising. Use my recordings, or develop your own hilarious greetings on your telephone machine. Also includes the funniest prank call ever. This one was a quick idea I had when recording a personal message for my cellphone. Maybe others will contribute their creations.

/2007/07/16/how-to-manage-your-digital-music-library/
The full 5 step solution for starting a collection of mp3s or lossless whatevers. Doing a little research will fine-tune a perfect collection. Find out where to listen to samples, get recommendations, and figure out most favored albums or popular songs. Even get tips on how to shop wisely, use amazon to sort buried deals, split secret tracks, tweak volume levels, powertagging options, and final personalization.

/2007/02/13/the-most-memorable-voices/
Voices are awesome. They have a vocal quality about them as well as a musical one. Unique voices are common, but a few stand out. This list is a good one, with audio clips or video for most of the contestants. I took a while to remember some of the people’s names here, but I got it done.

/2007/10/27/easy-batch-download-for-mp3s-betterpropaganda/
A compiled list of mainly indie (but recognizable) mp3s from betterpropaganda.com and it is only available here in this quick and simple format. Be sure to visit betterPropaganda to check out legel downloads that get updated about once every week.

/2006/12/08/itune-up-free-itunes-fixes-and-tools/
Freeware addons and complimentary programs that strenthen iTunes. Many people dislike iTunes (it seems like the most popular music player though) and these fixes might bring haters back. I’m not an Apple fanboy, but iTunes does the most of what I want while other players lack minor features that outdo the benefits.

2007/04/14/listen-to-25-million-tracks-students-only/
This is not popular, but it should be. You can listen to a million songs, but they are DRMed (wmv). You can unDRM them yourself risking violating the Terms, but even having a huge library to listen to on WMP or the Ruckus Player anytime you want is fantastic. The catalog is extensive going back to blues and oldies like the eMusic catalog, but also includes big, BIG name artists. Think of all the iTunes artists, that’s close to what Ruckus has.