Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Year: 2009

  • stereotypic

    I should be going to bed, but my head is still going too fast. Maybe by the time I’m done here, it will slow down. A comment on someone’s Facebook post this morning sent my brain into full gear. The issue at hand was why Christian bands charge money (or perhaps charge too much sometimes) for albums, concerts, etc. The individual had some very strong feelings about this, and felt it was wrong for Christian’s to be charging for praise music. I chewed on that for a bit, and while I am a bit in agreement with that sentiment, there were some definite issues with the way the person presented the argument.

    Certainly, there seems to be a proliferation in recent years of Christian bands pumping out praise/worship albums. Often, I wonder how many are genuine? How many are in it for the money? How many are doing worship albums because it seems to be a ‘sure thing’? One would hope that the ‘superstars’ who make it big are putting the extra cash to good purposes, but that is between them and God.

    All that aside, the comment on Facebook was based on two things: All Christian bands sings praise music, and all Christian bands charge for their music. It also made a correlation to secular artists, and showed disgust for Christian bands making money off their music just like secular bands. To be clear, many ‘Christian bands’ don’t even sing decidedly Christian music. Some tackle the same issues that secular artists do. Some like to write love songs, just like secular artists do. Is it wrong if Christian bands have certain things in common with secular artists? I would hope not. Also, not all Christian bands  charge for their music either. Have a gander at noisetrade.com to see artists (Secular and Christian alike) that are trying to do things a little differently.

    To say that Christian bands, or rather, Christian artists shouldn’t make money from their music is a bit odd. I’m a Christian. Am I not allowed to make money doing my job? Is it a surprise that some Christians have chosen musical artistry as their occupation? Going back to the core of the idea even more, what about praise music? Shouldn’t that be free? If it’s all about God, how dare we put a price tag on worshiping God? However, consider this: The original ‘worship leaders’ in the Bible were the Levites. A division of the Levites were set apart by God to lead His people in praising Him. They didn’t just do this on Sundays, or during special celebrations. This was their job, and it was handed down from generation to generation. And they received compensation for this (gasp). A portion of the sacrifices (meat, grain, etc.) and offerings was designated to be the portion of the Levites. They were also given housing, and property to own. God made sure the people that were in charge of leading worship were well provided for.

    Coming back full circle then. Is it wrong for Christian artists to make money from praising God? No. In fact, it would be splendid if the church would support these people better. Unfortunately, it seems to have trouble enough supporting those that preach and teach the word of God, and those that are given the task of leading worship have a hard time not being lambasted for not catering to every whim of the church (who are we supposed to be worshipping?).

    To make sure my intent is clear, I didn’t write this to make the person on Facebook look silly. This is an issue I’ve stewed on many a time and struggled with in my mind. His comments on Facebook simply made my mind revisit this topic, and this time it gained some traction in the right direction. I wanted to help those who have wrestled with these questions too. Hope this helps.

  • noisetrade

    I was listening to the latest Relevant Podcast the other day, and they had an interview with Derek Webb that was very thought provoking and in the process he mentioned Noise Trade. I had heard about Noise Trade before, and even downloaded a couple albums. The idea is really cool: You can pay anything you want for an album, or you can tell five friends about it and get the album free. The albums I downloaded at the time seemed to be a bit lacking, but I visited it again today, and the selection has grown tremendously, and there seems to be some real quality music on there now (Derek Webb, for starters, although I’ve only heard a few of his songs).

    Going back to the core issue that he touched on though. Music is going, no, scratch that. Music has already gone digital. This makes it an infinitely reproducible commodity as one commenter said. Based on the laws of supply and demand, that makes it free (or close to free, since there are still distribution costs). Realistically, there has to be some way to make money from that, but you’re a bit at the mercy of the consumer now, since you can’t cut the supply (you could, but why?). I think a lot of artists are starting to get it, and doing some really cool experiments with pricing and marketing in the digital realm. The labels, however, seem to be drowning, gasping for breath, when the shore is mere feet away. If they would only look to the side, instead of the same way they’ve always been going.

  • unthawed

    This how-to assumes you’ve already read and followed most of Frozen. As mentioned in the previous article, this how-to is for Ubuntu 9.04. Once you have icecast and liveice working, you may want to use mp3’s as your source instead of live audio from your soundcard.

    The relevant bits are in liveice.cfg:

    SERVER hostnameofserver
    PORT 8000
    PASSWORD yourpasswordforicecast
    USE_LAME3 /usr/bin/lame
    NO_SOUNDCARD
    HALF_DUPLEX
    SAMPLE_RATE 22050
    BITRATE 32000
    MONO
    ENCODING QUALITY 30
    HTTP_LOGIN
    MOUNTPOINT live
    NAME, GENRE, PUBLIC, URL, and DESCRIPTION are all up to you
    PASSWORD your icecast password again
    MIXER
    PLAYLIST /home/user/someplaylistfile
    DECODER_COMMAND /usr/bin/mpg123
    UPDATE_DELAY 1
    MIX_CONTROL_AUTO

    The playlist file is simply plaintext, with one file per line, listed as the full path. Example:

    /home/user/music/song1.mp3
    /home/user/music/song2.mp3
    /home/user/music/song3.mp3

    Fire it up as before with:

    ./liveice -@ 2 -F liveice.cfg

    Skip the ‘-@ 2’ switch if you’re having trouble, and increase VERBOSE to 10 in liveice.cfg if necessary.

  • frozen

    Here at the college, we used to have a streaming media server running Windows Server 2003 for the purpose of broadcasting our athletic events. At some point, it broke, and it became apparent that it would be necessary to rebuild said media server. Being the fan of Microsoft that I am, I decided to go a different route, and try my hand at running Icecast on Linux. Originally, I intended to use ogg for audio encoding, but given our user-base, I decided to do mp3 instead. I didn’t want the headaches of dealing with plugins, and weird file associations on Windows, and making the user jump through twenty hoops to listen to our games. My initial concerns were with licensing, since mp3 is a proprietary format, and typically looked down upon with scorn by the linux community. So I went to the source. The licensing for mp3 explicity permits using the mp3 format without licensing fees if you are a non-profit, and are making absolutely no money from your use of the mp3 format. If you aren’t sure about that, see http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html.

    So now for the fun stuff. Ices2 doesn’t support mp3, so it was off to find an encoder that supported mp3 and would talk to Icecast2. In case you’re not too familiar with Icecast or Ices, you must have 2 parts to stream audio. A front end (Icecast) to serve the comressed audio to clients, and a back end encoder (Ices, darkice, liveice, etc.) to compress the audio from whatever source you are using.

    We are running on actual server hardware, which doesn’t have any built-in audio capability. It also only has one available PCI slot, which is used by the RAID card, because it is a 1U rackmount chassis. So we bought a Startech USB Audio Adapter from newegg.com for our input source. We’re using Ubuntu 9.04, although 9.10 is coming out in several days.

    (more…)

  • journey

    Sometimes my devotional life just plain stinks. Sometimes it isn’t too bad, and every once in a while, it reaches fantastic. More often than not, though, I skim through a chapter of the Bible each morning, eat my breakfast, and go to work without ever giving what I’ve read a second thought. Today, that changes, and I’m giving the world the opportunity to keep me accountable to this. I’m starting a spin off of my website called God Impact.

    Here’s the plan: Every day, starting at the beginning (Genesis 1:1), I’ll read a small portion of the Bible. I find that if I try to read too much, I forget what I read at the beginning, or I rush through it, and don’t get anything out of what I’ve read.

    Here’s the interesting part (hopefully). I’ll post what I’ve read, and then follow that up with some sort of commentary/insight into the passage. I’m not promising anything profound, but I’ll leave that up to God. If you like what I’ve written, or if it encourages you in any way, feel free to subscribe via the RSS feed. You can even leave comments on what you took away from the passage if you like.

    For those of you on Facebook, Multiply, LiveJournal, or Blogger, I don’t intend to cross-post any of this to those sites, sorry. If you want to read it, you’ll have to visit http://godimpact.shanebishop.net. Of course, that all may change, but that’s the plan for now.