The Weblog is Alive with the Sound of Music

My friends, I bid you to look left and scroll down. Thither you will find three music players, all of which I have named "My Best Minstrel," though this text does not seem to have appeared with the gadget, but that is all right. What is not all right, though, are that lousy pink play button that I am not allowed to change and the inconvenient size of the device that force unattractiveness upon my beautiful weblog. For reasons such as these, I have placed My Best Minstrels beneath the weblog archive. All these files are in mp3 format, so they should load and play smoothly, and if I find a way to do set such a thing up, all my friends could place these files on their iDevices. Then you could listen to me all the time!

By the way, I edited the recordings of all three pieces so they would sound better. I changed some of the dynamics in "Adagio," but only for the computer. The ones that have always been there are far better for a human performer. In "The City in the Sea" I changed some of the actual notes as well as a number of dynamics. All these changes are better for both humans and computers. In "Midnight Feast at the Temple of Springtime" I added pedal markings that the computer was not playing acceptably. A human should understand, so these are not going in any printing of the sheet music. Also, I sped up the tempo for all three of them. Thus, having meticulously looked and listened to each one again and again, carefully weighing what is the fine and the beautiful, I have attained something far more pleasing to my perfectionism.

At this point I will explain how I managed to put these recordings onto the internets. First, I created the music files using Finale 2007, and then I saved them in wav format from there. For some imbecilic reason Finale does not support mp3 file creation for the GPO MIDI's. Regardless, I am able to use my profile at fuzz.com as a makeshift converter between wav and mp3 files, which I am otherwise unable to do. Thus I uploaded the wav files to fuzz.com and then re-downloaded them in their new format. But how to get these files on the weblog when Blogger does not directly support them? The answer lies elsewhere in the machine that is google.com, in fact, in two different places. First there is Google Sites, which allows an individual to make a webpage for free. This comes with an amount of space on which I can upload certain kinds of files. Furthermore, I can and did make the site such that I alone can access it, so effectively it is just online storage for whatever I want to put there. Obviously, I put my music files onto my Google site, but how to get them to play on the weblog? The answer to that is Google Gadgets, which allows the user to search for neat devices to put on web pages like this one. I searched for an mp3 player and chose the one that I knew to be safe and honest (and ugly). Following its instructions, I was easily able to add it to the side of the weblog. Huzzah! Finally, I think I should mention that I did not come up with this on my own. I found instructions on the internets for everything after I began to use Google.

Now it is time to groove! Groovy, swell, and neato!