Kevin Bresnahan

How things have changed. I ordered a bunch of Tone Poet & Classic Vinyl LPs a few years back and after about 4 months, I contacted them to cancel the order and they never responded to my e-mails. I ended up getting a couple of them in and then they cancelled the rest.

I had a cart full of those upcoming Kevin Gray mastered CDs but then I looked at my music library and realized I have all of them in at least one digital iteration with some of them on more than one digital release. I'm done chasing the next best sounding CD. More for the rest of you.

Merry Christmas everyone. This one is tough for me as it's my first without either my father or mother. It's going to be weird not being able to call mom tomorrow on Christmas morning. I hope it's not too bad. My daughters should keep it from being too blue. Great Christmas CD BTW...

I find the iPhone a hell of a lot harder to operate than my old Samsung Galaxy. It's harder to text. It's harder to call. It's hard to setup. It uses stupid shit like defaulting to HEIC pictures instead of JPEG pictures. Have you ever tried to send someone a picture from your iCloud? They likely cannot open it unless they have an Apple PC. It defaults to AIFF instead of mp3, most likely because they invented a format just because they're Apple & they want to force people to use their player app. One thing I really hate is that this iPhone has terrible predictive texting capabilities compared to my old Galaxy phones. I'm talking about when you're swiping a text to someone and you mention something like a winery, say Kinsella Vineyard. With the Samasung Galaxy, you type in Kinsella Vineyards one time and any time after that, if you type Ki, the Samsung pops "Kinsella" down at the bottom as an auto-fill option. After you select "Kinsella", it'll then pop up "Vineyard". The iPhone never gives that option. It requires you to type out the entire name Kinsella Vineyard over & over & over. It's very annoying. And I never had to do anything special to answer any calls on my Galaxy so I don't know what your wife did to her phone to make it act like that. In fact, this iPhone sometimes requires me to point it to my face just to get it to show up in my car for CarPlay. This is actually very annoying as the whole reason I was to use CarPlay is because I don't want to have to look at my phone at all. That's some bad photoshopping!!

Regarding "Am I Blue", I haven't spun it in a long while so maybe it's time to give it another chance. I remember it being kinda boring. More like "Am I Stoned" than "Am I Blue". I like slow blues & I love ballad albums, so it's not that. Like I said, I'll have to give it another listen. I do remember being disappointed in Joe Henderson's playing the most.

I can't tell if you're kidding or not but no, I am not going to install iTunes on my Windows PC. It's a sucky app and it takes over as your default player for everything. I don't want that Apple app anywhere near my music. The thing that bugs me the most is that all I want is my music onto my phone. I don't need anything else Apple "thinks" I need done. I don't need it sync'ed to their money-making cloud. I don't need to be prompted to buy anything from their store. But Apple decided that just letting me mount my phone as an external drive was not in their best interest, so they made it impossible to do. SharePod did just that, but Apple figured out how to block it on iPhones after the iPhone 11. I have an iPhone 14. I only got this phone because my daughters want to FacteTime me, otherwise I'd still have a Samsung Galaxy. FWIW, I use Exact Audio Copy to rip my CDs. I have for many many years. It's the best ripper ever made, especially if you like to tinker with the settings like I do. Some of the reverse sensors are really nice to have. I didn't realize how useful they were until I had to drive a car that didn't have them. They can save you from many parking lot idiots who fly around like they're on a highway.

How do you get your music onto your iPhone? I only recently got an iPhone and I am not going to install any special Apple music player app just to get my music onto this phone. I used to use Sharepod to get my mp3 files onto my iPod, but that only works up to the iPhone 11.

I just searched around Amazon and it's gotten really bad for these things. I've never heard of any of the top rated players and most of them have no shock protection, which means they'll skip.

It's likely just a rebranded drive from some Malaysian manufacturer. Also, that won't work as a car player. It's only for hooking up to a PC as an external drive. There's no way to play audio drives with this drive in standalone mode. There are no play/pause/stop/skip buttons or a display to show what track is playing.

I looked into buying a portable CD player with USB output capabilities but like Lon says, most of the reviews say that most of them skip fairly easily. Also, buying a known name is no guarantee that you won't get the exact same drive if you bought a cheap, no-name drive. There are only so many manufacturers making these things today. Even the big names just rebrand these junk drives as it cheaper for them than designing/building their own. I do understand it when you get a new CD in and you want to simply spin that disc, but it's not that hard to rip it to mp3 (I use VBR Q0) and copy those files onto a USB thumbdrive (~$5 for a small one these days) and bring that out with you. As an added benefit, no skips.

I was given this book to read many years ago and I've only just gotten around to reading it.

Mistletoe Magic - Holiday Jazz Improvisations - Various Artists (Palo Alto). This is such a good Jazz album it's almost unfortunate that it gets called a "Christmas album". Sure, the melodies are all well-trodden Christmas tunes but these artists take them well away from those melodies. A couple of times they even skew outside a tiny bit. If I had one complaint it would be the excessive use of reverb on some tracks/instruments. On the first track, Hino's trumpet sounds horrible. If reverb had a setting, it would've been set to 11 on this one. It sounded like he was playing in an airplane hanger. Great bands here: 1) Elvin Jones Quintet - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Terumasa Hino, cornet; Dave Leibman, soprano sax; Kenny Kirkland, piano; George Mraz, bass; Elvin Jones, drums. 2) Free Flight - Silent Night/Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Jim Walker, flute; Milcho Leviev, keys; Jim Lacefield, bass; Ralph Humphrey, drums. 3) Larry Vuckovich Sextet – We Three Kings Of Orient Are Tom Harrell, trumpet; Charles McPherson, alto sax; Jerome Richardson, soprano sax; Larry Vukovich, piano; Ray Drummond, bass; Eddie Moore, drums. 4) Full Faith & Credit Big Band - O Holy Night Soloists - Jim Benham, flugelhorn; Dave Eshelman, trombone 5) Richie Cole Quintet - Sleigh Ride Richie Cole & Art Pepper, alto sax; Roger Kellaway, piano; Bob Magnusson, bass; Billy Higgins, drums. 6) Meredith D'Ambrosio/Hank Jones Duo - The Christmas Waltz Meredith D'Ambrosio, vocal; Hank Jones, piano. 7) Mal Waldron Quartet - The Christmas Song Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Mal Waldrom, piano; David Friesen, bass; Billy Higgins, drums. 😎 Les DeMerle Sextet - Little Bebop Drummer Boy Bobby Shew, flugelhorn; Don Menza, tenor sax & flute; Lanny Morgan, flute; Jack Wilson, piano; Bob Magnusson, bass; Les DeMerle, drums. 9) Full Faith & Credit Big Band - We Three Kings Of Orient Are Soloist - Paul Robertson, alto sax

That looks like a killer band but I have to say, if I saw that CD cover in a bin back in the day, I would've skipped right over it. What a horrible cover design. It's like a graphic arts major vomited all over it.

This is the time of the year when you really should expect shipping delays. Every shipper is trying move a ton of packages right now & unless the shipper paid the extra money, it may get put on the back burner as everyone tries to get their packages in before Christmas. It'll get even worse over the next week. I try not to ship anything after Thanksgiving unless I really have to.

It contained: BST-84029 The Big Beat BST-84049 A Night In Tunisia BST-84054 Meet You At The Jazz Corner Of The World Vol. 1 BST-84055 Meet You At The Jazz Corner Of The World Vol. 2 BST-84156 The Freedom Rider BST-84245 Like Someone In Love BST-84258 The Witch Doctor BST-84347 Roots And Herbs GXF 3060 Pisces (Japanese)

Mosaic already put out 6 CDs of that material:

Just ask Jordi to do it. He can probably even create a Mosaic box cover to give that extra oomph.

Or, let's be honest here... US buyers either.

I was told that their biggest problem near the end was not their international expansion but instead a few bad business deals they made with some of the big labels. They agreed to buy large quantities of new titles (like that Britney Spears you mention) as well as quite a few expensive box sets, like the Miles Davis boxes with the metal spines, and they forced each location to stock some crazy number like 100 boxes. Because these boxes were expensive, they busted the local buyer's monthly budget for anything else and because these sat on the shelf, they couldn't order much of anything for months at a time. They forced the stores to stock stuff they couldn't sell fast enough.

Hank Jones also played harpsichord on his Impulse! LP "Happenings". I am not a fan of it and from the face Hank made when I handed him the LP to sign, he didn't either, asking me, "Did you really like this"? I replied, "I thought the black part of the cover would look good with you autograph on it". He smiled and signed.

I'm hesitant to use SSDs for long term backups, as I've read that they should stay powered up or they can lose data. It makes sense when I think about it. Currently, all of my SSDs are attached to PCs that I leave on mostly all the time to save wear & tear on the internal hard drive. I've had good luck (knock on wood) with internal hard drives. That being said, I always have a back up HD with my system image on it in case that changes. My third backup SSD drive is not really being set aside as a backup. I have it attached to a Raspberry Pi mini PC that I have Volumio on and I use it as a music player in my main listening area. I access the music using my laptop web browser to access Volumio and it's pretty good. A bit cludgey with my large music collection and it doesn't find every single folder so I won't say it's perfect, but it works well for me. Total cost was about $225, including the external 1 TB SSD.

The links still work if you don't have these tunes. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the 3 Pledgemusic tunes in a recent PC switchover & I never did print out the artwork so that's gone too.

4 TB for under $100: https://www.newegg.com/seagate-ironwolf-st4000vn006-4tb/p/N82E16822185030

The thing that's weird is that the action of playing music off of that external hard drive should be enough to keep it playing anyway. Usually they only go to sleep when there's no activity. I actually used an external hard drive at work in my office for years & I never had an issue with it shutting down mid-play. I did have it "disappear" when I'd go to play some music off of it after a period of inactivity but never when it was playing. On my Windows PC at home, I only use external drives to back up my music & data though. On my Windows mini tower PC (I know - who has a mini tower these days?), I installed a second 1 TB internal hard drive (not RAID) that I use as an internal "external" hard drive that I only use for my music. Because it's on the internal PC bus, it's faster and it never shuts down due to any power saving features. Internal drives like this are really cheap these days. BTW - on my Windows PC, I use the old "Windows Media Player" app to play my music. As dated as it is, it handles a huge library like mine better than any other music playing app I've tried - and I've tried a lot of them.

If this new PC is a Windows machine, you change change the power setting so that the external HD never goes to sleep. It's probably under the USB power setting where it asks if you want to shut off USB ports to save power. You'll get a nag message when you turn it off but just ignore it. I turn off pretty much all of those power savers because of things like this.