Martin Geisler Online

There’s a storm here in Denmark tonight — I can hear how the wind howls, as it sweeps past Skejbygaard. It’s kind of cozy to sit indoor and listen to the wind outside — not that I hear it that much, with XMMS running constantly on my computer…

I turn all my CD’s into Ogg Vorbis files using Grip. The latest addition to my collection is The Lord of the Rings Soundtrack which I got for my birthday. We can’t buy the film on DVD yet, but at least we can buy the soundtrack. When listening to it, you can see the film in your head — it’s actually very nice. Enya has made two of the tracks, which only makes things better :-)

I just stumbled upon something called Ogg Vorbis the other day. Ogg Vorbis is a new audio encoding format similar to mp3. The advantage of Ogg Vorbis is that it’s opensource, without the patent-problems that plague mp3 and free. It’s also slightly better that mp3, which means that the files are smaller.

So I’ve started to re-rip all my Cd’s and encode them in Ogg Vorbis. I use Grip to automate the task of ripping and encoding the Cd’s. Grip first asks freedb for information about the disc, it then uses cdparanoia to do the ripping and then starts oggenc to do the encoding. A pretty cool program.

I’m still waiting for my 10 Cd’s to arrive, but with a little luck I’ll get them tonight. Then I can start the ripping :-)

Today I ordered a pile of new CDs — 10 CDs in total! It all started when I discovered that Karl Jenkins had made more than one album with Adiemus. In fact he’s made four of them — I had only listened to the first one Adiemus — Songs Of Sanctuary. So I when downtown to look for the remaining three albums. But I could only find one of them, so I went searching on the web. I found two Danish stores that had the albums: www.gufmusik.dk and www.cdskiven.dk. The first shop was the cheapest, but they also had fewer titles than the second shop. At first I thought that would be a problem, but they told me that they had all the titles that I wanted in stock, even thought they hadn’t updated their webpages.

Now that I was searching for good music I also remembered that I’d heard some Era. Their music sound a bit like Enya / Enigma / Adiemus which means that it’s good :-) So I also bought their first album.

I searched further, and found some CDs by Jean-Michel Jarre. My dad has his album In Concert Houston & Lyon which I’ve heard a lot. It’s a live recording where he plays some of his best songs. But now I’ll get a chance to hear all the songs of his CDs, since I’ve bought six of them :-)

So now I’m looking forward to receiving the Cd’s. According to www.gufmusik.dk they will be shipped next Monday.