Hi & thanks for stopping by to read for a minute!  I'll use this soapbox page to let you know how things are going with Music Sojourn, changes and improvements that we are making to the site, and other things that might impact what we do to bring you the music on Music Sojourn.

Topics:

1. Real Audio: FM Quality & Stereo on Play-LO
2. MP3 Streams
3. Direct Support is keeping us alive
4. Questions about "Subscription" service and "server overloads."
5. Questions about Windows Media Player vs. Real Audio:
6. Misc. Topics

1. We are bringing back "FM Quality" STEREO Real Audio!  Starting with Echoes Volume 114 and Takin' Ya Back Volume 3, we introduce "Play-HI" buttons which will launch Real Audio 44.1 Kbps streams.  You will probably need a "Broadband" (DSL, T1, ISDN or Cable Modem) connection, though they MIGHT play over a GOOD 56k connection (be warned, if they do play on 56k, they may take much longer to load, plus may rebuffer a lot - if it works ok for you on 56k, let us know).

We are also starting to make the "Play-LO" Real Audio files STEREO.  With the new Real Audio 8 encoders, the 20.7 k Stereo sound almost as good as the 20.7 Mono, and many people have asked for the Stereo streams.

2. Related to 1.) above, we are eliminating the "Live365" MP3-HI Stereo on some produced Programs.  Many of you have complained to us about the ads or other things about these streams, so the new Real Audio streams will not have those.  However, we will soon be adding in Promotion spots for other programs on Music Sojourn.  These are not paid advertising, but a service by us for our producers to help them promote their programs.

3. We are surviving because of your DIRECT SUPPORT!  IF we had not had a good initial showing of direct support since we added this option in February, Music Sojourn would have almost certainly closed down like many other internet sites.  Internet advertising CONTINUES TO BE ALMOST WORTHLESS, and we have eliminated all but one banner advertising agency from the Music Sojourn site.  For the long term, it is probably in our best interests to remain associated with one high quality advertiser.  We have also eliminated all but a few banners for "affiliate" programs which also don't work well, with the notable exception of Amazon & CDnow for music purchases - your continued purchases of music or other items through our links also helps support our efforts!

If you have not considered a direct contribution to Music Sojourn, we would encourage you to do so, even at a level as low as $3.00!  If everyone who uses Music Sojourn regularly contributed only $3.00 every once in a while, we could expand what we do here significantly.  If you're a regular listener and there's a specific reason why you would not contribute to our efforts, Let me know.

SPECIAL THANKS to those of you who have contributed directly by check or money order!  We realize that it is not as convenient, but it provides us with an extra 16% that we would lose to the credit card processing costs!  For more information, click here.

4. Answers to questions some of you have asked about "Subscription" service and "server overloads."  Some of you who have been coming by Music Sojourn for a while remember when we were considering (& preparing) for a subscription service for higher, FM Quality files, plus the "server at capacity" problems we were having then.  This comment is typical: 

"I see the pleas for direct support and nothing about a premium service. What's going on? I'm confused about the direction you're headed.  .... The main thing I want is not to get bumped off or unable to access the streams in middle of the day, which is when I listen. I'm not terribly interested in paying for a service that runs out of streams when I want to listen, which is what happened all last year."

A: You will no longer get bumped off or be unable to access the streams in middle of the day because we have moved off of that very expensive and very limited Real Server and set up our own server for all streams. The old service could limit the actual number of users unless we paid more, which is why we had to get rid of it. Our new server will not limit users, streams or access unless we get enough use to totally use up the provider's total available bandwidth (not entirely impossible, but unlikely under current usage levels - probably only likely if we run the Victoria's Secret show or worse). 

We have abandoned the idea of a "subscription" service because relatively few people signed up for it, and we are using the standard public radio model of asking people to voluntarily pledge their support for the programming.

5. Questions about Windows Media Player vs. Real Audio: We get this question in one form or another every so often: "Please consider encoding your streams for Windows Media Player. ... Do you have some tie-in with Real?"

A:  With respect to Windows Media Player and Real Player, we have no tie
in with Real, and are not locked into using Real Player exclusively.  As an extremely small staff, it took us quite a while to work out a method for displaying the song titles with the programs that we could duplicate easily enough to do on a weekly basis with programs like Echoes. This is difficult to do with a "continuous" program like the produced shows that we host. It requires creating files for each song played on the program, and then timing out the exact change point for each song, calculating that time in seconds, and adding that time into each file so that it changes at the correct time - like a very precise slide show. It took a while to work out all of the details to be able to produce this result on a regular basis. 

Real has a product that allows us to do this somewhat easily at this time. When we last looked at Windows Media player, there was no way for us to do this process for a continuous program. Maybe there is now, or soon, but it will take time for us to research how to do it, and see how we can do it easily on a regular basis.

With respect to sound quality, I have listened to many different encoding schemes. About 7-9 months ago, I observed that Windows Media at 48 kbps sounded pretty close to Real Audio at 64 kbps (which we were using then) and we looked into using it. But Real's next release of RA8 (update) brought the quality of the 44.1 kbps Real Audio to the same quality (it now gives a 16 KHz audio range like the 64 kbps streams used to), which is why we are now using it. It sounds the same or slightly better than the Win Media of the same rate, and better than the 56 kbps files we use for the Live365 streams. at this time, it is far more efficient for us to re-encode Echoes to 44.1 kbps Real Audio and use the same, already done, real text files and scripts for the song displays!

6. Thanks to so many of you who provided feedback and suggestions on our recent efforts to improve the page layouts for the Volume Guides on the Echoes series.  Our young interns, David, Mike & Eric are now implementing the changes on most of the other series.  We hope that you find this new page layout more concise, less cluttered, and easier to navigate.

7. The WEB becomes a LESS FRIENDLY place everyday.  Remember cooperative spirit and friendly exchange of links, etc?  Most of that is dissappearing as everyone promotes their own interests.  We always liked AMG - All Music Guide, and in the past linked many of our album titles on the playlist pages to them.  We checked, by the way, and they had no posted policy about linking to them or not.  But you'll find that any links on our playlist pages now just go to a blank AMG page because they made another change in their link structure.  So we're removing all links to them as we can.  Sorry for the bad links until then.  For album info, we'll start linking to CDDB when we can.

more coming shortly ....  Let me know of any additional topics or info that you would like to see presented here.

Scott Ericson