finally, a useful mp3 player

around the office or the studio, we had more or less standardized over the last few years on musicmatch as our favorite and default mp3 player/manager. somewhere over the course of it's history, musicmatch got bought by yahoo and that's when things got really ugly. the software became a constant source of restart, computer freeze, headaches and drama...

we've been keeping an eye around for something better - and remain outside of the microsoft monopoly; windows media player never quite delivered anyway!

about a month ago, i gave the media center 11 from j-river a try and things have been nothing but impressive, to say the least (the undah-dub replaced musicmatch on his laptop and his desktop faster then you could say 'be gone'). this player really works for what a true music fan would want an mp3/audio manager to be. the interface takes some getting used to - that's because this player does so much more. but the adherence to standards, such as the mp3 id tags specification, makes it a real savior.

read around the net about it and the reviews have mostly been good. it costs $40 for the full registered version but you can download a trial version and give it a try. it's not often that a piece of software delivers so much. for the price, it's a pittance.

the reluctants

we've received a few requests on bio information on two recent artists added to the roster of the label: don davenport and lou peoples. but getting either of these producers to stop and do the mundane is quite a challenge.
no bio. no promo pics. no myspace accounts. nothing.

they're all about the music music - they say. let it speak for itself. let it find its own voice and face.

the last time we tried from a cell phone camera, this is what we got, before don nonchalantly threatened us with his fork!

ok, we get the message. they must need the liebowitz treatment and the photoshop after-effect!

the reason...

recently, i completed my first blog deployment on blogger right after it was bought out by google.

after reading plenty about the blog phenomenon on Business 2.0, i knew conceptually what made a "good" and "interesting" blog in this web 2.0 environment, but i had never actually deployed one.
around early october 06, i suggested to a friend to use a blog as a way to get his feet wet in publishing. he had always wanted to write a book but never really could begin the process. a blog however provided a perfect way to put forth his thoughts and over time, get a sense of direction and grouping for his topics that could perhaps lead to a book. that's how eclectic commons was born.

in the mean time, we had been putting a lot of thoughts in developing a better promotion campaign that would be both effective and cheap. it was also becoming more and more difficult to differentiate our label from the myriads of labels featured on all these big digital distributors (beatport, stompy, itunes) or to get the occasional favorable placement on their
section pages. it became obvious that the best way to play was to increase the number of "contact" points for our fans and by custom-packaging our content for different audiences or mediums.

the web 2.0 movement rides on the concept of user-generated content, specifically the flexibility of the blog. hey, even CEO's are getting into it these days!

so, this blog is an attempt at reaching to another segment of our fans and deliver our music in a fresh and contemporary way. there is no real big plans for this. it will be more news-y then news, more ramblings and conversations, more insights into the creation process of the music you see released on this label.

contribute in any way you see fit!

we welcome the input and opportunity to have a dialog with the public out there. it will definitely give us an insight into how to do better what we've been doing for the last 10+ years...