Friday, December 08, 2017

A Wise Man

I was reminded of this old share from 2011 this morning when my friend Lee over at Music You (Possibly) Won't posted his annual collection of Line Material sides.  It's a great collection of stuff that you should head on over and download if you haven't already.  We spent a few years digging all those up, and I suspect his collection is as large and as good as anyone else, probably better.  Now if someone would just collect up all the paper ephemera that came with those records...  But I digress.  Lee attributes the high quality of those records to the participation of John McCarthy, who to the best of my knowledge released two Christmas records to the American market.  One of those was a unique offering for the RCA Record Club, which you can find at my post from last year, and this one. I won't pretend that this as good as the Line Material sides, but it's the same conductor, so it's at least related a bit. This is The Regency Choir-John McCarthy, Conductor-Three Wise Men (Columbia CS 9382, Stereo, 1966).

1. The Bells Of Christmas
2. Jesus Garcia
3. Silent Night
4. Pat-A-Pat-A-Pan
5. The Bells Of Bethlehem
6. Do You Hear What I Hear?
7. Three Wise Men, Wise Men Three
8. Heavenly Night
9. O Little Town Of Bethlehem
10. O Bambino (One Cold And Blessed Morning)
11. O Come, All Ye Faithful

Zippyshare

7 comments:

  1. Thanks, Ernie - this looks excellent!

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  2. Thank you Ernie! I agree with Buster. This looks excellent.

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  3. now i’m sure all you people out there have nice and neatly maintained download files on your computers. but i’m a slob; and while i have good intentions, i don’t have quite enough of them to stay on top of all the crud that gets downloaded to my machine. and i still sometimes forget to move a zip file out of there before opening it. you only have to open one or two big zips with a bunch of music files numbered one to a hundred (or a thousand), and picture files of all descriptions, to become hopelessly entangled with other files numbered and named from other downloads.

    and that’s why i like ernie. you folks ever notice how all his uploads are prepared so that when they are unzipped, they are contained in one neatly named folder? that’s the way to do it. and you might think “yes, that’s the way to do it, so what’s the big deal?” well, how come so many other people out there don’t do it? you unzip one of theirs and splat! files go spraying in all directions, never to be put back together. it’s really only one small step for an uploader. but it’s a giant mess when it isn’t done. ernie always does it. it’s the difference between competence and incompetence.

    i can’t complain too loudly about all those other guys. (not at price i’m paying.) instead, i’ll offer this simple praise: hurray, ernie does it right! and the rest of you should repeat the sounding joy.

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  4. Thanks, Barba. I'm like you, I hate downloading something then unzipping it and creating a mess. :)

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  5. I'll second you both (or is that me third?) - I love opening organized well labeled zips. And Ernie, not only do I love all the music you provide so neatly ;-) but I deeply appreciate all the information you include, both in the folder & on your blog. Thank you!

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  6. Barba, thanks for saying what I've been meaning to say for a while. I love Ernie's stuff because it's always so clean and well organized. There's so little work I have to do to add it to my own collection. I don't have to fill in tags someone else left out, I don't have to correct errors, I don't have to go hunting for artwork to add, etc.

    With Ernie's shares, literally the only thing I do is append a link to the original post in the "comment" tag so that I can remember where I found it when I listen to it many years later. I keep Ernie's original catalog information in the comment tag, of course; that's valuable info.

    Anything else I download anywhere else is such a manual process to prepare the files for my own collection.

    The other thing about Ernie's blog is that if it's posted here, I'll download it, because it's probably good and I'd probably like it. If that wasn't so, he'd certainly say as much in the post and then I can pass it over if I so desire. With other blogs, it's a little more hit and miss as to whether I'll like what they post, or whether it's a clean rip, so I really have to listen to it first before adding it to my collection. Just more work that I have to do.

    With Ernie, it's like I literally have someone with the same taste as me searching through record stores on my behalf and grabbing these records that he knows I'd like. Then he does all the hard stuff, like digitizing and cleaning and tagging and then just hands it right to me. I can't even imagine what it would cost for me to pay such a personal musical assistant, so the fact that he's just here doing it because he likes to... I can't even imagine how it could possibly be worth it for him.

    So, I thank my God and my lucky stars each year that he's still doing it because it brings so much joy into my life. Every Christmas season since I found his blog has been so much more joyful for me and so much better. I don't know how to put a price on that, and I'm so grateful I don't have to, because if I did stop to calculate it, I'd probably find out that I owe Ernie a kidney or something. :)

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  7. I once thought about putting a link to the blog in the download, but never did. Ideally, it would be a link to the actual post, but I can't link it until I post it, and I didn't want to post it without the link. So I went round and round for a few minutes that way and decided against it.

    Thanks for the praise. I try to do a decent job. :)

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