The Blog
What's going on with Maynard's Groovy Bible Tunes, from day to day...
Great for school - but what's that stuff that interrupts the songs?
Jade (who gave a false email, so I can't get back to her) posted this comment:
"Hi Everyone i am commenting on this Website because at our school its Great for Worship. But I would mention not the bit in the middle 'welcome to maynardsgroovytunes.co.uk' anyways otherwise its Great!!!"
Thanks Jade!
That "bit in the middle" is there as a 'watermark', let me explain: I'd love to make it possible for the whole song to be heard without interruption - but that would mean that some people would copy the files and break my copyright. So I'm sorry - the bit in the middle that interrupts it (and removes a bar of music also) will have to stay.
Why not ask your teachers to get a CD or two? Then you can sing along to the whole songs 
Thanks for commenting.
ShortLink: http://mgbt.uk/oRn
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New Songs on their way...
I've got three new songs on the go. Two are about treasure - it's the theme of HotShots Summer Club 2009. Another is a Bible song, based on Psalm 19.
I'm still working on the songs we recorded with the kids a few weeks ago - working on some new mixing techniques, so that's slowing me up. Also - work is MAD (great, but MAD) 
- so that stops me doing Maynards' stuff.
Watch this space...
Recording Today!
I'm recording today - with some children from our Church groups. We're going to sing some of the new songs, and see how far we get!
I'm moving my computer and lots of gear into the church. I've got a plan for how to set it up, but since this is the first time I've done this, I expect it'll change as we go along. It should be great fun - I know the kids are looking forward to it. I just hope they can cope with doing a few 'takes'.
We've got two hours, but I don't know whether that'll mean one song or ten. I'm not expecting it to be easy - but on the other hand, I do know that the real hard work will be mixing the results later on. That will take hours. Still - I've been quite pleased with the recent results I've had with recording, so I'm very hopeful to get some great stuff out of this.
The aim is to get a new CD out soon - a commercially printed & packaged CD... We'll see.
Website Fixes
Yesterday and Today I discovered and (hopefully) fixed a number of serious glitches on the website.
1. The Media Player on the store pages wasn't working.
It's a different player from the one I now use on the jukebox, and it didn't like the changes. I've fixed that, so now you can listen to a song when browsing the Store.
2. The Media Player on the Jukebox didn't seem to play anything when changing quickly between one song and another.
This surprised me: and flumoxed me for a moment - what had I done wrong with the code?!! Why wasn't it playing? Then suddenly something played after a pause of 20 odd seconds. Weird.
What was happening was that flowplayer (the media player) was still loading the previous song's file in the background, even when a new song had been chosen. If you clicked a few songs in order, I think it probably loaded every one into its buffer, before eventually playing the last one you stopped on - hence the long silent pause.
Fortunately the flowplayer command $f().close() stops this buffering happening, so now that's fixed.
3. The Bible page wasn't working - stuck with a Javascript error.
... and no-one told me. I suppose I should have noticed. That's fixed too.
4. Everything is minified.
This isn't an error - just a new feature. I'm using jsmin-php to minify the javascript used on the jukebox. That should cut down the load time by a few seconds, and hopefully make the page more attractive to people.
If you happen to spot something wrong, or something doesn't work for you - PLEASE TELL ME!!! 
Jukebox Redesign
I've had a little go at the Jukebox's design today.
My main aim was to put the song buttons in a scrolling area, because with 50+ songs, the list had become a bit too big.
It was easy to change the buttons area to a 'div' with 'overflow:auto', and a fixed height - trouble was, the scrollbars looked rubbish. Fortunately the gorgeous Scriptaculous has come to the rescue, with a Javascript powered slider bar, both for the song buttons, and for the lyrics.
I think they're quite nice, do you?
Get Maynard's Groovy Bible Tunes on Seven Great CDs!
Get some CDs so that you can sing along wherever you are,
and enjoy praising Jesus and remembering how great he is in that familiar foot-stomping way!
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