Thai Movie "The Overture"

Highly recommended:

Top violinist busks in train station and nobody listens

this is why I don't busk...
really great article - follow the link.

Pearls Before Breakfast

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?

Laya Project film at Greenfest June 5

Six shores sharing one ocean, one sky, and one language of survival and music…

67 minutes – screening approximately 9pm as an evening of the ‘Best of the Byron Bay Film Festival’ films –

On June 5^th as part of Greenfest (see below)

Free!

More images can be found at http://www.layaproject.com/layaproject/stillimage.html

The filmmakers behind Laya Project travelled for two years through the traditional folk communities of the 2004 tsunami-affected regions of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar and India in order to create this timeless musical journey. Their goal was to search out unknown local folk musicians whose music expressed the spiritual and life rhythms of their village and beliefs.

Set against a rich visual tapestry, regional folk music traditions have been recorded, mixed and enhanced; preserving the unique music, ritual and tradition of these various peoples. Some of this music was being recorded for the first time ever.

Director Harold Monfils interlaces a pervasive visual theme of sea and sky throughout the film, highlighting both the proximity and potential power of nature. Within this contextual landscape, everyday village spaces become recording studios, capturing the music and dynamics of peoples whose traditions and resiliency have been capable of withstanding whatever nature has imposed upon them. Close up shots of village faces, both young and old, allow us an intimate portrait of capacity, tragedy, experience and beauty.

Laya Project is a personal and collective tribute to the resilience of the human spirit; an inspirational visual and musical journey that crosses borders and transcends time.

This joyous journey is dedicated to the survivors of the 26th December 2004 Asian tsunami.

Greenfest 5-7 June Brisbane Botanic Gardens

Greenfest presented by Brisbane City Council, is Australia's largest free green festival and place for fresh energy. Commencing on World Environment Day, Greenfest aims to bring our community together for a cooler planet!

Where: City Botanic Gardens

When: Friday 5th June 12 midday to 10pm

Saturday 6th June 10am to 10pm

Sunday 7th June 10am to 5pm

Entry: FREE to all areas, exhibits, concerts, speakers

Program will be published here 15th May. View music lineup.

How to import podcasts into iTunes

I've been on a really slow internet connection lately, but still wanting to download podcasts to listen to on my iPod. This is where iTunes really fails - its downloading through slow connections is terrible. You can download the files with a download manager (I'm using FreshDownload), but iTunes doesn't provide an easy way to actually put the files into the Podcast directory where you want them; it just imports them as regular music files.

At last I found a post on One Horse Blog, where the writer was actually trying to do the reverse - make podcast files appear in the music section of iTunes. The solution is to use the Mp3tag utility and modify a few of the extended tags. After some experimentation, you must at least set these:
: ITUNESPODCAST - 1
: ITUNESPODCASTURL - set to rss feed of podcast - you can copy from another file in the podcast stream
: RELEASETIME - not compulsory but good for sorting correctly, eg 2009-02-02T11:00:00Z

There are other tags you could fill in if you are keen (eg ITUNESPODCASTDESC and SUBTITLE, which are normally the same in iTunes and can be copied from the iTunes RSS feed), but three listed above will get your podcast file in the right place.