I’ve been meaning to get these photos posted here for a while, and here they are — just some of the many cool people I hung out with at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas last week. (Click on each image for a larger image.)

Hanging out with Roxanne and Shane (a/k/a Secret Cameraman) from Beachwalks with Rox.

Here’s a larger photo of me and Anji Bee from The Chillcast and Lovespirals.

At the Wizzard Media booth with Rob Walch from Podcast411 and Today in Phone…

…and with Elsie from Elsie’s Yoga Kula.

This was taken at the Revision3 party with Charles Stepczyk, the new chief at Insomnia Radio.

Revision3 was well represented, with podcasting rockstar Veronica Belmont from Tekzilla…

…and Sarah Lane from PopSiren.

I even got to meet John C. Dvorak! (Ha ha.)

Ariel Publicity’s own Ariel Hyatt.

Rocking out at Coverville 500 with C.C. Chapman from Accident Hash.

As great as Las Vegas was, it was the people that made going to the New Media Expo so much fun. I hope I get the chance to do this again soon.

UPDATE: I think the Feedburner RSS feed is fixed now, and all the missing files should get repopulated in iTunes before the day is over. Hopefully.

This will be my first trip ever to the city of Las Vegas, so if you have any advice or any recommendations for things I absolutely must see or do while I’m there, feel free to post a comment here. Thanks.

The laptop audio went haywire again last night. I am once again in the process of reinstalling Windows and other software. (I’ve gotten pretty good at it, too.) I should have things straightened out here by the end of the week, by which time Dave’s Lounge will resume its normal schedule.

I almost put another old episode in the feed here tonight, but I didn’t want to do that so soon after the last one. You can download past episodes here.

In the meantime, I hope all of you out there have enjoyed both parts of episode #100. I’ll be back soon with #101. Stay subscribed!

To that end, I’ve created a group called Dave’s Lounge Listeners, where fans of the show can congregate and talk about music, podcasting, methods for relaxation, or any other topics they feel like discussing. Feel free to join the group and spread the word about the show. Thanks.

Earlier this week, a couple of people purchased “By Candlelight,” the theme song/background music for Dave’s Lounge, and neither of them were able to download the song. Clearly, something has gone wrong with the Payloadz system I had been using.

So I’ve decided to offer “By Candlelight” and a couple of other songs I wrote a few years ago on Amie Street, a new social network for music that prices songs by their popularity. These songs will be free to download in the beginning, but as they grow in popularity, so will their price.

If you like these songs, I’d appreciate it if you would download them and give them some recommendations to others. Also, if you know of any bands on Amie Street that I should check out, feel free to point me in their direction. Thanks.

Click here to go to my Amie Street page.

I was all set to go with show #90 when my laptop decided that it didn’t want to recognize the existence of my M-Audio Firewire 410 sound module anymore. I have no idea why this started happening tonight, as it wasn’t a problem before, and I suspect it will take a few software reinstalls to fix it.

My apologies for the delay. I’ll try to get this settled as soon as possible.

Suffice to say, past episodes of Dave’s Lounge are helping me through this. Unfortunately, they will have to help you through this, too, as there will be no show this week. I do plan to get back up and running a bit more quickly than last time, though, so stay subscribed. New episodes will come your way very soon.

It appears Rob from Podcast411 and Today in iPhone is having a little trouble getting his iPhone back from his 15-month-old son. What could possess the boy to run off with Rob’s new toy? Listen closely and find out.

The first is that I don’t want to limit my audience to iTunes and iPod users. MP3 is still the most popular and most portable file format for audio, and if I switched to AAC, I would immediately lose about 8% of my total audience. My goal has always been to attract as many new listeners as possible, and it’s easier to do that with MP3 files rather than AAC files. If every digital audio player out there played AAC files, it might be different, but for now, MP3 is the best way to reach everyone.

The second reason is that I don’t really want to create two separate feeds for MP3 and AAC listeners. You can chalk that up to time constraints or laziness or whatever, but I feel better knowing that there’s one feed where everyone can go to get the latest episode of Dave’s Lounge. It just feels more inclusive that way.

There’s also the fact that I don’t own a Mac, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there, is it?

So that’s why I only produce shows in MP3 format. I won’t say it’ll be like that forever, but until AAC overtakes MP3 as the audio format of choice for everyone on every platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), this podcast will remain an MP3, because that allows everyone to come to Dave’s Lounge.

I’m throwing this out to the podcast audience in the hope that someone might be able to point me in the right direction.

I am currently in the process of fixing all the tags on my giant MP3 collection. I’ve gotten all the full albums fixed, and now I’m onto the singles. However, I have a huge number of loose singles, and close to half of them appear to be without tags. Going through and tagging files individually will take a very, very long time.

So what I’m looking for is a program that will read the name of a file, every one of which is named Artist – Title.mp3, take the artist and title info from the filename and put that into each file’s ID3 tag. I’ve found tons of programs that do the opposite — take the ID3 tag and change the name of the file — but I haven’t found one that will read the filename and parse that name into an ID3 tag.

If anyone out there knows of such a program, post a comment here. My MP3 collection is about 76 gigabytes right now, and the singles take up somewhere between 20 and 30 GB, so anything that will help me avoid going through all those old files individually would be a big help.

Thanks, everyone.

I’ve encountered some delays in getting #79 together — probably just my lousy time management skills coming to the forefront again — but I do intend to have it ready for everyone sometime this week, and hopefully sooner rather than later. Don’t go anywhere…

http://www.daveslounge.com/download

You’ll find links to each episode’s show notes as well, so you can see which artists are on each show before downloading the show itself.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to point the daveslounge.com home page directly to the old Liberated Syndication page, which should let me work on the new site in the background. It will also let me put together the next show in the meantime. I hope to have the new site ready in the next week or two.

Thanks for being patient with me, folks.

I’ve been busy putting together the new Wordpress-based Dave’s Lounge web site since the weekend, so I haven’t been able to put a show together this week. At some point in the next few days I plan to move the site onto its new platform, and it will probably be a little messy for a few days. Trust me, though — it’ll be worth it when it’s done.

Further announcements are forthcoming…

So if any of you were wondering whether or not eMusic was a good deal for the artists, too, that should answer your question.

As you can see in the background, I’ve also got a new audio interface, so if my voice sounds a little different on the next show, you’ll know why. Also, if you’ve emailed me in the last week — especially about the web design — and I haven’t gotten back to you yet, sit tight. I do intend to respond to everyone soon.

In the meantime, I’ve noticed that iTunes sales have jumped a bit since the last show. What songs are people picking up out there?

For this reason, I’m going to push Dave’s Lounge #39 back a week to give the LibSyn guys some time to get their house in order. I want to be sure the Shop is open for next week’s show, because there are a couple of songs from this show that you will want to buy.

In the meantime, I’d like to ask a small favor of you, my dear listeners. I’ve gone into iTunes and created some iMixes of songs that have appeared on Dave’s Lounge. I’d really appreciate it if you would go into iTunes and rate those mixes. If you’d like to buy some of them, too, that would be great, but just rating them would be enough for now. I’m attempting to see if I can use these iMixes as a promotional tool for the podcast itself.

Here are the iMixes:

• Dave’s Lounge iMix #1

• Dave’s Lounge iMix #2
• Dave’s Lounge iMix #3
• Dave’s Lounge iMix #4
• Dave’s Lounge iMix Instrumentals

Also, if you haven’t done so already, feel free to leave a review of Dave’s Lounge on its iTunes page or its Yahoo Podcasts page.

Thanks for bearing with me, folks. Don’t go anywhere. More great new music is on the way…

I may not be able to fix this until tonight. Sit tight, everyone.

Update (5:45 PM): It looks like the fix is out of my hands. Libsyn is doing all the redirecting, so the problem is on their end. I’ve put in a support ticket for this, but it may take some time before it’s resolved…

Update (8:00 PM): Looks like everything is working again. Feel free to go buy CDs to your heart’s content.

UPDATE (10:40 PM): Okay, the feed should be working properly now. I think we figured out what the problem was, so I’ll be sure not to duplicate the conditions that caused that problem any time soon.

For more information, visit www.davesloungeshop.com.

I plan to make a special announcement about the shop in Dave’s Lounge #16, which will be released on Wednesday, so stay subscribed for more info…

Here’s a quick list of songs previously played on Dave’s Lounge that are available now through iTunes. Click on those links to purchase them:

1. Bent, “Sing Me”

2. Bird York, “Wicked Little High”
3. Daughter Darling, “Broken Bridge”
4. Endless Blue, “Ninety-Nine”
5. The FLIR, “Phere”
6. Gaia13, “Trail of Funk”
7. J-Boogie, “Oceanic Lullaby”
8. Josh One, “Contemplation”
9. Love Spirals Downwards, “Psyche”
10. Milosh, “Simple People”
11. Mudville, “The Hero of the World”
12. Slovo, “Whisper”*
13. Trancenden, “Don’t”

*- This is the original CD version of “Whisper,” not the remix version played on the show.

At the present time, there is an issue with Artemis’
CDs in iTunes. Hopefully, this will be worked out soon…

UPDATE (11:10 AM): As you can see, I’ve cleaned things up a bit this morning. The design isn’t quite how I would like it, but it’s readable, which is good enough for me for now. I’ll be beating on the Libsyn templates again in the near future, though…

I’ve got a busy weekend ahead of me, and I’m afraid I won’t have the time to sit down and crank out Dave’s Lounge #4 this week. Stay subscribed, though, and I’ll have a new show ready for you soon.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, please vote for Dave’s Lounge at Podcast Alley. (I’m really trying to avoid begging for votes on the show itself, because too many other podcasters do it, and it gets old really quickly, but a few extra votes would do a lot to help this show find more than 52 subscribers. Talk about narrowcasting, eh?)

Thanks for listening. As those placards on The Tonight Show used to say, “More to come…”