A Music Chasing Saga

If you can tolerate some background story, this might actually entertain you.
People give too much credit to the power of music. It can’t do much for you if you are empty. Sure, it can fill the space of an empty soul, but it won’t change anything. When the music stops, the empty soul goes back to its emptiness. Those who have something inside already now have something more.
My singing is adequate and I sing often during any given day just to keep the music of my own soul alive. For those who know, I’m a stentorian baritone with just shy of three octaves usable voice. But my voice is not commercial grade by any means and it has never been an aspiration to develop it any further. It’s useful, but not my mission. There are plenty of really good singers much more valuable to the listening audience, perhaps too many to choose from.
Central to my character is an annoyance at those who make too much of anything that isn’t God. We should be thrilled He has granted so many things which help to relieve the misery of our prison here below, but none of them can take His place. I never liked musicians who took the music itself too seriously, because they never understand music serves people’s needs, not the other way around. Same with computers and software and even grammar. You’ll notice the Grammatik, the grammar checking component of WordPerfect, tends to be annal retentive. It has its purpose, but it’s annoying to use, as is every aspect of WordPerfect. Perfect grammar is hardly necessary to communicate and doesn’t make you better. I reject a standard of superiority which makes the tool more important than the people using it or benefiting from it.
When I find a piece of music which really helps me face this crappy world, I give it more of my time. Your favorites are different from mine, I’m sure, but I’ll bet you understand the underlying principle. We invest ourselves in keeping that sort of music around for those moments when we need a little help making bad times tolerable and good times even better.
One particular song I’ve always loved, even if I have to sing it myself, is “Shine, Jesus, Shine” by Graham Kendrick, released in 1990. I first heard it on an album which came as part of a collection to which I was subscribed at one time. The series was produced under the label “Hosanna!” and is owned by Integrity Music. Like all good ideas, somewhere along the line it was hijacked by marketers who never understood what made the series so successful; the music quality plunged noticeably. We dropped it after a couple of uninspiring albums were produced. No sense paying a premium for junk. Lots of the earlier songs still play in my head, but this one song was so good, it made it into church hymnals very quickly.
All our copies were on cassette tapes, which were starting to show audio glitches from excessive wear. We left them behind in one of our moves because it was just not worth it any more to cart them around. I wanted a copy of the original song, though.
You can go to YouTube and find numerous copies of two versions. One is Kendrick himself, and the other with Don Moen. Both did a lot of work with Integrity and both are grandly talented musicians. The versions we find of that song will be pretty bog standard, though. Both are recorded in a standard congregational singing style with nice orchestration. They are not what I heard on the original album. Oddly, most copies on YouTube claiming to be from the original album recording are not. It was pretty annoying to me because the original debut recording was scored with a much more demanding arrangement, featuring a dozen or so highly successful singers as a small choir. There was simply no comparison between their beautiful work and the standard choral arrangements still scattered all over the Net.
I was determined to find the original, but I couldn’t afford the retail price of the album now out of production. It’s a collector’s item with prices start at some $50 US. (No, I’m not willing to buy any downloadable MP3 because all copies are hidden behind an incredibly annoying subscription service, worse than the original Hosanna series.) I was willing to hunt down pirate copies, but I finally found it as part of a long medley.

I like the other songs, but don’t always need to hear the whole thing. I wanted to isolate the song in question. Here’s the techie part: I used a Python script to download it under Cygwin. What I got was a large FLV file with some useless video and a random funny name that I changed to something recognizable. I then used FFMpeg on the commandline to strip out the audio (I grabbed the latest 64-bit static build because I run Win7 x64). One of the parameters allows for slicing out a particular portion of the track. After playing it through a few times, I decided the least annoying place to cut was at 5:19. The result was the long-sought copy of the original recording. I’m not going to get myself into hot water by posting that clip anywhere. The point is, sometimes it become worth the investment in a couple of hour’s worth of work getting something which really means a lot to your sanity.
There are ways to use FFMpeg with a pretty GUI face, but I don’t care for them. Look here for starters. To use FFMpeg on the Windows CLI, you either have to put it in your PATH statement or do the work in the directory where you unzipped it, which is how I do it. My incantation looks like this:
ffmpeg -i Medley-ShineJesusShine.flv -vn -ar 44100 -t 00:5:19 -f mp3 Medley-ShineJesusShine.mp3
If you care enough to investigate FFMpeg, you’ll be able to parse the details. Otherwise, it simply serves to indicate how much effort I put into it for stuff like this. When you can’t make it yourself, you have to figure out how to get it from someone else. Chances are, you aren’t the only one trying to figure out a way to get it, and someone somewhere has made a tool for it.