My friend Simon Gugala wrote this recently with his cousin Chris, and they needed some hardcore vocals for the song. Hardcore vocals they got, probably more than they expected. I pushed my voice harder than ever. Believe it or not, I think it sounds pretty amazing. I’d love to know what you think.

The song is credited to Simon Gugala with guitars by Chris Gugala.

Download “Welcome to the BeatDown” or stream it live:

Lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:
This is the time
This is the place
We are the young and the unafraid

We’ll make you break
We’ll make you bleed
You won’t believe what you’re about to see

Welcome to the BeatDown
Welcome to the BeatDown

Nowhere to run
Nowhere to hide
Watch your back ’cause you’re in for a fight

Your heart is racing but you
Can’t get away
Here I come like a hurricane

Welcome to the BeatDown
Welcome to the BeatDown

Your heart is racing but you can’t get away
And your mother’s gonna hate me for the rest of her days
Cause I’m coming at you like a hurricane
Gonna rip you limb from limb until you’re screaming her name

Welcome to the BeatDown
Welcome to the BeatDown

Enjoy and let me know how you like it. Download or play it below.

Download “Solace (Live)” or stream it:

Lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:
Joey wasn’t ordinary
Not nearly ordinary
No he wasn’t ordinary enough for us

Megan wasn’t strong enough
Clearly wasn’t strong enough
No she wasn’t strong enough to change for us

She didn’t talk right and she didn’t obey
When we said to comply in every way
And she wouldn’t listen to the things we say

Fall into the gap and never look back
Fall into the gap and never look back
Fall into the gap and never look back
Fall into the gap and never look back

Garbage in is garbage out
Censor all the worthless doubt
We’ve already got it all figured out

We are the superior
You are the inferior
You have our condolences, cause you’ve missed out

It’s in love we insist; it’s in love we betray
When we say to comply in every way
But you won’t listen to the things we say

Fall into the gap and never look back
Fall into the gap and never look back
Fall into the gap and never look back
Fall into the gap and never look back

Finding solace in the way we do things
Finding solace in the way we do things wrong
Finding solace in the way we do things
Finding solace in the way we break our spines

Download or play it below, and as always, leave a comment! :)

Download “Just Like Me” or stream it live:

Lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:
I don’t think I want a funeral when I die
I’d rather you forget my whole screwed up life
Cause everything I did for you tonight
I did it all for all the wrong reasons

And I don’t mean to be
A hater of what’s me
Cause I love myself almost as much as you

But I can’t take credit for
Everything that you adore
Most of it’s lost to my sore
Fallen heart

I try to be humble and pure
Everything that you are sure
Is the whole reason to be
Just like me

But I give to the poor just to try and get more
From the one who delivers me
And I love you so just so that you’ll show
Me your love and you’ll cherish me

I am a faker, it’s true
Everything I do for you
I selfishly do for my own
Flawed agenda

It’s not that I’m always out for me and mine
But I can’t keep my heart clean inside
It’s not that I don’t love you; I really do
But my Savior’s love is perfect and mine falls through

He’s forgiven me
For everything you’ve seen
And he loves me still despite my falling through

But I can’t take credit for
Everything that you adore
Most of it’s lost to my sore
Fallen heart

I try to be humble and pure
Everything that you are sure
Is the whole reason to be
Just like me

But I give to the poor just to try and get more
From the one who delivers me
And I love you so just so that you’ll show
Me your love and you’ll cherish me

Yeah, I give to the poor just to try and get more
From the one who delivers me
And I love you so just so that you’ll show
Me your love and you’ll cherish me

I am a faker, it’s true
Everything I do for you
I selfishly do for my own
Flawed agenda

But my Savior is true
He will always love you
He will love you for who you are
He will love you for who you are

Here is Least of These, as some of you heard at the 30 Hour Famine concert. I’m planning on adding some harmonies to it yet, as well as some bass. But it sounds great already! Let me know what you think! :)

Download “Least of These” or stream it live:

Lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:

Oh how I long to be free from the weather
Free from the snow and the rain
Oh how I long to be free from desire
The freedom of nothing to gain

Remember, remember

Our lives are but only a moment in time
We were designed for much more

But for now I’ll serve the least of these
With all that I know they’re craving
All your love and hope is bleeding
To be brought to those who are needing

I will enjoy all the blessings you give me
I’ll play in the snow and the rain
Though I am ready to be done here
Your work over here isn’t done

So use me, Lord use me

I will fall and I’ll crack myself open
But that’s how your love will shine through

So for now I’ll serve the least of these
With all that I know they’re craving
All your love and hope is bleeding
To be brought to those who are needing

And I know that you’ll show
Me the way to be to deliver me
To the broken and outspoken
To reveal to all how your mercy calls

So for now I’ll serve the least of these
With all that I know they’re craving
All your love and hope is bleeding
To be brought to those who are needing

We never really got to polish it, unfortunately, which is kind of a shame because it’s a pretty neat little tune. It’s a good listen, regardless. Enjoy. :)

Download “Nevermind the Aftermath”

As always, the lyrics are after the break.

Nevermind the aftermath of war
Justify the consequence of your
Decision to get into this, this war

Look at all the dead bodies you ignore
Force yourself to realize you’re the author
Of this mess you walk through, you’re so sore

Would you teach your children this truth?
And would they grow up to be just like you?
Who would they kill?
Who will they kill?
When they grow up

Only if you could forget what’s right and wrong
Then you could run this place so strong
Take on every obstacle with your arm

Life just doesn’t work that way, my friend
And death’s what happens when you try to pretend
That life’s just one big competition
Cause only one survives then, would it be you?

So you go teach your children this truth
And watch them grow up to be just like you
Watch them kill their sons and daughters too
Watch them make the same mistakes as you

There are also two noticeable changes to the song (in addition to bass and beefed-up guitars). Can anyone spot them?

Download “No Other Hope” or stream it live:

Lyrics are available here.

Download “No Other Hope” or stream it live:

Lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:

God might kill me, but I have no other hope
He is within me and I hold nothing to scope

I am dead to all my own decisions
I am dead to all my “human rights”

I give it all to You cause none of it is worth anything to me
Compared to the glory of Your grace; it sets me free
Love me with the depth of the sea; come and stretch me till I’m buckling at the knees
I need You more than anything; You set me free

(Free me)
Please come stay with me
I can’t believe in me without You
Don’t let me be
I need You now

I will not be swayed by my own imperfections
I’ll place my faith in my Savior’s resurrection

I am dead to all the sins I’ve made
I’m alive because of my Savior’s grave

I give it all to You cause none of it is worth anything to me
Compared to the glory of Your grace; it sets me free
Love me with the depth of the sea; come and stretch me till I’m buckling at the knees
I need You more than anything; You set me free

(Free me)
Please come stay with me
I can’t believe in me without You
Don’t let me be
I need You now

I give it all to You cause none of it is worth anything to me
Compared to the glory of Your grace; it sets me free
Love me with the depth of the sea; come and stretch me till I’m buckling at the knees
I need You more than anything; You set me free

The anger of my Lord
Lasts only for a moment
The favor of my Lord
Forever holds

I’ve kept the old recording up as well so you can compare them if you wish. The old recording and the lyrics are available in the previous post here.

Download “Tribute” or stream it live:

Download “Reason to Grow” or stream it live:

Lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:
I don’t mean to impose
But I need to know
Where you find

Your reason to grow
Your reason to grow
I need mine

I’m failing everything just because I refuse to try
I’m losing all the faith in myself that I could find

And I’m trying hard to keep on my good side
But I’m finding out how deep the issues lie ’cause

What feels right doesn’t fit the game and now
I’m fighting just to stay the same somehow
When all I need is a transformation
And all I want is a defamation

Face forward
Move onward
Tomorrow
Will follow

Left my pride on the door step
Ten years ago
When I found

These addictions that keep me
Locked and controlled
I’m still bound

I’m bloodied and I’m bruised from the wounds that I’ve applied
I’m broken and confused by the thoughts that I’ve supplied

And I’m trying hard to keep on my good side
But I’m finding out how deep the issues lie ’cause

What feels right doesn’t fit the game and now
I’m fighting just to stay the same somehow
When all I need is a transformation
And all I want is a defamation

Face forward
Move onward
Tomorrow
Will follow

1. Careless Ripping

In case you’re not familiar with the lingo, to “rip” an audio CD means to extract the music from the CD and save it to your hard drive in the form of WAV files. These WAV files are simply uncompressed audio data, and they’ll play back in pretty much any audio or music player application. Before an application can make a compressed MP3 out of your music, it must first rip the raw audio data from the CD onto your computer. Most music applications, such as iTunes, will perform all of this behind the scenes for you. This is nice and convenient, but unfortunately doesn’t always yield the best results.

You may have previously noticed that when you’ve used iTunes or another application to try and import a CD that’s been scratched a bit, the end result is not too pleasing. You may end up with “clicks” or “ticks” in your music that are obviously not in the original recording, even when those discs play fine in a CD player. These artifacts are a result of careless ripping, and you may be pleased to know that you can probably still pull the music off those scratched discs without having to hear those annoying ticks all of the time.

The truth is, though, ticks sometimes even show up when ripping a brand new, scratch-free disc. They obviously show up more often on scratched discs, but unfortunately you can’t assume your music will always be ripped safely if your disc isn’t visibly scratched. This is because most ripping mechanisms in common music applications such as iTunes focus primarily on speed, and not accuracy. It’s convenient for the ripping process to be quick, but doesn’t do much good if the end result is poor.

There is one ripping application available, however, which does absolutely everything it can to make sure that the music that is being read is accurate. The application is called Exact Audio Copy, or EAC. Unfortunately, it’s only for Windows, but very fortunately, it is free. It will help to ensure your music is accurate in several ways, including using your CD or DVD drive’s on-board error control mechanisms and even checking your music against an online database to ensure it is correct (a feature called AccurateRip). EAC will need to customize itself for your machine and may take a bit of learning, but all the resources you need are directly on the website I’ve linked. Once you’ve used EAC, you’ll never go back to your old application for ripping, as it gives you 100% peace of mind that your music is without flaws, and even lets you resurrect old scratched-up CDs.

2. Lossless/Lossy Format Confusions

You may have never even heard of “lossy” audio compression before, but chances are your entire music collection is using lossy compression. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you need to be aware of the repercussions of using lossy compression and the alternative of using lossless audio compression.

When you rip your music directly to WAV from an audio CD, you’ll notice that the resulting WAV files are rather large, sometimes up to 50 megabytes or larger per track. It’s inconvenient to store and transfer such large files over the Internet, so people look to compression techniques to reduce the size of the files so that they are more convenient to use. There are two different types of this compression: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression works much like a ZIP file does; it takes the data and does its best to compress it as small as possible, without losing any data. When you extract a zip file, or play a lossless music file, you get the same exact data that was compressed in the first place. It is an exact replica of the audio that was on the CD.

Lossy audio compression, however, knows about how our human ears work, and attempts to remove the portions of the audio data that are the least important to our ears perceiving it as still sounding good. These algorithms are incredibly complicated and have been studied for years; modern lossy compression codecs are so good that most people can’t tell the difference between a song that’s been encoded using lossless or lossy compression. Therefore, in many circumstances, lossy compression is ideal.

You’re no-doubt already familiar with many lossy audio codecs: MP3, AAC (M4A, MP4), and WMA are all lossy audio codecs. You may have never heard of any lossless audio codecs, though; the most popular and recommended of which is FLAC.

So what are the advantages of using a lossless codec? Though you may not be able to hear the difference between lossless and lossy, lossless music files are much more flexible for the future. Often people don’t realize that every time you re-encode a file from one lossy codec to another, you lose quality. For example, if you take an MP3 and re-encode it to an M4A file to match the rest of your collection, you’ll end up with a lower quality file than you had in your original MP3. This is because of the lossy audio techniques used in the compression, which are meant to only be used once. If you keep converting your files to different codecs, you may start to hear the loss of quality relatively quickly. Re-compressing a lossy music file is a no-no; never re-compress a lossy music file to another lossy codec to match the rest of your collection. Lossless music files do not suffer from this problem, however, and can be re-compressed to any format in the future without any loss of quality, which is the biggest advantage to using a lossless codec.

For most people, though, as long as you’re aware of what not to try and do with a lossy music file, lossy is the way to go. This is because you generally don’t need to re-compress your music these days, and you most often can’t hear a difference between modern lossy and lossless audio formats. Lossless is nice to have, but doesn’t compress near as well as lossy does, so lossless music files are often ridiculously large and difficult to manage (not to mention player support is still fairly limited).

If you want to try and hear the difference between lossless and lossy audio formats, download the foobar2000 music player and the ABX Comparator plugin. This will guide you through a series of “double-blind” listening tests to see if you really can tell the difference. Trust me, though, you probably can’t. Foobar2000 is also very useful and convenient for compressing and tagging music files after ripping them.

3. Non-Gapless Audio
Chances are you’ll have some CDs or albums in your collection where two or more tracks are strung together without any silence between them, sometimes with the same instruments playing across the tracks. If the codec, encoder, and/or player you’re using are not gapless, you’ll hear a glitch, or pause in the music between these tracks. This gets very annoying and breaks the listening experience between tracks.

It wasn’t until recently that lossy audio codecs supported gapless audio, so it used to be that this was another good reason to use a lossless audio codec. These days, however, gapless is supported by several lossy formats, so gapless audio is no longer a reason to use a lossless codec.

In order to get gapless playback of your lossy music files, though, you need three things: you need a codec that supports gapless audio, an encoder that creates gapless audio files, and a player that will play these gapless files correctly. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, though you may find that some of your older music files are not gapless and will need re-ripped using more modern tools.

The easiest way to create gapless files these days is to use iTunes to encode to VBR AAC 256. These are the default encoding options for the latest versions of iTunes, but make sure you get the latest version as previous versions of iTunes did not encode gaplessly. There are many other options, but this format is in my opinion the most ideal because of the quality, compatibility, and features (such as gapless playback) available. Remember, though, to use EAC to rip the files first before using iTunes to encode the files. These gapless files can then be played gaplessly in iTunes, foobar2000, or Winamp, among other players. Many players, however, such as Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, still do not play these gapless files correctly, and will still result in hearing annoying gaps between tracks. This is a good reason to avoid these players.

4. Improper Compilation Tagging

You may have noticed previously that sometimes music players don’t handle compilation albums well, or albums that have a different artist for each track. Ideally, you want to be able to find your music both by the main artist or topic (such as in a soundtrack) of the album, and by the artist of each individual track. Modern tags and music players solve this issue with the “Album Artist” tag.

For example, if you have a soundtrack album, you would put each separate track’s artist name in the “Artist” tag for the song. Then, the standard is to put “Various Artists” in the “Album Artist” tag. This way, the album will show up in your collection as “Various Artists – Name Of Soundtrack Album”, but will still be searchable by the various artists on the album. Otherwise, without populating the “Album Artist” field, most players will interpret the album as many separate albums, one for each different artist on the CD. iTunes does work slightly different, though the concept is the same. They’ve simply added a “Collection” check box to the tag, which specifies that the album is a collection (though you can still use the “Album Artist” tag just the same).

Occasionally, you may find an album that has a true album artist, but has subsequent artists for each track. In this case, the solution is obvious; put the album artist’s name in the “Album Artist” field, and each track’s separate artist name in the “Artist” field. This works much the same as in the previous, soundtrack scenario.

5. DRM

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few years, you’ve probably heard something about DRM related to music. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and it’s a way for the rotten record companies to restrict where and when we can listen to the music we’ve purchased. Until recently, everything purchased from the iTunes store was covered in nasty DRM. Thankfully, DRM has been removed for all future purchases, but you’ve probably got some still in your collection if you’ve purchased music from iTunes in the past few years.

Don’t let DRM bite you when you least expect it. Do your best to only purchase DRM-free music, and consider your DRM-laden music files not future-proof unless you can somehow strip them of the DRM (yes, in some cases, you can, but it’s not easy).

It’s also worth noting that though music purchased from the iTunes store no longer has DRM, it can still be tracked back to you as the person who bought the song, and get you into legal trouble if you share it. In my opinion, this is reason enough in itself to boycott the iTunes store (though I have to admit I haven’t been as faithful to this as I’d like to be).

Whew!

By now, if you’ve made it this far, you’re practically a digital music collection master. Or something like that. To reiterate, here are the five main points to remember:

• Do your best to rip audio CDs accurately using EAC.
• Don’t abuse lossy audio formats; never re-encode from one lossy format to another.
• When possible (and necessary), be sure to use a gapless codec, encoder, and player.
• Tag your compilation albums properly using the “Album Artist” tag.
• Avoid DRM whenever possible.

These tips should help you to obtain a much more consistent and higher quality music library. If you’ve gotten this far, surely it’s worth leaving a comment or two! Let me know if you disagree with anything in the article or have anything to add. Comments will always receive a reply. :)