[rocksmyfaceoff.net]

Jonathan Guenther has done an excellent job in putting together what everyone around the SOLA-MI deal has seemed to figure out so far. I can’t encourage you enough to participate in our running thread on the Rumor Forum.

I’ve you’ve stayed following @ssyndrome in the years since that was a thing, you’ve seen the countdown tweets: THREE TWO ONE BEGIN in ASCII. [Kudos to Jeremy Goss for getting that figured out and to my attention.] This makes sense given that we were given hints about April 24.

So here’s what we’ve gotten today: @ D E R E K W E B B was the last @ssyndrome message, which would indicate that Derek won’t be maintaining two accounts this time around. [He also won't have us be complicit in the start this time.]

In the time it took me to start writing this post, Jeff Holland jumped on the binary / hex in the images:

01010011 = 53 = S
01001111 = 4F = O
01001100 = 4C = L

Any guesses? We’ll keep watching this through the day [although I have classes this afternoon].

1809 GMT: 4 is 01000001 = 41 = A.

Sola. Are we getting another Reformed record?

[And here for a while I was stuck in class.] We got M and I, which set me to expecting The Sound of Music or something, but …

RF user RedSoxLAS thinks she’s got it figured out, and I agree:

It’s Latin. Sola Mi is “my only” but could also loosely be “only me”

Go to www.sola-mi.com and put in your email. The site will then thank you in Latin “Gratias”

It will also point you to a new twitter: @officialsolami and a new facebook

At the bottom of the page you get a new hashtag #whatisthenexus

If you add @officialsolami ‘s first tweet (“hello”) to www.sola-mi.com/hello you get a wordpress blog that hasn’t been fully set up yet but seems like it might be in the future.

Any guesses on the significance of the username sola6770?

Don’t believe her? View the source on the /hello/ page. That’s Derek in ASCII.

Any way, join the Rumor Forum and talk about the new album. Are you excited?

A couple weeks ago, Derek sarcastically responded to people who had been criticizing his statements from an article in The Huffington Post about tolerance in the contemporary American church. Plenty of people had reasoned arguments. Plenty more were really sarcastic, sophomoric takedowns of Derek, casting aspersions all over the place.

As someone who considers Derek to be a friend, this dismayed me greatly, especially because he and I come from different faith traditions, as I am a United Methodist and hold to its tenets. You can disagree with someone, even strongly, and do so in a very loving way. I came to know Derek starting in the 2003 timeframe, right as his solo career was kicking off. Everyone who knew of my faith leanings knew that Derek and I were opposed in a lot of soteriological ways, and they also knew that Derek used to really rough people up for being Arminians back in the day. He and I have never had a cross word about soteriology, because we believe that we share so much more in our theology than we don’t.

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I’ve created an Editorial category for this entry, purely because I want to say that anyone issuing an unfollow threat is acting foolishly. On Twitter, you choose whom you follow. On Twitter, you choose whom you follow. On Twitter, you choose whom you follow.

If Derek Webb says something that you don’t like on Twitter, don’t follow him. If you don’t like the things he says in interviews, just don’t keep him on your horizon. Derek Webb doesn’t owe you anything for your fandom. You’ve bought his records, you’ve attended his concerts, and you’ve told your friends about him. You’ve helped him make a living so that he can provide for his family. If you decide that you don’t like his music for any artistic reason, stop supporting it. Don’t buy it. Don’t recommend it to friends. Don’t go to a show.

The way that I have always understood Derek’s career is this: he tells the truth as he understands it. I think that we as Christians understand that none of us fully perceive God’s Truth. Because of this, we are left with everyone grasping for the truth as they understand it. There’s an old saw that the level of a man’s intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with you. If you though that Derek Webb was really smart when he wrote She Must and Shall Go Free and really offbase when he wrote Stockholm Syndrome, then you’ve got the problem here.

Reasonable people can reasonably agree. Unreasonable people issue unfollow threats on Twitter. I firmly believe that an unfollow threat says much, much more about the person issuing it than the target.

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Have a Merry Christmas everyone. We have hopes for a full-length Andy O album in 2011.

Wondering who’s going out on the road this December? Wonder no more!

AP
Todd Bragg
Paul Eckberg
Cason Cooley
Ben Shive
Andy Gullahorn
Jill Phillips
Andrew Osenga
Jason Gray
Gabe Scott
Claire Indie

That’s a whole lot of awesome.

You may know Matthew Smith as a part of the Indelible Grace effort, or you may know his solo work. Tonight, he posted a run of tweets about Feedback, which will be released next Tuesday.

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Derek sent me a download link for Feedback on Saturday night, and I gave it a listen Sunday morning. I liked Matthew’s statement about it being “a soundtrack to prayer”. If you need encouragement for a long prayer/study session, wanting to get immersed in what you’re doing but have an audible cue for when you should complete, Feedback clocks in around 37 minutes.

Derek posted this video yesterday.

We here at dw.net are super excited about the upcoming release from our favorite bald man. We’re trying to set up an interview with Derek about the record so stay tuned.

From reading the comments, some of you seem interested in discussing the new album, the future of the band, etc. We would invite you to register for our Rumor Forum, which has a dedicated Caedmon’s Call Board. Membership is free for the first 100 posts.

Caedmon’s Call fans:

The band has heard your frustrations with the Raising Up the Dead pre-order, and Derek has addressed many of them. The salient point:

now in terms of the limiting of the immediate download to the top two pre-order tiers, this was not an easily made decision. there was some disagreement at INO as to whether we should immediately deliver the record during the pre-order seeing as though the record would only ever be a digital release (otherwise, it isn’t really a “pre-order” so much as an actual “release”). the compromise was made to allow for some tiers to include an immediate download and to have the others digitally deliver the record on release day.

but since the focus with this record has been and remains on the fans, we have heard your disappointment and have decided to change the pre-order options. as of this posting, ALL PRE-ORDER TIERS WILL INCLUDE AN IMMEDIATE DOWNLOAD.

what does this mean if you’e already pre-ordered? if you have already pre-purchased a tier that didn’t include immediate delivery, you will receive a download code via email within a day or so to get your immediate download as well. and if you pre-purchased one of the top tiers and want to reconsider which one to buy in light of this change, simply send an email to support@discrevolt.com and they will take care of you.

This will not answer everyone’s concerns, of course. Nothing is ever enough, after all. But we do believe that this will address the key concerns that many of you had.

The pre-sale page will be up by evening. So get back to work and quit asking Geof when it will be online. ;) We will post an update to this post when it’s out, and we’ll also tweet when it’s up— we’re @ccnet.

Update, 1650CT: So, here’s the 411: you’ll be able to get an instant download, plus some extras. There will be an exclusive physical version of the disc, for you collector types. [1000 printed.] Oh, and … something about Guild 1 was mentioned, but then our call was dropped. [THANKS A LOT, Steve Jobs.]

Update, 2220CT: It is now up.

1. Tier 1: Digital album.
2. Tier 2: Digital album + T-shirt.
3. Tier 3: Digital album + T-shirt + digital copies of Guild content from over the years, including Guild 1 MP3s.
4. Tier 4: Digital album + T-shirt + Guild content + physical CD.

Let’s clear things up: there will only be 1000 physical copies printed. That’s why the top tier is where that is. You want the physical CD, with all the bells and whistles that the band will put in it, you pay the highest price. Don’t eschew that expecting that there will be a bookstore release of this record.

You may remember the short-lived indieriver.net bootleg-trading service. It was shut down for a number of reasons, the main one being that it proved technically challenging for many users, who just wanted high-quality MP3s and didn’t care about all the nerdy lossless audio and all that, much less being interested in trying to figure out BitTorrent, etc. As a result, the service was shut down in favor of something less daunting: archive.org’s Live Music Archive. That’s not to say that LMA is easy, but we’ll explain it for you.

On any show page, you can stream the audio to check to see if you want to download it. You can also embed this on any Web page that you like. If, for example, you recorded a show and wanted to announce that fact to the world, it’s as simple as using that embedding function.

If you’re wanting just the MP3s in a simple convenient format, click the “VBR ZIP” link in the left-hand sidebar. You’ll get a happy ZIP file with all the MP3s—nothing more, nothing less. Drop that in iTunes and you’ll be listening in seconds.

Now, if you care about lossless audio, MD5 sums, metadata, et al … that’s all still available. The easiest way to download everything is to hit the “All Files: HTTP” link. LMA used to support download via FTP, but sadly that is no more.

Go forth and download. I’ll be getting the Derek backlog up I have from all my taping, plus the shows that other tapers shared, out on the Live Music Archive repository for Derek Webb soon. You may pester me in the comments if this goes slowly. Happy downloading!