Holiday Music

I love holiday music. Some folks call it Christmas music but not all of it is about Christmas (thankfully). I know that its can be sickeningly sweet and that some of it can force a very religious message down your throat but I ignore that. I like teh music . I used to play inteh high school band and holiday music was always the most fun for me. Mainly because when you play a Baritone horn you get some of the strangest parts: melody with the woodwinds in the same piece as harmony with the french horns as well as bass line with the turbas and bari sax. Good stuff.

Anyway last year I had started compiling a bunch of songs to burn onto a CD as one of my favorite mix's of the season. But I lost that hard drive and never got around to fixing it. This year, since I have 500GB of hard drive space begging to be abused, I decided to go ahead and re-rip all my Holiday Music and work on the compilation again. Hopefully it'll fit on a standard CD. If not, I might have to push it out in mp3 format.

I'll let you know when its done. Got about 7 more albums to go. Usign Grip on linux and Lame to encode then to mp3s. Using a Yamaha CD-RW that rips optical as fast as 8X and a 1Ghz Athlon with 1GB of RAM to encode them at around a 2X rate. Its not great but its reliable :-)

So what are yo throughts on holiday music? Got any favorites?