As I was browsing the web yesterday looking for some free live concert recordings, I stumbled upon AOL’s CD Listening Party Page. This is a site that gives you a chance to listen to entire recordings that are coming out. They change the selections on a weekly basis so that they don’t stay up too long, but otherwise, you are really listening to the whole thing.

Doing a bit of research, the quality of the selections really varies from one week to another. However, I lucked out this week falling on Jack Johnson’s latest, Sleep through the Static. If you read my blog regularly, you might remember that I said that I did not really like this new album after listening to the 30-second sound clips on iTunes. However, I must say that my opinion has changed after listening to all of the tracks in their entirety. While my opinion that a lot of the tracks are a bit more gloomy, the album still has a very nice ring to it and flows very smoothly from one track to the next. I have not gotten myself a copy of this CD yet, but it is a definite possibility now.

I am guessing that the selection of music on the AOL site will probably change on Tuesday, so head on over if you feel like listening to it. Enjoy!

After talking about some cool adventure games that will be released this year yesterday, I wanted to mention that the Action-RPG front is also looking promising on the Nintendo DS for this year, starting with the release of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - Ring of Fates. This new title is a continuation of the GameCube title that is really more action-based than RPG based. You basically control your character in a 3D environment and fight monsters in real time instead of a turn-based mode. After reading a hands-on preview on IGN, I think that this will definitely be a title to get this year.

I have always been a big fan of adventure games on the PC. Titles such as Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango were just amazing games to play through with their creative content, great graphics, and funny situations.

The adventure game dies off a bit for a number of years and then came back more recently with titles like Syberia and Runaway. Both of the companies producing these games have recognized that the Nintendo DS, with its two screens and stylus, is a perfect platform to play adventure games. So, in 2008, we will see at least 3 great adventure games on the DS.

• Last King of Africa: A DS version of Benoit Sokal’s Paradise
• Sinking Island: A DS version of the Benoit Sokal game with the same title
• Runaway: The Dream of the turtle, available April 1st, a DS version of the second game from spanish company Pendulo Studios

I’m going to have fun this year with my DS

This week is something quite unique for me. Andrée is away to a photographer convention in Florida while I am taking vacation and staying home with the girls. Two days into it, things are going pretty good. I’ve managed to get Evelyne to school this morning on time and then came back home and had a good time with Gabrielle. As I am writing this, both girls are taking a nice long nap. We’ll see how the next five days treat me but so far, it is nive to have time with the girls and they have not been too hard on me.

I’ve been using the iTunes Music Store for a couple of years, ever since I got my first iPod. While I love the concepts of being able to buy music singles or entire albums at my leisure and getting easy previews of the songs, I’ve been appalled recently by the number of album pre-orders that are showing up on iTMS. For example, the new Jack Johnson CD (Sleep through the static) has been on there since Christmas).

Pre-ordering a DVD of a movie you have seen or that you saw a good preview for is one thing, but my main problem with the concept of pre-ordering music is that you have no clue whether or not an artist’s next CD will be good or not. All you get is a single song preview which is typically one of the best tracks of the album, or which is just the first single released.

Again, going back to Jack Johnson, I was tempted to make a pre-order for his new CD since I absolutely loved his last one, “In Between Dreams”. It was kind of tempting since they even offered an extra track that you would not get when the CD actually comes out. In the end, I decided not to pre-order and was actually glad about it when I logged onto iTunes today and saw that there are not really any tracks that catch my ear on his latest effort. Perhaps 30 seconds song clips are too short to form an opinion, but the opinion of many others on the site seemed to indicate similar feelings towards the new album. So, in short, I wonder how music pre-orders have become so popular.

After making everybody jump at Macworld when they announced that iPod Touch users would need to pay to get access to the new applications for the platform, Apple has just silently introduced new higher-capacity versions of their iPhone and iPod Touch. The new devices sport 16 GB and 32 GB of flash respectively.

Personally, the phone capabilities of the iPhone is not something I need while the 32 GB of the touch just seems overkill. Seriously, how many songs and videos does someone want to carry around? I recently converted my ENTIRE music collection to Mp3 format in 129 kbps format and it clocked in at 9 GB. In a 16 GB device, this still leaves 5-6 GB of space for videos and other content. Of course, I only placed music that I legitimately own. If I started to download and put any kind of music on there, then I guess that I could use up a lot more room.