Deep Purple: The Collection

I bought some albums from a local shop and wrote a review for one of them to RYM.

Not exactly the best possible Purple collection but well worth the 5 euros I paid. Purple isn't exactly a difficult band when it comes to making a collection. They have a distinguishable sound and Blackmore's riffs are great so it's almost enough to just throw enough tracks together to fill an album and it sounds great.

Well, almost. This compilation has 9 tracks, two of them live and I do find some of selections maybe not ones I would pick. Easily the best pick of the lot is the live version of Smoke on the Water where Blackmore plays that world-famous riff with great power and strength. Sound quality also varies among the tracks and the tracks sound very different, some sound like they were recorded in a large open area, some lack clarity and so on. So it sounds like the tracks really were only thrown together and the publisher didn't try to match the tracks to make this compilation sound a whole. It's a problem with many collections, and very much so in this case.

Still, sounds like a good album to have in your car. Purple is great music for car journeys, it's easy to imagine your right foot pressing down.. not an ideal starting album for Purple but the live version of Smoke alone makes this worth picking from a sale basket.

DVD Collection

I just tested out a nice Firefox extension called DVDProfiler Companion (there is also a stand-alone version available). It creates a website from your DVDProfiler collection. Intervocative Software (makers of DVDProfiler) does offer you a place to keep your collection but unfortunately you only have about two different choices for the look (the one I selected is the better one..). The trick with the Companion is you can use the skin you use in DVDProfiler and there are lots of skins available at the Intervocative website.

I used a skin called Darkskin - English by story_teller I picked up from the DVDProfiler webpage and I think the result is pretty nice. There are a few small issues using the Companion, like the need to click each individual image that is part of the skin (totaling to quite a lot in this case) but overall it was smooth going. The images look crap because the unregistered version of DVDProfiler only support low resolution images. I really should register it as it's only $29,95..

Doug, the creator of the Companion has also written a nifty little application for DVDProfiler with which you can download IMDB cast and crew information directly into DVDProfiler, called DVDFolks. Makes entering those long lists a lot easier!

There are other interesting applications and even PHP enhanced skins available on Doug's website for DVDProfiler, maybe I'll try them out at some point.