Tips for Listening to Your Wedding Songs & Building a Playlist
It’s a lot of fun to pick out the songs that you’ll play for all of your wedding traditions.
The two of you will be thinking of the songs you’ve had as favourites all of your lives, or the songs that mark your special moments. So how do you make your choices?
There is a simple and easy way to listen to your songs in full before you buy them on CD or from iTunes. Most of you already know about this place-but, for the less internet savvy people, it’s…
All you do is type the name of the song and the artist into the YouTube search bar.
You’ll find that most of the time someone has posted a clip with lyrics, or you may even find the original “official” video clip to the song.
It’s also an opportunity to give covers by other artists a listen.
Although some songs may not play with top quality sound, you will be able to listen to the entire song, in most cases.
This is an advantage over iTunes or Amazon, where you get only a thirty second sample-which might not be enough to determine if that song is the right one for your wedding tradition.
Update as of 2013 – iTunes now offers a listen of up to a minute and half on most songs.
Finding Lyrics to Your Songs
You can also find the lyrics for just about any song that’s ever been commercially released. It’s as simple as listening to it on YouTube.
Getting to know the lyrics for say your first dance is extremely important as you most likely want them to be optimistic.
Some songs have great music for a first dance but the lyrics may be inappropriate for the occasion or taint the great music.
Just go to your Google search bar and type the song’s title and artist, followed by the word “lyrics,” into Google. If you’re an internet novice, you’ll find this is very easy, and 99% of the time you will go straight to the lyrics you’re seeking.
Try it out by going to Google and typing this into the search bar:
at last etta james lyrics
If you’re ready to give this a try, you can access Google Search here…
Or try a new alternative Duck Duck Go at…
Getting Your Songs onto CD
Most engaged couples want to assemble all their favourite songs onto one CD.
Some newlyweds just love to have a wedding music CD so they can listen to the songs that have meaning for them any time they wish.
Others decide to go all out with this and create music CDs as wedding favours for their guests – which does have copyright implications!
The first step is sourcing your music and the easiest, legal way to do this is to install iTunes. If you haven’t already installed it, it’s available here:
http://www.apple.com/downloads
iTunes lets you listen to a clean thirty second sample of each song. The cost of the full song is only $1.69 each in Australia or 99 cents in the U.S., with comparable prices in other countries.
In 2009 Apple began offering DRM-free songs for $1.29 (U.S. dollars). That means you can purchase higher quality downloads without being restricted on the number or types of devices that you can use for song play.
While iTunes fully expects at least half of its five-million-song library to be DRM-free possibly by the time you read this, the less expensive versions will still be available.
Whichever version you choose, once you have purchased your music you can then easily burn it onto an Audio CD (within iTunes). This makes it playable in any CD player.
Important iTunes CD Burning Tip
TIP – Tick the option to “Include CD TEXT” data to Audio CD in the iTunes Preferences -> Advanced -> Burning section.
This will allow your Mp3 Ripping software to pickup up the Track Name & Title information from the CD so you do not have to type it out again!
One thing to note with iTunes and most other legal song download sites, is songs from some major artists such as ACDC, etc., are not available for download as of yet.
The record companies have not released the digital download versions. So you will have to buy these songs on CD…
Once you have all your songs, either on an iTunes backup CD-and it makes sense to back-up your purchases in any event-or an original purchased CD, you can then format shift (rip) these back into an MP3 format.
The best free software I have found to do this is CDex available here…
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/?q=download
This is also available at download.com Just search for CDEX..
How you categorise your music is really up to you. Software which will help with your MP3 tags (this is information to categorise your MP3’s) and sorting is Tagsmart.
Get into the habit of adding the correct tags early to your MP3’s in your database-building days.
Before you realize it your collection will have grown quite large, and adding the tags will be a headache. Do it now, and this will save you a lot of time in years to come.
The best software for playing your music for general listening is Winamp.
This allows songs to seamlessly fade into each other and create huge playlists you can save with little effort.
Winamp can also be useful for dinner music playlists at weddings and it’s also a perfect software for use in restaurants and cafés.
Get the latest version of Winamp Here…
Do you use a software that helps organise your music? Let us know in the comments area below.
SecretWeddingSongs.com