Chubby Here!
This is the part of our website where I get to share some of my favorite things with you:

Chubby’s Philosophy Of Life

• Live every day like it is the most important day of your life
• Spend quality time with the important people in your life and tell them you love them every change you get.
• Live your life like it is the only one you will get.
• You can never have too much vacation !

My Favorite Lyric
(remember…you must chart your own course in this world)

“Make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along”

courtesy of Mama Cass Elliott

THE BEST BOOK for song/artist music information
Go to www.RecordResearch.com and buy the Top Pop Singles edition. Whether you use it professionally, for bathroom reading or give it to another music enthusiast, it will be some of the best $$ you ever spend. Trust me on this one.

Buying MP3s
Aside from the obvious places on the internet like ITUNES, my 2 favorite places to buy downloadable MP3s are www.MP3Sparks.com and www.MP3Fiesta.com Both of these sites are “prepaid” websites, meaning you purchase a set amount ($5, $10, etc) and as you buy songs, your balance is reduced. MP3Spakrs is a much stronger sight but sometimes has problems when you try and “re-fill” your balance. But stay with it..it really does R-O-C-K.

Buying Music DVDs
After seeing our music video library, lots of customers ask me where I find our music videos. www.CDUniverse.com and www.DeepDiscountDVD.com are my two favorite places to chop. Of course you can also find some cool stuff on www.EBay.com If you want to find some rare DVDs, try going to www.musicstack.com Be careful with this site…and ask the seller ALOT of questions. Some of my purchases have been great…and others not so great.

Ripping and Editing Music Videos
This process is a real pain in the….. I have spent literally HUNDREDS of hours finding, buying, ripping and editing music videos/concerts. For ripping DVDs, I use IMTOO DVD Ripper Platinum. A couple of quick hints on using this program. Under Settings/Preferences you can set the “audio ripping volume”. When ripping a DVD, trying ripping one track as a TEST and then adjust your volume uo/down as necessary. You might want to also change the “profile output”. Sometimes when using editing software, some formats work better than others. I find that AVI files can ALWAYS be successfully edited by most editing software.

For editing software, I use Windows Movie Maker. It is a simple, user friendly program. You can adjust audio and video by cutting, fading in/out, adjust overall file volume, change file name, etc.

Ripping and Editing Audio Files
The simplest and easiest to use program that I have found is CDEX. You can download it for FREE off the net and is one of my most used tools. It can be used to change files to/from MP3/WAV, etc. It can also be used to extract these same types of files from CDs. For editing, buy Sound Forge. It is expensive but well worth the investment if you care going to do a lot of audio editing. www.MP3Gain.com is your answer if you want to “batch normalize” a group of MP3s (that is make them all the same audio level).

Downloading MP3s and Music Videos
This can be a risky proposition. Be careful with all of the PTP (peer to peer) programs like Limewire, etc. There is a lot of crap up on there because there are “unmonitored”. However, I have found your solution. Go visit www.audials.com and purchase VideoRapter. For $30, it is THE best download program I have found on the net. Once you pay the $30, you get UNLIMITED downloads. If you want to download music videos with no “water marks” (like MTV, VH1 etc), trying sticking to the videos from ClipFish and Stage6). If you buy the whole package from audials.com, you also get TUNEBITE (a program for removing the DRM from audio and video files that are purchased from ITUNES). BE CAREFUL with TUNEBITE. There are some specific system requirements that your computer needs to have to make it work successfully…and you also need to tweek some settings on ITUNES. Before you go buying a lot of music videos from ITUNES thinking you will be able to use TUNEBITE to remove the DRM. I suggest you buy ONE video from the ITUNES store and TEST IT OUT for yourself.