RockyMusic

RockyMusic.org features information for 32 albums, with 37 recordings on 47 pressings. 6 box sets are also included. These albums include 349 tracks, of which 181 have song lyrics available and 56 have MP3 sound files. A total of 8,479 tags have been applied using 425 distinct media tags, as well as 52 song tags and 11 language tags.

The multimedia archive currently includes 735 photos and 240 album images, with a total size of 558.9 MB. There are 558 MP3 sound files, 3.42 GB in size with an average bitrate of 224 kbps, lasting 1 day 12 hours 51 minutes. 105 of these have lossless FLAC equivalents available (723 kbps average bitrate), which are 2.26 GB in size. Also included are 93 videos, 993.9 MB in size and 4 hours 34 minutes in length. Finally we have 43 text documents, 2.9 MB in size and 373,287 words long. All total, we're looking at 7.20 GB worth of Rocky Horror related archives.

I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Texas A&M University (as a Freshman there) around Halloween 1991. I was sixteen at the time (and you can extrapolate my current age from that...:-). There was no shadowcast, but they did have a loud and boisterous crowd with a few individuals yelling lines and a whole LOT of Super Soakers. I couldn't really follow the movie, but I had a damn good time and went back the next evening... and again in the Spring semester. After dropping out of college and moving back home to San Antonio, I finally saw a performing cast at the Central Park Fox Theatre (now closed and demolished) in 1993.

I didn't really join the cast there per se, because I was too shy to actually talk to anyone there. But I was gradually absorbed into the cast, as people kept asking me to help out with various things and I couldn't figure out how to say no. The cast self-destructed after about a year, but just before that I met some visiting performers from the cast in Austin. So I started commuting from San Antonio to Austin, an hour and a half drive, every single weekend.

This went on from around Halloween 1994 to mid-1997. Eventually I decided that Austin really was the city for me, and actually moved here. I've been a resident ever since. I'm also still an active member of the Austin cast, Queerios, as well as their Webmaster and Treasurer. My primary performing part has always been Riff Raff. Though in recent years I've been perfectly happy to just sit on the front row, take pictures, and (more likely than not) never get around to actually posting them.

I'm a Java programmer in "real life", having worked on the online poker client used by PokerPages, PokerSchool Online, and BugsysClub for over five years. I've been happily married to my wife Raini since April 22nd, 2006. We have not spawned as of yet...;-) Some of my other interests/obsessions include digital photography, the game of Go, hiking, martial arts, yoga, and online gaming.

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but at some point around 1995 I started seriously collecting Rocky Horror related CDs. All of them... no matter how bad the studio cast was, how obscure the link to Rocky Horror was, or how expensive the import CD was. I scoured local music stores, went to record conventions, traveled to other cities to browse their used CD stores, and searched through the online catalog for CD Connection before they had a web site (you actually had to telnet to a dedicated server with a command line search interface). I had consciously decided to concentrate on collecting CDs (as opposed to vinyl) both because I thought it might actually be possible to find essentially all of them and because they were so much cheaper to obtain. Even then, certain Rocky Horror Show cast album LPs would sell for a couple hundred dollars between collectors... and this was before eBay became popular.

RockyMusic.org itself had its origins in the first cast web site for Austin Rocky Horror. Another cast member ("Grackle", now an APD officer) decided to put up a basic cast web site in early 1996. He gave me a login to modify the site, so I started adding other Rocky Horror related content... such as a section on Rocky related CDs. This grew and grew until I eventually decided to split it off into its own site. Thus the "Rocky Horror Related CDs" web site was born, in early 1997. It continued growing rapidly, and in December 1997 was renamed "The Musical World of Rocky Horror" (after Little Nell's single) due to the fact that I was now including vinyl albums as well as CDs. The site was hosted by whatever ISP I had at the time (Internet Direct, Eden, KDI) until finally in November 1998 I was able to move it to its very own domain name: RockyMusic.org.

I stayed very active updating the web site (which had become incredibly popular) until around May 1999, when I essentially stopped updating it at all. This was due to a number of reasons. First, I got a "real job" as a programmer. Most of the early work I'd done had been while I had crappy jobs doing telephone customer service or similar, which meant that I had little money but lots of free time. At my first programming job it was important for me to prove myself, and I ended up working many 60+ hour weeks. After that much time programming, I had little motivation to work on web sites once I got home. Second, I knew very little about web technologies while writing the site (and didn't have CGI access in any case) so therefore everything was done manually. As the site grew, there were more and more places where I would have to update the same thing when it changed. This wasn't a big deal when I had loads of free time, but became a bigger and bigger problem. Third, after I'd gone such a long time without updating the site there was a significant amount of inertia working against it happening.

I eventually realized that the only way it ever would happen would be if I completely reworked the entire site from the ground up. Which is exactly what I did, starting around August 2006. Hopefully this new incarnation will be vastly more maintainable than the previous one was. Happy 2007, everyone!

RockyMusic.org is written entirely in custom PHP. I don't like graphical web development tools, so I just use a text editor for everything (EMACS). Some may notice the site's resemblance to Slashdot - that's because I took a snapshot of their layout and CSS then modified it for my own purposes (I hate doing layout work). The webserver is running Red Hat Linux with Apache HTTP Server and the MySQL database. Techies these days are calling this the LAMP platform. Whatever... it's what I've used for years in both personal and business web sites so I'm extremely familiar with it all.

PHOTOS AND ALBUM IMAGES: Back in "the day" I didn't own a scanner and had no way of posting album covers or anything on my own. I relied primarily on the kindness of strangers (particularly Leon Tencer in Australia) e-mailing their own scans, and was able to borrow someone else's scanner once or twice. Nowadays I own both an Epson Expression 1600 flatbed scanner and a (little used) Nikon LS-2000 film and slide scanner. I use the LaserSoft SilverFast Ai plug-in to Adobe Photoshop 7, for scanning software. The scanner is calibrated against an IT8 color target, and at least 4x multi-sampling is used (8x for photo prints). The Pictographics iCorrect Professional plug-in is used for color correction on photos (and certain album covers). Panavue Image Assembler is used to stitch together images for scans that won't fit all at once on the flatbed scanner (vinyl album covers and sleeves mostly). CyberLink PowerDVD software is used for DVD captures.

SOUND FILES: When I first started creating MP3s, I used BladeEnc. Unfortunately it turned out to have entirely broken code for doing CRC calculations, which caused certain MP3 players to play only silence. Nifty feature, eh? All MP3 sound files currently online were created using the LAME MP3 encoder v3.97b2 with the "--preset fast extreme" VBR option. EAC (Exact Audio Copy) v0.95b4 was used to grab audio from CDs. And Sony Sound Forge 8 was used on occasion to edit WAV files (splitting tracks, trimming silence, etc.).

VIDEOS: All videos were created with the Macromedia Flash 8 Video Encoder using the On2 VP6 codec. DVD Decrypter v3.5.4.0 and Xilisoft DVD Ripper Plantium 4.0.53 were used to extract VOB files from DVDs and then encode them into intermediary MP4 files.