Music in our Little House

Melissa Wiley, over at Here in the Bonny Glen, posted a link to a special NPR program, called Arkansas Traveler which focused on Little House on the Prairie Songs. If you've ever listened to any of the books on tape with Cherry Jones reading, you'll remember that she would sing the songs sometimes with a little accompaniment of fiddle. This show combines excerpts from the audio books with songs from a new album called, "The Arkansas Traveler: Music From Little House on the Prairie." You can buy the album on-line at Pa's Fiddle, where they also have information about another album of Little House songs.

Once at the NPR site, I discovered other special programs related to Christmas, including a Handel's Messiah performance at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. On that page are other links to more music. So, this week in our "little house" we will be listening to music from the prairie with heavy influences from Scotland and the beautiful Messiah performed here in Philadelphia in addition to our new favorite Christmas CD, Savior - free song download from that album here.

Technical information for Mac users to download audio from NPR.

If like me, you own a Mac and have been frustrated because you can't get audio from NPR, I've finally found what to do.

Click on the audio link, but don't open it with quicktime, SAVE it to disk. Now, open Text Edit (search your applications folder) and open the SMIL file you just downloaded. You will see just a few lines for text. Look for the link that looks something like this (which is the correct link for the Little House Show): rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/holiday/20061201_holiday_arkansas.rm?v1st=5EE6D9AD23EB8779&mt=7

Copy it! Now, open Real Player and then under File, open location. Paste the link into the box and click "open".