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Well anyone who has been following this blog will know, every Christmas season I get lots and lots of visitors looking for the man with the magical voice.

Every couple of years I have to re-search once again how people can acquire his music as things always seem to shift and so it was again this year. But…

This may be the last year I have to publish what I know about getting his CD’s as he will be very shortly available on iTunes and Amazon – something that I have been trying to get someone to do for years!

As luck would have it, I had someone comment once again on one of my postings and in reviewing it for publishing ( I have to authorize all postings – including comments for them to become visible – due to all the spam attacks I get ), I discovered that a youtube video of Gipps Christmas Garage was broken and needed fixing. So not only was I once again in search of Gipp’s Christmas CD’s, I was also in search of a video of Gipp’s Christmas Garage.

As luck would have it, in finding the new video ( you can see that here ) I found someone who was in the process of getting Gipp’s CD’s electronically published! Here is what Dale Baglo ( who wrote the music for this High Def video of Gipp’s Garage Video – The Gift of Christmas) had to say.

Hi Rick.  The plan is to get them onto CD Baby very shortly, which will then cause them to be distributed through places such as Amazon, iTunes etc.  There is a small technical hurdle that needs to be overcome first.  (Such digital places don’t always play nicely with CDs that are made of joined tracks.  So the tracks (stories) either have to be unjoined, or the entire CD needs to be encoded as one hour-long audio track.)

CDBaby is a publishing resource for many small and independent musical groups, singers and entertainers. My daughter and her friend published a Christmas CD there.

Dale is hoping to work out the kinks on the digital versions shortly so that they will be available very soon on CDBABY.COM for purchase, hopefully by next week ( You can now click here to get his CD . ) iTunes and Amazon will eventually then be fed by CDBaby.

You’ll be happy to know that I’m at this very moment working hard on getting the GFC files ready for CD Baby…  It’ll take a few days for them to get it into their system.  So at that point, it will be available for sale through CD Baby only. iTunes and other distributors will follow… and may take weeks.

I’m hoping that they will be able to create separate tracks. Once we got our CD’s I naturally “ripped” them ( turned them into digital recordings ) and put them into our iTunes library. I can’t remember if I had to manually edit out each track or it occurred naturally, but I now have separate tracks for each story.

This time of year I like to play Christmas music using our AppleTV and have a slideshow going at the same time showing pictures from all the past Christmases. The music is played on shuffle ( all mixed up and you can’t know what comes next. )It makes it really special when Gipp comes in with a heart warming story in amongst all the wonderful Christmas music.

As a last note Dale just sent this little snippet for those of you who may not be aware, so check your local radio station. Or better yet, send them some emails or letters to see if they will carry this next year ( just in case they can’t fit it into their schedule this year. )

I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but we also produce a rather long (ten hours) radio special that many Canadian stations run over Christmas time.  It will run, for instance, near you on CFRA (580 on the AM dial) in Ottawa.  I suspect they’ll start it some time on Christmas Eve and run it continuously Dec 24 and 25.  The show is called “The Gift of Christmas”.   It has lots of reminiscences, skits, songs… and even a handful of Gipp bits on it.  It won an award for “Best Program” at the radio syndication awards.

Here is the link to Dale Baglo’s Christmas Specials www.thegiftofchristmas.com, he also started a facbook page www.facebook.com/ChristmasRadioShows and his more generic radio services can be found here ( with a rather humerous ad ) dalebaglo.com.

Merry Christmas Everyone!