OK… the title says a lot, but as I write, it is not that I don’t like praisevoice.com  because I am  its creator and manager. I am quoting a friend of praisevoice who wrote me recently and complained about PraiseVoice services!  He wasn’t being negative or  judgmental, but was simply constructively criticizing what we do so we may improve. In this post,  I am going to share with you his insights and encourage you to share yours  thoughts with us because it is important to understand that your voice counts (it does not mean that I will have the time to discuss every comment publicly necessarily though ). So here we go…

• Same Music over and over again

  “I have been listening to PraiseVoice for over a year now, but I am always ticked off when I hear the same song after 20 minutes“.
  My answer:  While I agree with you that this may be a big turn off for most visitors, you would be pleased to know that this is something we made top priority to work on for 2010! It mainly due to the fact that we need more music from musicians who are slow at responding and sending us music.
  

• 
  

  Cutting in and out

  “At least at two occasions I have had interruptions where the stream simply cuts and doesn’t come back until very late in the day“.
  My answer:  Contrary to what some people may think, PraiseVoice is more popular than it appears. This means at any given time, we have people connected listening to the good music from as far China, Japan, and as South as Argentina and Brazil. Who knew?!! PraiseVoice streaming server is hosted on dedicated high speed backbone and usually connection is not an issue though we may have had a couple of interruptions in the past few months. My advice is that once the stream cuts, try to connect again right away, and if you can’t for some reason, please wait about 1-2 minutes and reconnect. It may be a simple synchronization issue or DNS propagation one. If you can’t connect for more than an hour however, I would appreciate if you let us know of the time the facts and make  clear your city and the local time it happened.

• Leave us the choice. Will  ya?

  “Music on demand please. Why is the PraiseVoice on-demand music doesn’t work? ”
  My answer: On this one, Mea  Culpa for the delay, but hold on… check http://www.praisevoice.com/music/ondemand/ and if it doesn’t change your mind I will apologize again.  You will need to have registered and be logged in.
  

• Expensive albums

  “I would like to buy a couple of your albums but I think they are expensive.”
  My answer:  We do not set the album prices. Musicians do!
  

• Constantly changing looks.

  “Why do you change the looks so often?”
  My answer: It surely may look like that, but we try our best not to. PraiseVoice and ishimwe.com are built on the amazing Wordpress platform. It requires constant upgrades to insure maximum security and integrity of the data. So, when something major comes up, at praisevoice we try our best to adjust so as to provide a better experience to our users.
  

So there we go. The five questions  from Mr George K. If there was anyone else with the same kind of questions, I hope that gives you a better understanding and if  not, by all means, get back to us and we will share your thoughts if we can.

I mentioned this in my post a few days ago, that the PraiseVoice shopping cart was coming back online after almost a year offline. The journey was long but worthwhile.  I won’t go into details, considering the scope of this post, but you can have a look at the PraiseVoice shopping cart is back online post.

Please consider letting us know of your feedback.

Enjoy

I know I haven’t been around to write much on PraiseVoice recently. It is always hard to give one’s reasons, but that is not  the point of the post either. I simply want to let all PraiseVoice community users  that I was busy making some interesting applications that would hopefully make our services even better. Below is a nutshell of what is in stock for PraiseVoice.

1. As of Novermber 1st 2009, the PraiseVoice shop will be back.

   It has been almost 8 months since we put it down. The reasons behind that restructure was that we needed to make a shopping cart that’s much better than it was better and tailored at enhancing the relations between customers, PraiseVoice administration and musicians. With the new cart, users will not only be able to shop quickly online, they will be able to track their orders as they are shipped. This will reduce the havoc on shipping and delivery issues.

2. What about sending card and greetings to friends/family?

   Well, November 1st is the day.  In the past we had the ability to share music with friends and family using the greetings service of PraiseVoice and ishimwe.com  The new service will only allow you to send greetings and music to friends and family for free, you will also be able to share them on social networks such as facebook ! What about that?
   Rendez-vous:  November 1st !

3. PraiseVoice Radio integration

   Ok.. Listening to the Radio is great. I know you love it because statistics show me that PraiseVoice Radio is more popular than ever with more visitors coming from well over 80 countries around the world. Better yet to come, is that we are launching a podcasting service in English, French and  Kinyarwanda (ishimwe.com ). What about that? You will be able to see the songs that are playing and some information associated with them. You will also be able to to comment on the song, write a review and much more. Could it be any more fun to tune into PraiseVoice?

This notice it to let you all know that this new service will start with an addition to the PraiseVoice staff. As of November 1st 2009, you will see two new people added at the PraiseVoice staff in our Sherbrooke office and two coordinators in Rwanda, one in France, one in UK, and one in Australia. We will publish the names and their responsibility on November 1st!

We appreciate your prayers and encouragements to share the Gospel through music.

It’s always a pleasure to hear from our visitors about the various services of PraiseVoice. In this section, please let us know about what you think about PraiseVoice services. The Live Radio!

cforms contact form by delicious:days

There has been  recent overall revamping of PraiseVoice services. The response has been tremendous mixed with some uncertainity about the overwhelming changes. I understand and I am writing today to clarify a few things.

First of all, praisevoice.com  has been revamped to provide a better user experience and enhance interactivity between users and management. The main idea is to build a virtual family around “world gospel Music”. In this post I will cover a few davantages of using praisevoice services.

1. Meet other Gospel enthusiasts
   If you hav e visited praisevoice recently (or ishimwe.com  for that matter) you probably realized that you can now connect with other people who share the same passion with you about gospel music, especially from Africa.
2. A good opportunity to promote your services for free.
   This may sound cliché, but it shouldn’t. We all would like to let the world know more about what do in a way or another. For instance, if it’s a choir based in Gitarama – Rwanda for instance, it wouldn’t hurt to let those in Canada what you’ve been up to. Would it? So, why not start a group. It is free and you have total control over what can be done in that group such us who can join, what  kind of forums to have and so on. This is a good opportunity to let the world know about yourself and what you do. PraiseVoice is crawled by Google on average every 8 hours. This means you can undoubtedly be sure that not only will your content be shared and propagated throughout the net fast, it is done in a way to make it unique!
3. A good opportunity to help
   I might have started PraiseVoice and ishimwe, but I am not alone in this ministry. I don’t mind input from others. Once you log in your account you have a chance to share what you think about PraiseVoice and what you would like to see changed. This helps not only you, but also everyone else  ina way or another. So, please do log in ! For instance, how do you see praiseVoice radio? What would you like to see changed?

While the management is doing all possible to make PraiseVoice a more user friendly and interesting baord, you have a say in it too. So, speak up and let the world know you were here!

This is one of the many questions we have been receiving from various visitors of PraiseVoice.com and partner ishimwe.com . This is a legitimate question, especially considering the recent revamp of the site from a regular blog to a fully  functional social network. To answer to properly, we have to go back to the original vision of PraiseVoice.com in the first place.

Back in 2005, when I created PraiseVoice, I was hoping to bring together all those “world gospel Music enthusiasts” to a common ground where we can share the music and other ideas. For instance, a place where artists meet listeners. The recent changes at PraiseVoice aimed at making it and ishimwe.com a more “socially involved” community. The idea was to make the PraiseVoice community that has been growing remarkably over the past years, interact more.

In the past few weeks the response has been positive with more participation both from the administration of the site and the general Public. For instance, in the last three weeks the amount of data shared between users is more than double the amount shared on the entire site in the entire month of May! !!

In the end the change was necessary and it has proved worth it so far!

Sometimes life gets us by surprise. Sometimes we get confused and lose vision of where we were heading. Some other times it’s completely impossible to understand what happened, especially after being left in  a whirlpool of confusion from various factors. The good news is that God’s always in control.

As I was roaming the net today, I came across this beautiful song and thought of sharing it with others especially on praisevoice. It gave me some push forward and hope you will be encouraged as well as you listen to it and ponder the meaning behind the melody.

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God is in control by Twila Paris

This is no time for fear
This is a time for faith and determination
Don’t lose the vision here
Carried away by emotion
Hold on to all that you hide in your heart
There is one thing that has always been true
It holds the world together

God is in control
We believe that His children will not be forsaken
God is in control
We will choose to remember and never be shaken
There is no power above or beside Him, we know
God is in control, oh God is in control

History marches on
There is a bottom line drawn across the ages
Culture can make its plan
Oh, but the line never changes
No matter how the deception may fly
There is one thing that has always been true
It will be true forever

He has never let you down
Why start to worry now?
He is still the Lord of all we see
And He is still the loving Father
Watching over you and me

watching over you…watching over me..
watching over every things..
watching over you..watching over me..
every little sparrow..every little things…