New Releases

Contrary to the note in last week's newsletter, the news are now coming out on Friday. Why? To give our audience a better chance at digesting what we publish, we have decided to split our releases into two. Every Thursday, a new video will be featured, and every Monday you'll have a new piece of audio – as long as our stock lasts. The newsletter comes out on the day following the release of the video. So, what's new?

Sri Kunjabihari Das Babaji's Tirobhava-festival (2005)

This week's video entry, featuring footage from the tirobhava-day of Sri Kunjabihari Das Babaji's memorial festival, completes the bundle, complementing last week's adhivasa-kirtan. The footage, split into four files with a duration of more than three hours, contains the entire morning's festivities including the tirobhava-kirtan and the parikrama-procession around the village. Read more!

Krishna-rupa - The beauty of Krishna's form

These two series of recordings, recorded at Rasa-bari on the occasion of Tinkadi Goswami's centennial celebration, feature almost four hours of songs describing Krishna's captivating beauty in the words of Radha and her dear sakhis.

The first evening's songs are led by Sanatana Das Babaji, the second series is led by Lalita Das Babaji. Read more!

New video format introduced

For those of you who are eager for high-quality video yet lack the means to download or store the large DVD-quality files, we are happy to announce the introduction of a new video format, the x264. x264 is an open-source version of the new H264 standard of MPEG4 compression.

In plain English, this means that you can now enjoy near-DVD quality video for a file size less than the VCD files we have. You can read more on it from the Notepad and look at the specs on the Specifications page. All you need to do is to install a small decoder available at a link from the specs page, and it'll play in your media player of choice.

All of our new releases will include a x264 file, and older material will gradually be converted and uploaded as well. While we're at it, we are also reprocessing the other files, fixing contrast, lighting and the such where called for. (The older entries are largely unprocessed.) You can find information on latest x264 additions to our archive on our Releases-page (under News).

Other developments

• RSS-feeds are now in place. They'll help you keep tabs on what's happening at Lake of Flowers as it happens. There's one feed for news, that's an aggregate of the three news pages we have, and another that lists new media items as they get published.
• Comments – We'd like to remind everyone that our comment-feature is in place, and you can go and leave your short comments on all the videos you've seen and the audios you've heard. We'd appreciate if you'd find the time to do that.
     One of the first ten who leave a comment gets a free DVD!
• Downloads are now faster – Our download links now lead many of you to the Archive's mirror servers in Europe that are less loaded.
• Our front page now features more interesting statistics. We have recently broken the 70 GB barrier of available media with our 444 available files.
• Page addresses are now easier to relate to. Instead of a zillion ampersands and what else on the address bar, you'll just have /pool/news or the such there. Easy to remember, easy to share with a friend.
• New colors, or rather lack thereof, a black-and-white-version, are available for those of you who long for a bit of change in the color scheme. Browse to LAKEOFFLOWERS.COM and target top right.

Suggestions?

If you have suggestions on what we could improve with the website or our productions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. Any and all feedback is welcome – we find it inspiring to know that there's an audience out there who is alive and attentive.