Ed, First and foremost I applaud you for making the effort to change over - you don’t know it yet but you really have done such a simple, yet essential switch - the guys who don’t, well they’ll learn the hard way pretty soon.
Well done!! 
;D 8) 
Now, back to the task at hand, mysqli is my cup of tea so i’m going to show you how to do your query and parametrised querys. It can quite easily be changed over to PDO with very little effort as i’m sure one of the PDO guys will chip in.
[php]
<?php
$mysqli = new mysqli("my server","user name","password", "nlchurch");
// for your query it's quite ok to do it like you have here.
// obviously you can still do htmlentities or some kind of security.
$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT * AS _message FROM nl_audio WHERE author = 'ed'");
if($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
foreach($row as $k => $v) {
$row[$k] = stripslashes($v); // this *should* be made more secure!!
}
}
echo $row['_message'];
[/php]
However, take a look at this:
[php]
// for a query that takes user input you need to parameterise the query,
// so let me break it down using your own query..
// I'm going to pretend 'ed' is a string, taken from user input.
// pretend input
$ed = 'ed';
// lets create and prepare the query (notice i have called specific table names instead of using * )
$query = "SELECT table1, table2
AS _message
FROM nl_audio
WHERE author = ?";
if($stmt = $mysqli->prepare($query)) { // always check the query before proceeding..
if($stmt->bind_param("s", $ed)) { // we are binding a string 's' that is the value of $ed
$stmt->execute(); // if it binded ok, execute the query.
$stmt->store_result(); // store the result so we can loop through it.
if($stmt->num_rows > 0) { // if there were more than zero rows..
$stmt->bind_result($table1, $table2); // bind the results to variables.
$stmt->fetch(); // in a fetch (array)
}
$stmt->close(); // now we're done, close the $stmt
}
else {
echo $mysqli->error; // if the bind params failed..
}
}
else {
echo $mysqli->error; // if the prepare failed..
}
echo $table1;
echo $table2;
// etc..
?>
[/php]
It really is simple when you get the hang of it and will leave your scripts much more secure than before.
Hope that helps,
Red
;D 8)