don't ever antagonize the horn

[egypturnash]

Yet another music-pirating program with some interesting underlying technology and an amusingly conspiratorial subtext to its webpages that reminds me I really ought to try to read 'The Crying of Lot 49' someday. (also, the Pynchon references seem to be in-jokily layered atop a quickly-killed encrypted-sharing application the WinAmp folks wrote that was called 'WASTE'.)

You know, the real problem for me with these sorts of things is that my taste is fucking weird. Napster-spawn are fine if you want to find pop music, okay if you want something moderately obscure, but the further you get from the mainstream the harder it gets to find the stuff, and you're sure not going to find an identical copy on 27 machines at once so you can get fast swarm-downloading. Most of the time when I share music it's in a more personal way - I'll be talking about music with a friend online, and mention an artist they haven't heard who I think they'd like; if I have it on my machine I'll point them to the secret URL that goes direct to my carefully-encoded collection. The idea of making my collection available to anyone is... alien to me. Too philanthropic. Not elitist enough. While I want to spread the word about cool music, I don't want everyone in the world to know about it, because saturation does detract from appeal...

(Link from Slashdot, by the way.)

Comments

[justabox.livejournal.com]

what you haven't read Lot 49 yet

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Nope. I read his Mason & Dixon when I found a copy of it for cheap and found it... wilfully unreadable in interesting ways. I think I stopped about three chapters short fro mthe end.

[justabox.livejournal.com]

Pretty much all Pynchon other than Lot 49 is seriously hardcore unreadable unless you have two years of your life to devote to it. The prospect of reading Mason & Dixon terrifes me to no end, and I don't think I'll read it until I'm forced to by somebody.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I think I only paid three bucks for it. Mass-market paperback on the remainders table.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

What really fucks with my head is the fact that the Yoyodyne corporate alma mater is to the same tune as my high school alma mater.

[bohor.livejournal.com]

You know, the real problem for me with these sorts of things is that my taste is fucking weird.

Oooh, like what? :-)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, let's see. I've been spending some time in the past couple days catching a few stray CDs that were only on the rack, and not in the computer - here's some highlights:

Amon Tobin, Bricolage
Barry Adamson. Soul Murder
Matthew Sweet, Altered Beast
Enya, The Memory of Trees
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
OHM (Early Gurus of Electronic Music) (a compilation)
Ska, The Third Wave (another compilation)
Yoruba Drums from Benin, West Africa (another compilation)
Nine Inch Nails: Downward Spiral, Further Down The Spiral, March of the Pigs remix disc.
Pete Namlook/Richie Hawtin: From Within I
Skinny Puppy: Mind, The Perpetual Intercourse
µ-ziq: Bluff Limbo
Squarepusher: Big Loada, Budakhan Mindphone, Music Is Rotted One Note.
Warren Zevon: Mutineer
Yes: 91205

And I'll be glad to have all of this back into my routine listening, since I've largely switched to the computer rather than CDs for my music when at home and online. I was encoding stuff in somewhat random order. I still need to tackle my copy of SP's 'Last Rights', which is the release with the misplaced track markers... that will require actual work to get into the computer coherently. I'm also debating if I'm going to encode the massive 15-disc Louis Armstrong set I have lying around.

I know people whose taste is more aggressively weird and unlistenable than mine, but I also know that I'm definitely not in the demographic that gets lots of use out of Napster-spawn.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Ska and Yaruba Drums? (not at the same time I know)
beg whine plead for ISBNs?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yoruba Drums CD: part of a Smithsonian folk music series. Smithsonian/Folkways CD SF 40440.

The ska comp is on Continuum Records, cond-19505.

I got the ska album mostly because it had a cover of Raymond Scott's 'Powerhouse' - I might've started to get into ska, but my first animation school room-mate listend to nothing but so that kinda made me lose interest.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

ahh but there are many flavors of Ska. I like british early 80s ska.
Sorry that got overexposed for you.
Thanks for the info!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I think that album is mid-nineties US ska.

[fourprint.livejournal.com]

If you have - or ever find - a copy of the Steroid Maximus cover of "Powerhouse", let me know. I miss it. And I think it's long since out of print.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I have a vague suspicion Ashy has this.

[(Anonymous)]

This kind of stuff is all over SoulSeek in spades, have you tried that?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Never heard of it. Is there a Mac version?

Actually, I'm just not really all that interested in grabbing oodles of music for free. I like to have the physical token of a CD whenever possible, like the seventies-born fogey I am...

[balthcat.livejournal.com]

There's no mac access to SLSK.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I know what you mean by having the thing to hold on to and put in the rack. I'm one of those try-before-you-buy types. And no I'm not aware of a Mac version, I should have checked that before suggesting it.

[balthcat.livejournal.com]

While I expect not every track would show up, a large number of those artists are common enough that I imagine they'd even show up on KaZaa. SLSK even more likely. Especially Amon Tobin, Barry Adamson, Skinny Puppy and Squarepusher.

The major flaw in filesharing is that they do not provide for a fluid interest-based network. Unless you can... amalgamate sectors based around common tastes, there will be NO way to have a good network for obscure tastes. I mean, if I connect to KaZaa and I have my underground/obscure tastes shared next to someone with four Britney Spears albums in full... I'm 1 more step removed from anyone with good taste.

The system should allow me to do a search for one or more artists on my "key interests list" and then reconnect to a user with that artist. Then, you do another search, for one with even more results, and connect permanently. That way, the network gradually coagulates and clumps based on interests!

I really, really, *REALLY* miss Audiogalaxy.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Of course, as you yourself pointed out, no Soulseek for Macs. And no Mac client for most of these things until they're a month from shutdown, it seems.

The few times I've poked around with filesharing, it just hasn't seemed worth the effort versus swapping stuff with friends, whose taste you know, wo know your taste, and who you trust to have done a good job of encoding the stuff. Although I did decide not to bother with Moby's last album after grabbing it all off of Gnutella - listened a couple times, went 'feh', and deleted the files.

Maybe there's just something I'm missing. Or maybe I'm just a crusty old fart. *shrug*

[gwynbones.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Warron Zevon! Yay, Yes! Yay, ska, Enya, and Matthew Sweet! Yeah, a lot of these aren't that hard to find on Kazaa, though it recently turned into a black hole of suck, so I'm looking for a new one to go to. Maybe back to old Morpheus.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

Dear misanthrope,

I recommend Win-MX for out-of-the ordinary P2P goodness.
I was able to reconstruct the totally impossible to find "Dead Vent 7" album from Single Cell Orchestra.
One Win-MX user actually had it.
It's also been good for Autechre, Aphex, and other noise gathering.

Unca Zrath says: "check it out".

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I get this feeling that something called "Win-MX" does not come in a version that runs on OSX?

[phaze2.livejournal.com]

Win-MX does offer some nifty stuff, but I never managed to download a single file because of insanely long cues. In some ways that's even more frustrating than finding nothing at all. Besides the Windows client is a memory-leak fest and I think it's spyware-ridden.

About Soulseek - that one is fine indeed. You even have themed chatrooms where you can find people with similar tastes in music. I'm not a big Unix/Linux expert, but isn't MacOS based on Unix?
Maybe it would be possible to compile one of those one-for-all clients like mldonkey for Mac use? They say the next version should even be able do swarm-download not only from different sources within one network but from all networks at once... now all I need is encryption and I'm gonna be one happy mofo.

I know what you mean

[warlockd.livejournal.com]

I would pay good money for a copy of songs by the Delgados, or some classic Bonzo Dog.

Sigh, britin bands are so hard to find.