The RIAA Can’t Touch Me
I am pretty much addicted to music. I listen to it all the time. It gets my creative juices flowing in the morning, helps me wind down at the end of a hectic work day, and just makes life more enjoyable.
My music of choice is jam-based music. I like just about anything that I listen to, but this is probably my favorite. By jam-based I am talking about bands like Grateful Dead (yes, i wore the tie-die in high school), The Allman Brothers Band, Phish, Widespread Panic and Gov’t Mule. The bands that can take a 5 minute studio track and stretch it into a 20 minute live jam that sounds different everytime it is played. Because of the nature of the music, the live shows are often much more exciting to listen to than the studio albums. Because of the policy that these bands have with relation to their live material, this music is freely available for download and legal.
I have amassed quite a collection of concert recordings over the past few years, some 300+ shows either sitting on my hard drive or burned on CD’s. When I am looking for new music or just some old favorites, there are two places I usually visit on the web.
The first is the Etree Audio Archive, hosted by archive.org. If you frequent the internet archive and have noticed the site taking longer to load, it is probably because of this section. The purpose of the Audio Archive is to preserve live concert performances by bands that are trade- and taper-friendly. These bands allow fans to come in and record their concerts free of charge with the understanding that the artist still holds the copyright and the recordings may not be sold. The tapers will then release these shows to the internet to be spread amongst the masses. Some of the larger bands (Allman Brothers, Phish, etc) have opted not to have their shows available on the archive, but there is still a plethera of music to select from.
At last count, the archive was hosting almost 20,000 recordings by over 800 artists. Some artists are farely obscure (how many of you have heard of the Santa Cruz Hemp Allstars or the Internationally Renowned Jug Band), but there are also some big names in there, like 311 and the Grateful Dead. The only drawback of this site is that downloads can take a while (ever try downloading a 1GB zip file), so be patient and have lots of bandwith.
My second source for great music is another Etree production. The site is bt.etree.org, and it is a BitTorrent tracker for live music downloads. This is what BitTorrent was really meant for. Fast downloading of live concerts that can easily reach 1 GB or more in size. This site offers everything from that Dave Matthews concert you just saw last night to a Phish show from 1994. Occasionally an artist will show up that doesn’t really allow taping, but a taper was able to get a copy anyway.
Of course, for this site you need a BitTorrent client and a fast connection, but there are some great shows available here. So if you are a music buff like I am, and would like to really discover some great new music, check out these two sites and enjoy.
One more tech note. If you do start downloading these songs and want to burn them to a CD or put them on your iPod, you will need some software to help you do that. These recordings are usually available in the FLAC or SHN format. These are loseless formats that help preserve the quality of the music without having really big files. On the other hand, MP3 is a lossy format. It compresses the music for even smaller file sizes, but you usually sacrifice about 1/4 of the frequency range of the audio (usually the higher end of the range).
To convert these files to something that can be burned to a CD (usually .wav) or something that can be loaded onto an iPod (MP3), you will need the MKW Audio Compression Tool for SHN or the FLAC converter for the FLAC format. You can also use the shnAMP plugin to play SHN files in winamp.
