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Sure does. Fan recordings are available at a number of 'net locations, such as:
http://bt.etree.org/?search=&cat=92
http://www.starwoodevents.com/forums/forumdisplay. php?f=8
http://tracker.score1more4me.com/browse.php

Additionally, officially-released soundboard recordings are available on iTunes.

Well, I would say it is safe to say that the average file traded over BT is, say, 1GB. That's about typical for the stuff I download via it. Mostly (legal) live concert recordings. A typical webpage is perhaps 100kb. So that's 10,000 webpage views (Probably a weeks worth for even the busiest net addict, probably more like 3 months worth for a typical home user. I often pull 10GB a week via bittorrent (http://bt.etree.org/ is your friend...)

Live concert recordings with explicit permission from the copyright holders.

Roughly what percent of your music collection is authorized files from P2P like futhur, etree, etc.?

I'm surprised how even on /., most people have accepted the notion P2P music downloads == unauthorized sharing. The best most people can come up with to rationalize sharing is 'why should I buy a whole CD for the one song I like' or 'it's not theft, it's just copyright infringement.'

How about, I download music gigs at a time and it's 100% legal and with the musicians blessings.

1. Soundboard recordings (directly recorded from house mix of the show).
2. Audience recordings (recorded using microphones from the audience).
3. A mix of the above two, often known as a "matrix" mix.

If you're interested in breaking free from slavery to the RIAA, please visit http://www.etree.org or http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php where you will find hundreds of artists who not only allow recording of their performances, but who encourage the free distribution thereof.

Sharing.

(Legal of course; there is an increasing amount of music distributed in FLAC that the artists allow you to redistribute (etree, furthurnet, Net Labels, Open Source Audio, etc.)

http://jambase.org/ http://bt.etree.org/ suport live music! (and taping!)

But there's a way you can enjoy free music downloads without getting into trouble. Listen to the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves. Find out how in my article:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

Here's a page that I found out about just a couple days ago and haven't added to the article yet. etree offers a page of Bit Torrent Downloads, all of them TradeFriendly.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, your web log, or from message boards. Be sure to email the link to all your friends who use P2P!

But there's a way you can enjoy free music downloads without getting into trouble. Listen to the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves. Find out how in my article:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

Here's a page that I found out about just a couple days ago and haven't added to the article yet. etree offers a page of Bit Torrent Downloads, all of them TradeFriendly.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, your web log, or from message boards. Be sure to email the link to all your friends who use P2P!

Three examples of legitimate use. Three.

Four.

Also Phish has very good control over what happens, I guess. And, in their contract it explicitally says audience taping is to be allowed unless they say otherwise.

I like bands that allow the audience to tape their shows, visit Etree for a huge list of live shows by a large number of bands - most of them in glorious lossless SHN or FLAC formats.

When I found Etree and discovered SHN at the same time I almost came in my pants - among other things they have over 2500 Grateful Dead shows!

For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P.

Let me offer a few others that have been around for a while:
- Distributing FLOSS. For example, Linux.
- Distributing music with the copyright holder's permission. For example, eTree.
- Distributing internally developed software to employees in a large enterprise. For example, LANDesk and Marimba use peer to peer distribution.

This one I don't think is a very big deal

To me it is. To switch from FLAC to Apple Lossless would be a major pain in the ass. I have a lot of these files; hundreds of gigabytes worth. I keep them in FLAC format because they are supported more or less natively by:

• WinAMP and Xmms (with plugins)
• Nero (with a plugin)
• My Squeezebox
• Tag&Rename and MediaTagger, the two best audio file taggers I've encountered (Windows)
• Formerly, my Rio Karma. But it was a POS and I sold it on ebay.

FLAC is audio format that best suits my usage patterns, which is why I'd like to be able to use it with my iPod. Which, of course, is the best portable audio player around.

Converting everything over to Apple Lossless would be a large time investment, not to mention the fact that there don't seem to be any standalone encoders for it (URL me if you've got one, I'm all ears). I have a number of scripts I use for converting other lossless audio files to FLAC and tagging FLAC files I download, so cross-platform, command line tools are my preference.

bt.etree.org

Go there and sort the tracker list by 'served'. Look at all of the torrents starting in June. There are over a dozen filesets there, many over 1GB, that have been served 1000 or more times. Heck, just look at the front page! This is one VERY active tracker site. And it's all legal lossless audio too.

I don't know about the percentages, but most (or at least many) BT users know that it's much easier to track down the users (because of centralized trackers), which tends to mildly discourage the illegitimate users, leading to a probably higher percentage of legitimate users even during regular times.

And Linux CDs aren't the only legitimate use of BT. Fans of "Bands That Allow Taping" (BTAT) prefer lossless formats (shn, flac) for distributing their legitimate concert recordings, and tend to use bittorrent. Since the individual songs are five times larger (due to lossless compression), and since these concerts tend to be distributed as a whole, rather than song-at-a-time, that's a fair amount of traffic involved. And since the audience for BTAT tend to be somewhat older on average (discounting a few anomolies like Jason Mraz), there's not going to be as much seasonal variation.

When Linux Journal did an article about bittorrent last year, their example image showed a legitimate download of a Widespread Panic concert, not a Linux distro. The Etree BT tracker includes a lot of stuff from the usual suspects (Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews), but also a fair amount of interest to different audiences (They Might Be Giants, Primus/Les Claypool, Ween, Tenacious D, Butthole Surfers, Charlie Hunter, etc.).

Twenty million Deadheads may be a drop in the bucket compared to the Kazaa "community", but when you consider that those Deadheads are sharing sets of files that are one to five hundred times as large as the individual files that are shared on Kazaa, and factor in the fans of nearly 1000 other bands that also allow taping/trading, and you might be starting to talk an almost measurable percentage of BT traffic. It might be more than you think. Maybe. Possibly. :)

I can't believe that I didn't see any suggestions for the kind Live Music Archive. The live music archive is THE source for high quality open source music!!! There are many great artists there. You might need to get a copy of the mkwACT for converting SHN or FLAC to convert the files to .wav

Some of my favorites include:
Steve Kimock Band
Steve Kimock & Friends
Zero
Yonder Mountain String Band
Yo Miles
Motherbug
Charlie Hunter
Top Level All Bands

enjoy!!!

these lawsuits do nothing more than publicize the fact that you can download music illegally from the internet. It's kinda funny in an ironic way.

That said, Live, Legal P2P and Live, Legal Bittorrent Downloads.

For people who don't speak Babelfish:

Get a cable which you can plug into your CD (Note: "real Compact Discs" don't ever have DRM) playing device of choice. It should have a male port on both ends. Plug one into your microphone port, the other into your CD player. Open a device (for example, sound recorder) and click record. Hit "Play" a half second later so you don't cut off anything. After the song finishes, stop the recording, clip off parts from the beginning and end, and save as a .wav file.

With your .wav, run it though a program for audio compression, maybe MKW audio compreesion toolkit. Then, distribute it to as many of your friends as possible.

MKW = http://www.etree.org/mkw.html

And, even though I realize that most of these bands that allow live recordings or even actively encourage them aren't exactly your garden variety pop band many of them seem to have quite a following. Maybe the grassroots, word-of-mouth approach isn't that bad afterall...

Places like etree have long lists of bands (over 1k listed on etree) that are cool with trading (mostly live shows). There's some great legally free music downloads out there, start checking them out.

etree furthurnet Live Music Archive

Lots of groups do. etree and etreenews are two good sites to look at for information about trading.

And I've spent a whopping $3.50 and got 4 full albums

Your experience is different than mine. I paid about $20 for 10 or so "full" albums in 300kbps ogg format. The full in in quotes, because many of the tracks were cut. I had to write a perl script to parse the emails that I forwarded from one machine to anothr using a procmail rule saying that the encoding was complete and download the files 5 in parallel (the max allowed). I would imagine that I have a little more skill and resources to do such a thing than 99% of the people out there, and I won't do it again.

I got some tracks that I'm not even sure what they are. The truncated tracks really pissed me off.

My next goal is to get 3 250Gig hardrives, raid 5 them for .5TB of available storage, rip all of my music CDs to flac, sell those CDs to the used record store around the corner. Copy all of my concert data CDs that I have onto the array.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Music is important to me. I'm willing to drive up to 15 hours to see a show. Money isn't really much of an issue. Convenience, variety, quality, and _longevity_ are important to me. By longevity I mean when I buy, acquire, record, steal my music, I want to collect it and have it around. Loosing everything is not something that I've been collecting for almost 20 years is not something I'd like to happen.

It seems slashdot readers "get" the idea of free software, why is it hard to understand that the same ideas exist in the music community?

Instead, I'd like to see some productive discussions of those artists that allow their music to be freely traded.

Linkage: (there just has to be some music you can enjoy at one of the following)
Live Music Archive
Furthurnet Band List
Etree BitTorrent Downloads

Should I let the people at Google know that I do have the Pink Floyd 1968 BBC appearance that they're looking for?
Do you think they'd give me, like, stock in exchange?

...another plug for etree.org, which offers free lossless (Shorten / .shn format) downloads of live shows from bands which allow recording

bt.etree.org
dottorrent.org
musicfreaks.net

I'd also point out that I have been downloading heaps of free, and legal, music from Sharing The Groove and ETree. It's mostly music from bands that permit taping and distribution of their concerts. It's a great way to try out new music as well. If I wasn't unemployed I might retaliate by buying some concert tickets... Sorry Napster. Even if you weren't WMA-only you still don't have the sort of music I want to listen to.

The dead are still touring and still allowing concert recordings. There are many bands that still condone audience recordings. Almost all are "jambands" of one kind or another. Check out furthurnet.net and db.etree.org.

http://bt.etree.org

just don't have time to hunt around kazaa for all 15 songs off this album for an hour and half, only to find out that half of them were ripped by a 14 year old, so there's glitches in the file, and it ends 8 seconds too short. I'd rather spend $9.99 than an hour and a half of my time.

Goddamn apple morons, you're just like a bunch of parrots. Just because steve said it, doesn't make it true. I've been grabbing legal to download music off gnutella for years. You can find all the tracks to an entire album/show in a little under 4 minutes, and download them in under 10. Most of the stuff on those networks is 256kbit or higher quality mp3. You can do the same with illegal to download music, too. I grab plenty of CD quality (not that lossy AAC shit) albums off http://bt.etree.org/ in a matter of minutes per disc.

Are you so poor you just can't afford $10? Does your cardboard box need a new roof? By the way, Rufus says there's good eats in the dumpster behind Mickey D's tonight.

And that's just retarded. $10 is quite a bit of money. I live in a nice comfortable apartment, drive a nice car, eat well, and don't even spend $10 a day to do it. You're telling me that some crappy music in a crappy locked down format is worth my entire cost of living for a day? Bullshit. Get a goddamn clue you elitist apple retard.

Check out Etree. There's a large community of bands that not only allow but actively support the taping of their concerts. This is a great business model for them, by giving away for free what they wouldn't have made any money off of anyway they get lots of free marketing and since any good musician plays a different show each night, it doesn't cut into album or concert sales. This is how the Grateful Dead became the most successful touring act in history.

There are plenty of sites and p2p network programs available that are devoted solely to downloading legally tradeable music (copyrighted but free for non-commercial downloading and trading). Examples include bt.etree.org (the etree.org community bittorent tracker site) and the Further Network. There are also ftp sites like gdlive that accept both uploads and downloads. All of this is perfectly legal and endorsed by the bands involved. This is actually a good business model for bands that tend towards improvisational music: every concert is different, fans trade shows, thus generating increased interest, and the bands derive income from live performances and related sales at their concerts. Such music genres include jazz, bluegrass and newgrass, and jam-band rock-n-roll.

A high upload to download ratio is not at all proof of any illegal activity. Personally, I listen almost exclusively to freely tradeable music.

I can understand what you are saying. However, I believe the RIAA only succeeds at making untalented "artists" survive. If you have talent, most likely you will be able to develop a fanbase without the help of the RIAA. At least that's how it is in today's world. There are so many good bands out there that get free promotion from their fans regardless of their label affiliations or lack thereof. They may not be superstars, but they're not unknown.

Yeah. Nobody steals those on the internet *cough*etree *cough* *cough*

I've had material on MP3.com for several years now. Never paid for the service, so I had less to lose than those that took the Gold Membership, etc. But I still don't understand the griping.
The era of free multimedia serving is over. There's just too much overhead to justify providing that much free bandwidth.
For those of you who bitching about MP3.com, just accept this unfortunate reality.

Who's been screwed? OK, maybe the folks that signed up for Gold Membership. But it seems like it's pointless to bitch about what's happened - it's all just business.

It's not the same as being ripped off by your producer [Beach Boys and countless others], or cheated out of payment by a venue after a performance [an ever-present risk in a business rife with unscrupulous people].

There's always an element of risk, whatever endeavour you undertake. There's no guarantee that a party with whom you have entered into a contract and paid money for future services will not go out of business, or sell out to another party. That's just a fact of life.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of free and low-cost music-hosting alternatives [sorry, I haven't checked ALL these links recently, but most should still be good. I am a lazy sod.]:


AMP3.com
AmpCast
Audiogalaxy
efolk
etree.org (SHN)
Listen.com
Lycos Music Search
MP3.com
nzmp3
peoplesound
SoundClick
stationMP3
gdlive.com
FurtherNet
CD Baby
IUMA
BeSonic
My Local Bands
SoundClick
VITAMINIC
archive.org etree listing (SHN's)
emusic
listensmart


My music (if you're curious, totally bored, and looking for something to listen to).

I agree with you about the limited choices --- 500,000 songs....pfft. Most of it is pop music crap anyway. Just hop over to etree where you can peruse some 119,000 unique shows from quality artists of many genres. Enough to keep your highspeed connection busy for a while.

Regards,

Jeff

I'm not surprised by this release. I would think that there is a massive amount of built-up demand among Windows users for the goodness and convenience that is iPod and iTunes.

Personally, I'd love to be able to scan music online and get what I want. Until now, that usually meant some website or some questionable methods. Both options don't really float my boat 'cause it isn't a service designed for the distribution and enjoyment of music, as in from finding it, obtaining it, listening to it, and storing it for future listenings using a single method.

Now that Apple has show the world that not all online music listerns are 1337 k1dd13z, maybe we can continue with these developments, and we can stop hearing some organizations whine.

This already goes on at etree. Does the slashdot crowd turn a blind eye to this because they are looking for "pop(ular)" music? I would hope that the folks here are willing to step out of the mainstream and support bands that allow taping.

Regards

Lossless recordings for live shows has nothing to do with quality. If you'd read any of the FAQs available online (for example, here), you'd discover that the reason to use lossless codecs is because, in the trading process, an audio file may go through multiple generations before reaching a given individual. For example, a concert may be recorded, compressed, then burned to a CD which is mailed to someone, which is then ripped, re-compressed, etc, etc. Yes, this is a somewhat contrived example, I know, but it DOES HAPPEN. Now, if you used a lossy codec, every time a re-encode occured, data would be lost, resulting in degradation at each generation. This does not happen when lossless codecs (such as FLAC or SHN) are used.

------

...nor should it. P2P is a legal means for easy distribution of large audio/video filesets... see:
FurthurNet.com, musicfreaks.net, and etree.org list of legal Bittorrent download sites.

The clients share the load, and there's no more leechers. What's not to love?

Sometimes, artists actually sound better in the live format.

Check out etree.org for more information on freely distributable shows by these artist as well:
Agents of Good Roots,Alan Hertz and Friends Alan Hertz Project,Ali Baba's Tahini Allman Brothers Band,Amfibian Ancient Harmony,Anders Osborne Ari Hest,Awnings for Eyelids Barefoot Manner,The Basement Shift Beanland,Bela Fleck & The Flecktones Bela Fleck & Tony Trischka Ben Harper, Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals Bernie Worrell and the WOO Warriors Big E,Big Head Todd and the Monsters Big In Japan,Big Smith,The Big Wu,Blind Melon Blueground Undergrass,Blues Traveler Bockman's Euphio,Brothers Past,Bruce Hornsby Burt Neilson Band,Carbon Leaf,Charlie Hunter Chris Robinson,Club d'Elf Counting Crows,Cowboy Junkies Critters Buggin,Dan Bern Dark Star Orchestra,Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds Dave Matthews (solo),Dave Matthews Band David Gans,David Gray,Day by the River,The Dead Deep Banana Blackout,Derek Trucks Band Dickey Betts,Dirty Dozen Brass Band Disco Biscuits,Dispatch Donna the Buffalo,Dr. Didg Drive-By Truckers,Edie Brickell,Ekoostik Hookah Family Groove Company,The Fareed Haque Group Galactic,Garage A Trois,Garaj Mahal Garcia,George Porter, Jr. & Runnin' Pardners Ghost Trane,Gov't Mule,Grand Theft Bus Grateful Dead,GreyBoy AllStars Guster,Hot Tuna,Howie Day,Indiana Trip Factory Jack Johnson,Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey Jason Mraz,Jazz Mandolin Project Jeff Tweedy,Jimmy Swift Band John Butler Trio,John Cowan Band John Hartford,John Mayer,John Scofield,John Scofield Band,Jolene,Jorma Kaukonen Karl Denson and Chris Wood Karl Denson's Tiny Universe Keller Williams Keller Williams w/ String Cheese Incident Kimock,Kudzu Kings KVHW,Lake Trout,Leftover Salmon Legion of Mary,Leo Kottke & Mike Gordon Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade Little Feat,Living Daylights Lo Faber Band,Los Lobos,Mad Dog Trio Marc Ford,Marcus Eaton and the Lobby Mason Jennings,Matt Nathanson Medeski, Martin & Wood Mermen,Mike Clark's Prescription Renewal moe.,moe. side projects The Mood Cultivation Project The Motet,nero,The New Deal New Monsoon,New Riders of the Purple Sage North Mississippi Allstars O.A.R. (Of A Revolution) Offering,OM Trio,The Other Ones,Oysterhead Particle,Pat McGee Band Pat Metheny, Patterson Hood and Friends Pearl Jam,Percy Hill,Phil Lesh & Friends Phish,Porcupine Tree Psychedelic Breakfast Radiators,Railroad Earth Raq,Ratdog,The Recipe,Reid Genauer Robert Hunter,Robert Randolph Robert Walter's 20th Congress Rusted Root,Santa Cruz Hemp Allstars Schleigho,Scott Amendola Band,Seth Yacovone Band Sex Mob,Shaking Tree The Slip,Soulive,Sound Tribe Sector 9 Spearhead,Spin Doctors,Sri Bidi,Stanton Moore Stephen Kellogg,Steve Kimock & Friends Steve Kimock Band,Strangefolk String Cheese Incident,Sweet Potato Project Tenacious D,Tim Reynolds Topaz,Tortoise,TR3,Trey Anastasio Ulu,Umphrey's McGee,Uncle Sammy,Vida Blue W.O.M.B.A.T.S.,Warren Haynes,Ween,Widespread Panic,Wilco,Will Bernard & Motherbug Will Bernard 4tet,Will Bernard Projects Willy Porter,Willy Porter Band The Word,Yonder Mountain String Band Zero,Zony Mash,Zwan

Trust me. There's plenty of content, especially free music.

I'm lucky, because I listen to that silly hippy music where the bands allow people to download concerts thanks to ppl like this. Also, the quality of audience (microphones on stands) recordings are amazing with good mics and a preamp.

Back on topic. However, I have a $15/month dialup connection because, as others have already pointed out, the broadband connections are asymetrical. I refuse to pay more for any connection unless I get full upload speeds. Yes, those are available. No, I cannot justify the price. I have incredibly fat pipes at work and a laptop. I can download whatever I want and transfer it at home easily.

I'm not familiar with k-sig (i'm checking it out now) but the lossless community definately keeps track of their MD5 hashes so that people know they're getting perfect rips. Such as E-Tree

I kind of wish someone would do the same for non-boots, but then that would be "illegal" activity.

Some people do want the legal files. Furthurnet Etree.org Sharing in the Groove BT.phishhook.com Besides the dozens of ISOs I've gotten via BT and P2P I've also downloaded 100s of GBs of music and video. All of it legal. Plenty of people use P2P and other applications for legitimate uses, but piracy gets all the attention and therefore you have people asking silly questions like "Using P2P for legitimate aplications?". Of course it has legitimate applications, I thought this dead horse had been beaten.

Powerful tools include cross-fader, 5-band parametric equalizer, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC support, and a huge, backlit display capable of visualizations, animated menus, and 16 shades of gray.

Now this is a reason to celebrate! I can get rid of my audiotron and my portable for one system that supports OGG and FLAC. FLAC support is huge for the thousands of people who download and share legal lossless music.

Download and share music that can be legitimately shared. Frankly, I'm so pissed off at the media cartel that I don't want to even bother pirating their products, let alone buy them. Even commercial radio stations thoroughly suck these days.

You can use a chainsaw to cut your winter firewood, or you can use it to commit a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Does that mean we should outlaw chainsaws? No, of couse not. The act of killing is already against the law and has nothing to do with chainsaw technology. It is about actions and not tools.

So too is it with technologies like BitTorrent. Yes, certainly a large community of cheap-ass slackers who want goodies for free have exploited this great content delivery system for their own purposes. But to be sure, there are so many other legit uses for it. The LEGAL online music trading community has also taken up BitTorrent to distribute high quality live recordings of bands that permit taping. (The Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, etc to name even a few!) Sites like Sharing the Groove and eTree provide legal lossless audio in FLAC and Shorten format to fans of the music. These lossless files can be quite large and the demand for them can be quite strong the night after a good concert. Well, gosh... This is Just the sort of thing that BitTorrent does and does well. It serves high bandwidth and high demand files with grace and ease. This isn't about piracy. It's about access to technology. The Supreme Court ruled in the betamax case that there were enough legit uses for the technology that it couldn't be outlawed simply because some people were using it to copy porn tapes. I reserve the right to use this technology in a lawful fashion despite what others may choose to do with it.

More than once I have turned to a Torrent link to get a copy of some content that was in high demand at the time. (Animatrix previews, Gollum's Acceptance speech, etc.) All were legit downloads when the normal methods of acquiring the content were under heavy /. effect.

Let's try to keep this in mind during these troubling times of heavy litigation by big media. They killed Napster, they'll try to kill BT and any other centralized system they can find. The chilling new bill introduced in congress should be a warning to us all. The concept of p2p itself is under attack. Fight for your rights to these tools.

(Stepping down from my sagging soapbox.)

Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum, Groove Salad, and Sharing in the Groove as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and .flac) music posted daily.

When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.