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If you listen to a lot of live music, you need high quality compression. Live music sources often have a lot of crowd noise. Compressing the crowd noise means you can't compress the music as well. Lossy stereo coupling can add artifacts when there's a lot of noise. Also, the acoustics in a concert setting are different from a studio. From my experience q6 ogg is the minimum necessary for good sound. That's roughly 192kbps. But really, until somebody tweaks a codec for the peculiarities of live audio, lossless is the way to go.

P.S. See furthurnet, etree and The Live Music Archive. For tons of high quality live audio from many of todays best bands. (Phish, Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Particle, Yonder Mountain String Band, and lots lots more.

And what if you want to play vorbis, FLAC, or shorten? 99.9% of the music I listen to is in one of these formats. Yeah, that's one song in a thousand. That's the beauty of etree and FurthurNet. Anyway, I've been looking and it appears that the xbox is the way to go.

It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or multichannel files.

It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or multichannel files.

So far as I am aware, I have never given the RIAA any money.

Neither have I given the MPAA any money, except for a single DVD several years back when I was curious what all of the fuss was about.

Have a look at Furthur. It is a p2p (I believe this is technically correct) counterpart to tape trading. Its 'operators' (no, I haven't investigated particularly the network topology or protocol) have gone to great lengths to ensure its legality, including requiring special or otherwise written public permission from all artists and bands whose performances are 'allowed' (I don't know the status of preventing circumvention) to be traded.

One great part about Furthur is that the network makes it much easier (a lower barrier to entry) for everyone to contribute back what they take than it would be, for example, to set up an FTP server listed through etree

If not that, find something to read. If (for whatever reason) you don't think purchasing a book is any better than purchasing from the RIAA or the MPAA, there is nearly 2500 years worth of significant philosophical works available unrestricted by copyrights, and enough of it is online to keep you busy for many years to come.

Instead of paying please support your artists that allow the free taping/trading of their music (either via P2P or other methods).

Bonnaroo BitTorrents are here

Check out FurthurNET

Also check etree

Amazingly enough The Grateful Dead (The OtherOnes and now The Dead), Phish, and Neil Young/Crazyhorse) allow the free taping/trading of their music and look how popular they are and how long they have been around.

I want to see the day when we are still listening to Alanis 40 years from now while she's on tour.

mp3.com, etree.org, iuma.org...

Actually, the compression ratio for SHN is much better. As much as 74% compression can be achieved on techno and pop. I would call 55% typical for live shows from etree.org.

FLAC has similiar compression rates. FLAC's strengths lie in its ability to compress 24bit audio and built-in checksums.

Check out Etree.org, they are all about the legal trading of music. There are tons of bands on their site. There's also Archive.org, and FurtherNet. Just because you don't hear about bands like this all the time, doesn't mean that they're not out there.

They are switching to FLAC. The problem is that there are a ton of shows out there in the SHN format. I would imagine that in the next year or so, the transition will be made to FLAC.

Here is the page that etree has on it...

Also, all the etree usage (live show recordings of bands which permit it) is completely legal. BitTorrent's total bandwith usage would be quite substantial even if the etree distributions were all it was used for.

many people are not aware bands like Dave Matthews Band have an open taping policy. while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive.

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

with the addition of BitTorrent the trading of these concerts has become even easier. Many links can be found under the music of Smiler's BitTorrent site. But here are a few direct links; here and here.

Check out the etree newbie FAQ and the etree trader database for more info.

The best part is the RIAA can do nothing about it, imagine that legal free music!

Mike

Also, all the etree usage (live show recordings of bands which permit it) is completely legal. BitTorrent's total bandwith usage would be quite substantial even if the etree distributions were all it was used for.

many people are not aware bands like Dave Matthews Band have an open taping policy. while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive.

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

with the addition of BitTorrent the trading of these concerts has become even easier. Many links can be found under the music of Smiler's BitTorrent site. But here are a few direct links; here and here.

Check out the etree newbie FAQ and the etree trader database for more info.

The best part is the RIAA can do nothing about it, imagine that legal free music!

Mike

Also, all the etree usage (live show recordings of bands which permit it) is completely legal. BitTorrent's total bandwith usage would be quite substantial even if the etree distributions were all it was used for.

many people are not aware bands like Dave Matthews Band have an open taping policy. while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive.

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

with the addition of BitTorrent the trading of these concerts has become even easier. Many links can be found under the music of Smiler's BitTorrent site. But here are a few direct links; here and here.

Check out the etree newbie FAQ and the etree trader database for more info.

The best part is the RIAA can do nothing about it, imagine that legal free music!

Mike

No stupid. Unless you got oodles of bandwidth and money you don't put audio in a lossless format on a site.

Oh really? What about the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive. Not to mention all of the volunteer ftp sites found from etree or even a site like this.

Hmmmm.... you mean like etree.org

Most of my entertainment does come in the "real" world though, and does cost money.

Actually, some mikes that are used in audience concert recordings have different cartridges to change the reception pattern of the mike (cardiod, hypercardiod, shotgun, etc ). Why? For better stereo seperation at different distances from the stage.

A good stereo audience recording sounds excellent. They really have that "there" feeling. I've actually jumped listening to a recording when a balloon popped near the mikes!

Some people have meantioned using minidisc for shows. I have never had a recording come from a minidisc. I've seen "tapers" use minidiscs, but there not considered tradable, they are for personal use only.

Regarding the recording of music on PDAs in general, I don't see this happening. There isn't a need. A minidisc is about as small as your gonna get, if size is what your after. Also, many of the current tapers have a dat deck, a good A/D converter, and some even have separate preamps to give gain from the mics to the a/d converter.

Trust me there are plennty of excellent recordings out there for many taper friendly bands. Many of the recordings have detailed lineage of the source. For example:

FOB B&K 4006 omni's (in hat, 36th row left of center) > Lunatec 316> Panasonic SV-250 by Marc Nutter; Transfer: Sony DTC-A6 > Dio 2448 > SF 4.5 @ 48K, Resample, add fades> CDWAV> SHN

This is from a recording 8 years ago, taping is almost godlike now!

Shorten is a lossless audio compression system that typically gets about 2:1 compression. It's used a lot by the etree jam band music trading community, which tends to start with audience recordings and doesn't want to degrade them further (unlike the old days on Nth-generation analog tape copies :-) That obviously takes a lot more space than small MP3s, but it still lets you fit twice as much music on a disk drive. So that 120GB disk drive that cost $120 at Fry's can now hold 240 CDs (Hmmm... I think the CD jukeboxes I saw could hold about 200 CDs for about $200. I remember when the computer WORM drive jukeboxes were more like $100K for that kind of capacity :-)

I've been using BitTorrent lately to download lossless recordings of Phish concerts. Each concert is usually about 1GB in size and the transfer rates have been superb. It will start off slowly, but pick up steam once you download parts of the fileset that others have already downloaded. A few hours later and I can burn 3 CDs worth of live music. Excelsior!

but it is still a pain for us who like live music.

Perhaps etree is more your style.

Amazing that no one here has mentioned etree. They offer thousands of live recordings done with the permission of the bands. Recording is done on DAT, then converted to a lossless file format 'shorten'. Those files then can be converted back to CD-audio using tools offered on their site. Great stuff, go have a look!

Not necessarily. Consider etree, for instance. Etree specializes in trading live music from trade-friendly bands such as the Grateful Dead and its sucessors, Phish, etc. However, etree trades involve lossless formats such as FLAC or Shorten, which take far more bandwidth than MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.

FTP and Web servers serving these files tend to be overloaded, so a peer-to-peer solution such as BitTorrent can be very handy for such trading.

On the other hand, for the hippie jam bands that let you non-commercially for your friends, obviously you want to rename the files .420pm instead...

The music isn't for everyone but Furthurnet already has such a service. Also, for the shorten compressed files, they can be verified by a central database found here.

It's also worth noting that some of the bands that allow live taping have been recorded and traded in CD-quality by members of etree, and a lot of those recordings are being put up in lossless-compression formats on the audio section of Brewster Kahle's Archive.org site. Most of the ones there now are ones most folks wouldn't have heard of...but they have 28 Guster concerts, one of which I'm listening to right now. (They did have some Dave Matthews Band, but had to take it down after DMB changed their concert-trading policy.)

What I'm wondering is how Clearchannel's legit-bootlegs CD program will affect the bands like Guster that allow audience taping and trading of their shows.

However, I would say that I'd pay for concerts of a lot of bands. People like BNL, Dave Matthews, etc. that throw some of the best live shows on earth would be worth it.

many people are not aware bands like Dave Matthews Band have an open taping policy. while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive .

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

Dave Matthews Band no longer allows distribution through etree.org audio archive , but using trades and B&Ps you could easily find a high quality DMB show for free.

Check out the etree newbie FAQ and the etree trader database for more info.

Mike

However, I would say that I'd pay for concerts of a lot of bands. People like BNL, Dave Matthews, etc. that throw some of the best live shows on earth would be worth it.

many people are not aware bands like Dave Matthews Band have an open taping policy. while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive .

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

Dave Matthews Band no longer allows distribution through etree.org audio archive , but using trades and B&Ps you could easily find a high quality DMB show for free.

Check out the etree newbie FAQ and the etree trader database for more info.

Mike

However, I would say that I'd pay for concerts of a lot of bands. People like BNL, Dave Matthews, etc. that throw some of the best live shows on earth would be worth it.

many people are not aware bands like Dave Matthews Band have an open taping policy. while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive .

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

Dave Matthews Band no longer allows distribution through etree.org audio archive , but using trades and B&Ps you could easily find a high quality DMB show for free.

Check out the etree newbie FAQ and the etree trader database for more info.

Mike

...with their recent Holiday run. The New Year's Eve show was available for download one or two days after the concert as either MP3s or SHNs (lossless compression see Etree for more on the common formats). The price was reasonable ($11/$14 depending on compression) for the equivalent of three CDs of music. The cool thing is that they still allow tapers to record and trade the shows, you just can't trade these sanctioned downloads which presumably sound better. It's a very cool idea though.

If you're interested in free music, go here.

etree.org for a directory huge lossless (true CD quality) legal audio files from FTP sites. Mostly live shows. HUGE files will fill up your space fast.

mp3.com for downloads-a-plenty. All put up there by the musicians, who want you to download them!

Emusic gets my best vote here, because their CDs have a one-click to download all songs on a CD. You can go add say 50 albums to your queue with 50 clicks each night before bed, and fill up your collection pretty fast. (non-windows people use zinf for this one-click capability.)

Etree has collaborated with archive.org to provide people with a large repository of completely legal and high quality live recordings. Check it out, you may find out about some good new bands. Stay away from Furthurnet. It's a decent idea, but its filled with bad files, written in Java, and it's slow.

see http://etree.org for mailing lists about sites with free music to trade. Mirrors of the sites on this list are needed. Please consider it.

Many bands allow taping of their concerts and the redistribution of audience recordings. Lately, the most popular method of distributing these recordings is as .shn files which are a type of lossless audio. A two hour show can be about 1.0 GB so that's one way to fill a lot of space quickly. You can get started at http://www.etree.org. There are many other sites out there that will allow to download SHN shows right from their servers including, for Dave Matthews, http://www.antsmarching.org.

People should check out: http://wiki.etree.org, an online network for people interested in live jam band music. They are trying to move towards using all FLAC, or at least mostly. Also check out the etree audio archive, they have some stuff in FLAC, although most of it's in SHN.

Visit etree.org. The big benefit of lossless compression is it makes for better distribution of live recordings. The short of it is that demanding recordings in a losslessly compressed audio format, along with verification using checksum files, guarantees no loss in fidelity.

There are many alternate live-music trading scenarios which cause a loss in fidelity. Two of the most common: 1) CD Audio->CD Audio copies are not perfect (unless you use a specialized tool like EAC - Exact Audio Copy); 2) trading lossily-compressed audio tends to lead to loss of fidelity through inevitable decompression, writing to CD, reripping, and reencoding.

The fact that most people who use P2P do not know who the RIAA or the MPAA sheds light on something interesting. The reason they don't know about them is that nothing they do is prohibitting them from finding their music online. Nothing. It's quite funny really. A large portion of the people who know about the RIAA are the ones saying "HEY, I don't download music illegally, so don't illegally tax me!" All my downloaded music comes legally from etree.org and is a lot better than most of the crap that the RIAA pushes.

actually, i have found mp3.com to be kind of cool and useful for certain things. i found some cool local bands that way. i lvoe finding new bands that no one has heard of and making my friends listen to them. i prefer to do taht with local bands and i found mp3.com to be the easiest way to discover local bands, other than listening to this radio show called local bands on WPLR 99.1 in the new haven area of connecticut. they play music from local bands for half an hour every sunday night at like 10 or 10:30. it's pretty good, although some of the bands suck.

another good way to discover other bands is to look at other bands members of your favorite bands have played with, or opening acts for your favorite bands. they usually have something in common (or sometimes don't, but that's rare). go to a small club or bar in your area and listen to a band or bands for like $5-10. go to the whole thing, not just the "headliner". a lot of times the openers (usually 1-2, sometimes 3) are decent bands. of course that doesn't always happen as i went to see psychedelic breakfast (i went to grammar school with their guitarist) one time at toad's place in new haven (they were opening for max creek that night) and the other opening band, spiral trace, was a high school band that absolutely sucked, so we just left, not seeing the other bands. we ended up getting drunk at yale instead, which wasn't a bad idea at the time. :) if you live in the new haven area, or anywhere in connecticut, toad's is a good place to check out. also pyschedelic breakfast and max creek are on mp3.com if they are new to you and you want to check out their music.

my last suggestion is to join any email discussion lists pertaining to the bands you like or the types of music you like. etree.org has a some discussion lists that pertain to taper/trader friendly bands. always a good way to find new music. so good luck on your music search, i'm sure you'll find a lot out there.

Amazon does a decent job of recommneding stuff that you might like based on other people's purchasing habits. One method that I've found useful is to create a wishlist of albums that you want or like (or even own). Amazon wil provide a list of other artists requested or purchased by people who requested or purchased the same thing you just did. Plus using the wishlist is an easy-to-access way to keep track of the stuff you want, but it is also pretty easy to get carried away. I have something like 250 books, music, and dvds on my list...

Also check out interviews with band members and check their homepages. They often talk about other bands they like or people who have influenced them. Depending on the music you like, certain members may play in a few different bands, or may sit in on concert sets of other bands. I listen to a lot of live music and many of the artists I like to collect I discovered by grabbing shows that an artist I already knew about sat in on.

Message boards and fan sites probably make decent ways to hear about people, as well as topical magazines (ie, GuitarPlayer, BassPlayer, maybe ComputerMusic, etc.).

Don't forget to ask other people at the shows you see what they listen to. CHeck out the local listings of bands in the area. Take the plunge and go see a show of an unknown that plays in a club that often hosts music you like.

Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on.

The Web was designed to work well with caching, particularly at organizational firewalls and peering points. It scales really well, and if you work inside a big company, or use a medium-sized ISP that has one, the first time somebody retrieves a given page, it's there for the next N users, and the bigger N is, the more chance that the first person got the page before Slashdot killed it. I've generally had much better success reading slashdotted sites from work, where I catch a cached version at the proxy, than from home. It requires a bit of computing horsepower at the firewall or gateway, but that's surprisingly cheap, and if bandwidth still costs you money, it can cut down significantly on costs when lots of people look at the same static content. It's obviously less useful for dynamic content, unless there's an easy way to tell if the dynamic content is the same for multiple viewers, but most web sites have content that's mostly static most of the time.

Akamai built a model that sells caching to content providers rather than viewers, which was technically interesting, and similar things have been done by their competitors such as AT&T, Digital Island, and Speedera, but if you're not doing a high-volume commercial site, and didn't expect to be slashdotted, it's the wrong model. Google's caching is fine, if Google catches it before Slashdot does and Slashdot actually points to it, but that's pretty rare. BitTorrent does a nice job of P2P caching and distribution of large files (its target application is things like CDs and big software distributions, and you'll find it used by some of the ETree Jam Band Music Download people - Bram's tested it for respectably-sized numbers of simultaneous downloaders (I think a few hundred, which is pretty big for CDs.)

If you look up "cache" in Google, the first entry you get is for Squid, which is also the first entry you get if you look up "squid".

Solid. It looks like, at least for now, that really nothing worth listening to is on that list. Ah well, I'll buy my cd or two a month and download my fifty or so a month from Etree's Free Network.

I would venture to say that these same Phish shows will be available on Etree sites, so why does livephish think people will pay for what they A) can get free already from Etree or B) will almost certainly end up on Etree anyway?

You will not find the official Live Phish releases circulating on etree. That would be a blatant copyright infringement and is exactly the sort of thing that we go to great lengths to avoid. Fortunately Phisg has changed their taping and trading policy to go along with this annoncement. Previously, the commercial release of one of their shows meant that audience recordings of the same show had to be removed from electronic circulation. Now they are allowing the audience recordings to stay in circulation. Kudos to the band and its management for making this change.

--Bklyn (etree.org server team member)

while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive.

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

Mike

Besides, doesn't charging for taped concerts kind of go against the concert-tapes-as-promotion philosophy? The reason the Dead were the most successful concert band of all time was partially due to the free availability of tons of concert tapes. I know livephish has to pay for bandwidth, but this is a much larger divergence from the Dead/Phish philosophy of free concert music than people seem to believe.

A couple points:

- Phish does not allow soundboard patches at their shows (due to the illegal foreign "import" scene). These soundboard recordings will naturally sound better than your typical audience recording. I'll pay for the quality. Some of my audience recordings sound great. Others sound like they were recorded in a tin can.

- You can still freely trade any audience tape/mp3/shn. In fact, Phish just modified their taping/trading policy to allow ANY audience recording to be traded online (Taping Policy). The previous policy prohibited the online trading of audience recordings if a commercial release of the same show was available.

- How is this any different from the live Grateful Dead releases (i.e. Dick's Picks)? You won't find any of the Dick's Picks releases on etree. Seems to me like they are embracing a new medium.

The Grateful Dead started legal concert taping years ago, eventually setting aside stageside sections for tapers where they could set up mic booms and their DAT recorders. These concerts (plus those of Phish, Allman Bros, Dead satellite groups, etc) for the past five-six years have been available on Etree which is essentially a clearinghouse for FTPs with .shn versions of these shows. Been downloading them for years. From the site: "You can find nearly every band that allows taping in the jambands community on etree.org, including Phish, The Grateful Dead, The Seth Yacovone Band, String Cheese Incident, The Slip, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Umphrey's McGee, The Big Wu, Amfibian and The New Deal."

I would venture to say that these same Phish shows will be available on Etree sites, so why does livephish think people will pay for what they A) can get free already from Etree or B) will almost certainly end up on Etree anyway?

Besides, doesn't charging for taped concerts kind of go against the concert-tapes-as-promotion philosophy? The reason the Dead were the most successful concert band of all time was partially due to the free availability of tons of concert tapes. I know livephish has to pay for bandwidth, but this is a much larger divergence from the Dead/Phish philosophy of free concert music than people seem to believe.

It's great that Phish has decided to make a lossless format available as well as the lossy mp3s. etree.org has been doing this for a number of years, and a method of distribution has been developed that preserves the quality of the audio as it passes through many hands.

etree.org offers legal show recordings from bands that promote the taping of their shows. The bands get free publicity, the fans get free recordings -- it works out for both parties.

Phish is pretty typical in that they only allow audience recordings (no soundboard access) and they sell (generally) better sounding soundboard recordings.

Here here! I only have a 12x burner and have burned hundreds of cds, almost all of them at 8x. Why? So I can reliably multitask and do something else while the burn is going on. When cdrecord ejects the disk, I take the one that just finished, label it, and put it in a stack with the rest and slap another one in the drive, rinse repeat. I was never in a hurry to burn a cd, I guess because I could burn them faster than I could listen/archive them. Oh yeah, etree rocks!

BitTorrent is getting widely used for recorded live shows, with the permission of the copyright holders.

BitTorrent works great as a content distribution mechanism for anything, but so far the corporate world hasn't noticed it yet, they're very wary of new technology.

SHN is a lossles compression format used by most traders. There are compression/conversion/etc. utilities and plugins for players on Mac, Linux, and Win, I use them for audio output to my sound system.

if you are going to go with a file that big, you might as well do shorten [ping.be] (.shn) files...

and hey, theres a plugin for winamp [etree.org] too!