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Actually, further is just an extension of things that have been going on for years. It goes all the way back to the Dead and people trading tapes from the reel-to-reel masters of a show, etc. There's a long standing tradition of many bands that allow taping of their shows, and trading (without profit) of those tapes.

Recently, this has been extended to the digital world, with furthernet being only the most recent addition to the mix. There's also (most prominently) etree.org which is the backbone of a system of FTP servers coupled with mailing lists that distribute ligitimate live music.

So, to touch on your fear that "sharing may not be legal" and that "the RIAA could[n't] care less what the bands want," in this case, the sharing is legal, and the RIAA can't do nuthin' about it. The RIAA does not have copyright on a live recording, simple as that. The copyright for that show belongs solely to the band that played, and they have the right (and many exercise this right) to a) allow people to tape them and b) allow those tapers to freely trade their tapes.

Also, flawed. I download gigabytes upon gigabytes of music a month, and it's all legitimate.

Napster is long dead. There are MANY other (better) options now available. When my roommate used Napster back in the day the average search returned a good enough list to download something at a decent speed. But let's look at Kazaa. The average list resulting from a search is insanely long and the combination of downloads for a higher speed is SO much better. Granted Napster would have incorporated the same thing into itself but that's not the point.

My point is that just b/c Napsters gone does NOT mean that people are no longer able to download/burn music. That's just stupid to say that b/c it is gone there is no more desire to buy CDs.

My theory (based on my own economic situation after the stocks went to shit) is that economics have played a large role in the downturn of everything, including CDs.

Already have an Internet connection, already have a CD burner, already have P2P software, blank CDs running me about $1 a piece/average.

New CDs run me $9.99 - $17.00 depending (especially for smaller bands like I prefer to listen to, SCI, WSP, etc).

What am I going to do? I am going to download the damn MP3s or SHNs and burn them. Just like everyone else is.

Stop w/the happy horseshit.

Support freedom of music. etree and FurthurNET

I think you underestimate the varied tastes of those in the etree community. Take a look at this list of performers starting with the letter D traded and owned by members of the etree community. You will likely discover that that tapers and traders come from all walks.....

And don't forget to put the URL of your band in your sig line and post all over slashdot!

don't forget to join the related trading outlets (I suggest etree.) and offer freebies and B&Ps regularly. Then, put your URL in your sig and post promiscuously on slashdot.

Many bands allow audience taping. These bands also sell cd's and they do ok at it.

Historic examples of bands that did very well while allowing fans to tape and trade their stuff are the Grateful Dead, Phish, and Dave Matthews Band.

By allowing taping, fans will share your music legally with each other. If your music is good enough that people actually enjoy it, then those people who received a copy of one of your shows will pay to see you live and possibly buy a CD at the same time.

There are two EXCELLENT resources for distribution of music on the Net.

FurthurNET and etree

I *only* support, monitarily, musicians that allow the FREE distribution of their music to their fans...

etree relies on a mailing list and FTP servers to distribute music whereas FurthurNET relies on P2P (in a format much like Limewire, etc).

If you really want your music to go out and don't want to have to pay HIGH bandwith costs, I suggest one of these two methods.

Shorten and FLAC. Lossless audio rules!

has anyone checked out FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or shorten32? I will not be using mp3 anymore....

nearly everytime something of this comes up I offer links to both etree and FurthurNET so that people can experience artists that allow the free taping of their events.

These two sources are probably the best way to experience artists in their element.

Just seems like people would rather rape and pilage the P2P networks instead.

Minidiscs never caught on because they use a lossy compression algorhythm. MP3 is already lossy, by putting them onto an MD, you are seriously crippling the audio quality by doubly compressing and compensating for silence samples in the data. If you insist on using portable players to transfer your MP3s in anything but MP3 format, DAT is the way to go - it's a perfect reproduction.

Of course, your best bet is to avoid MP3s, which pretty much destroy the sound anyway - you should go with ogg-vorbis (still lossy, but less so), or even better shn (shorten) format, a lossless compression scheme.

Some audiophiles do.

Yeah I guess, but that's really not the point here. Yeah, they are looking for "nodes" people who are running large segments of the network...

My problem w/this is that these "nodes" could theoretically believe they are in it to help out the greater good. Not necessarily facilitate the trading of copyrighted music.

I say fuck the artists and the RIAA. I really feel that music should be free. I have said it several times before and I will certainly say it again now...

I only support bands that allow the free taping, distribution, and trading of their music. Check out etree and FurthurNET to trade this music w/others.

Plenty of people share lossless music in Shorten (SHN) files. Read it about it here. Songs can be compressed to about 1/2 to 2/3 of the size of the WAV -- and for a perfect copy, it's well worth the not-too-significant download on a broadband connection. Smashing Pumpkins bootlegs are illegal (I think), but there are many bands that encourage this (Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Grateful Dead, and hundreds more) and I had no problems running a server at my school last year, sucking up about 4TB of bandwidth during the school year. If you keep it legal (not too hard), schools generally don't have much of a problem -- if they do, they should be capping people.

I don't know if anybody's done 2-dimensional lossless coding, or how well it works, but it shouldn't be hard - do line-by-line differences and then compress those, if you want something crude.
You can also find lossless music coders - "Shorten" used by etree.org gets compression ratios of 2-3, which is a lot bigger than MP3s but keeps the audiophiles happy.

Try http://www.etree.org [etree.org] @ 4:20pm EST to find out why everyone's so laid back...

Etree

Try www.etree.org. Since the Grateful Dead were cool with bootlegs, there are more reliable distribution means than P2P systems.

Anyway, this sounds something like what the people at etree do. However, the people there care a little more about music than your average joe.

no dipshit, the Phish CDS he's referring to are limited edition, special pressings of live concerts. They usually include a minimum of 3 CDs and are targeted to a small market, hence the higher price.

And besides, if you don't want to buy those, then you are free (as in beer) to download plenty other Phish tunes.

OK, maybe I listen to different bands than you do (:-), but there are lots of two-CD album sets out there, and they've figured out how to cram that into a jewel box while making it only mildly dangerous to open while driving a car ... It's probably more common for old hippie bands releasing lots more material, but unfortunately, a twice-the-capacity-of-CD disk isn't enough to hold an entire night's concert without compression (though if you make the player smart enough to handle shorten lossless compression you could fit most concerts on the new disk format, if not usually on the old.)

They're going to be a very busy department. How many people do you know that don't have illegal mp3's on their machine?

I agree.. but the problem arises when people who have all legal mp3s on their machine get busted. There is such a stigma on mp3s, and how they are illegal just because they're in that format.

Should they be afraid to keep 100% legal live music in SHN format on their computer, just because the common belief by the "powers that be" is that any audio on ones computer is illegal.

Just go to www.etree.org.

(etree is a music sharing community.)

Venues for...
Television theme songs
High-quality bootlegs for bands that permit concert taping

So what? I haven't listened to music on the radio since high school. Why? Well I can decide what I want to listen to for myself. If you can't investigate new music on your own then the radio telling you what to like shouldn't be a concern of yours.

Checkout some independent or smaller labels. Labels like Matador Records, Prawn Song, Fat Wreck, and may others. It's a shame that labels like Grand Royal were forced out of business for not force-feeding the status quo. Read Nude As The News for non mainstream album reviews.

Find a band you Like and check out their influences. This is a good way to find new stuff to listen to. Like Led Zeppelin? Listen to Muddy Waters. Like Trey Solo? Listen to Count Basie, Sun Ra, or Little Feet. Like Primus? Listen To Rush. Ect.

GO SEE LIVE MUSIC! If you live near a large city there are tons of show to go see, there are some good websites dedicated to finding shows in your area. Check out Jambase for example.

Trade Live Music! There are several communities for the trading of live tapes, a large number of bands ok the taping of their shows and the thousands of tapes are out there for free. One Such community Etree is a great example of this.

Listen to College radio if you live near one!

Don't complain about the lack of variety on the radio, just don't listen to it.

Shorten, or a .SHN file, is lossless audio compression that works quite well and dominates the bootleg scene, get the neccesary tools here.

Support Righteous Babe Records, Ani Difranco's indie label. They have a lot of high quality, frequently politically charged, and non-mainstream music. On top of that, the music doesn't suck.

None of that money goes to a big corporation; most of it goes back into making music and fighting the good fight, so to speak. If you want to put your money where your mouth is, go support Ani and the artists she publishes.

If you just want free music, you should get involved with etree.org, which is a community that distributes "bootlegs" of live concerts...the bootlegs are legal, recorded from performances of taper-friendly bands, such as Phish, older Grateful Dead shows, Bela Fleck...stuff like that. The bands that allow this tend to fit a certain profile (lots of improvising, etc), so if you don't like songs that can be fed to you in 3.5 minutes between commercials, you aren't going to like this avenue, however, there is a genuine community being fostered here that tends to be more artistic and intellectual, and frequently, very tight-knit for a bunch of virtual strangers. It's kind of cool, actually, and unlike the P2P mentality of leeching everything you can, there's a sense of the value of contributing back.

etree.org also happens to be Linux-friendly; there are links for XMMS plugins on the frontpage, etc.

The ultimate problem of these massive media corporations is they _do_ have a product that you want. I mean, if you want N'Sync (or that Episode 2 DVD, or some new Disney-owned Anime, etc...), then you can only get it in one place. I can also respect that not everyone is going to be falling over themselves for the latest release from indie band Bitch and Animal, but you _can_ consider this a chance to broaden your horizons; entertainment doesn't have to be mindless, and can in fact be a bettering activity.

Get out there and try something new.

--ryan.

handy links:
Winamp plugin

XMMS plugin

other windows shorten software

SHN FAQ

buy a ticket.
see the concert.
get the music from etree

Well, your arguments are basically wrong. Musicians have every right to get paid if they want to for their music. They also have a right to give it away if they so choose. Second, power sources like water, air, and sunlight are not "free". Each produces their own environmental and monetary negative effects.

I love the SHN format for downloading shows of etree or Furthur but as a portable device format it doesn't stand a chance because the filesize is just way too large and there are no SHN chip decoders in existance. What I would really like to see is a lossless format that reduces file size even further. Shorten is basically abandonware that has been adopted by a niche.

If it was download mix burn they might actually have a point...

There is plenty of music that is legally and freely distributed using the
"download mix burn" model:

http://www.etree.org/

http://www.furthurnet.com/

http://gdlive.com/

http://www.sugarmegs.org/

http://www.kapoho.net/

http://www.alternativetentacles.com/mp3.php

Just to name a few. Why should my rights to enjoy this music be taken
away? Why should rights of the artists to chose a free distribution
business model be restricted?

Don't tar us all with the same brush: "download mix burn" does not mean copyright
restriction!

It's not just hippie music, either. Metallica (ironically,) Pearl Jam, and Radiohead are a few bands whos live music is freely tradeable. A very incomplete list of bands who allow recorders at their concerts and subsequent trading can be found Here

burris

Make less crap.

I'm not going to buy an $18 dollar CD dammit. I'll buy two $12 dollar ones though. Make less crap, drop the cost of the CD, and I'll buy more. As a finger to the man, I'll just use etree for now (though the RIAA get kickbacks for CD-R sales so I lose either way). I've bought all the CD's of the artists I want to buy for now. Nothing appealing has come out lately.

psxndc

Actually, it does matter what the band says. Lots of bands have kept the rights to their music themselves, and there are public thriving music trading communities who trade only legal music.

Phish. Grateful Dead. String Cheese Incident. Keller Williams. Medeski, Martin, and Wood. Bela Fleck. Rusted Root. moe. Dave Matthews. Galactic. Gov't Mule.

Have a look at etree for one community that specializes in trading these bands.

That being said, no live taper would ever be caught dead using this thing to record a show. If somebody showed up with this thing a taping section, they would be laughed out of the building.

http://db.etree.org/etree_shnlist.php

Click on a band, and then click on the links under the "md5" column of the table. You can use those md5's to make sure that what you got is the real deal.

However, I know that furthur does not use these md5's. For one thing, you can share music from bands that are not on the etree list, like Metallica and Bob Marley.

Also, its a fairly big undertaking to have enough trusted people listen to every seed and bestow dank status on it. You can check out the process here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dankseeds

-Mike

1. The content at db.etree is not necessarily what is being traded over the etree mailing lists (see http://db.etree.org/faq/read.php?faq_key=126)

2. The md5s are not checked against a central database. They are packaged into a text file that is distributed with a file set. Furthur will not allow you to share a file set until all the files check out through md5.

3. The central server has information about what artists are ok to trade across the network. This does not prevent someone from creating a new client that ignores the central server and allows non-taper friendly bands, but it does limit liability of the central server.

Some members of the etree server team have been involved in the development of furthur since the beginning (thanks Mike!) so, as another person asked, yes, etree has heard of it.

etree will continue to be ftp centric but Furthur is the first p2p app that meets the requirements for etree, that is: free as in speach and beer, no banner ads, no money changes hands anywhere.

Tom A.
http://db.etree.org

P.S. Etree was founded in the summer of 98 so it would be hard to have used it for 4 years :)

* Files are associated with shows (ie band/date). So if I am downloading Grateful dead 8/27/72, I don't need to look for all of the individual songs. I just download the show and all the files are there.

* Support for MD5 checking. This ensures that a) all the files are there and b) it is an exact digital copy of the original seed. I can verify this with the etree database

I have been using Etree for three or four years now. For those not aware here, etree site-op's release their server content on the etree-announce mailing list periodically. Users can download, through FTP, high quality concerts from folks like The Grateful Dead and other microphone friendly bands. I think what keeps etree pure currently, is that with only a (relatively) few site-ops, control over content, is easily implemented. This will undoubtedly collapse under the massive abuse inherent in peer-to-peer networks.

It would be quite sad to see .shn's of Brittney Spears 2/18/02 Cleveland Show being traded alongside some of music's most influential live bands. For what it's worth check out what is being traded on etree at their database site

I have been using Etree for three or four years now. For those not aware here, etree site-op's release their server content on the etree-announce mailing list periodically. Users can download, through FTP, high quality concerts from folks like The Grateful Dead and other microphone friendly bands. I think what keeps etree pure currently, is that with only a (relatively) few site-ops, control over content, is easily implemented. This will undoubtedly collapse under the massive abuse inherent in peer-to-peer networks.

It would be quite sad to see .shn's of Brittney Spears 2/18/02 Cleveland Show being traded alongside some of music's most influential live bands. For what it's worth check out what is being traded on etree at their database site

Furthur is being developed by some of the etree.org crew. Etree.org has an outstanding track record so far. The group trades only "taper-friendly" recordings, and if anyone asks for a recording that isn't taper-friendly, members are sure to jump on the request and tell him to look elsewhere (some are more polite than others).

You'd think that a group of over 13,000 (that was last I heard a while ago, and with the second related story in a week, there are sure to be many more directed from /.) would be chaos. However, the group is pretty well self-policed.

The fact is, if someone wants an illegal bootleg, there are plenty of other places to look rather than the etree.org lists. Rather than get flamed and endanger etree.org, those people just go elsewhere for those needs.

Check out etree.org's legal page for more information about policy. After 3 years, there still hasn't been an RIAA shakedown.

Furthur is being developed by some of the etree.org crew. Etree.org has an outstanding track record so far. The group trades only "taper-friendly" recordings, and if anyone asks for a recording that isn't taper-friendly, members are sure to jump on the request and tell him to look elsewhere (some are more polite than others).

You'd think that a group of over 13,000 (that was last I heard a while ago, and with the second related story in a week, there are sure to be many more directed from /.) would be chaos. However, the group is pretty well self-policed.

The fact is, if someone wants an illegal bootleg, there are plenty of other places to look rather than the etree.org lists. Rather than get flamed and endanger etree.org, those people just go elsewhere for those needs.

Check out etree.org's legal page for more information about policy. After 3 years, there still hasn't been an RIAA shakedown.

Haven't these guys heard of etree.org? Etree has been around for a few years, and exists to allow the trading of lossless recordings of live shows from bands who allow trading.

Its not p2p, mostly ftps and burn + post cds, but it has been there for some time. Loads of good shows too :)

I've used shorten for online trading of Widespread Panic and other live bands, and it is by far the codec of choice for me. When used together with md5 checksums, it is definetely the best lossless codec out there. You can download shnAMP plugin for winamp or a similar program for Linux, which will play shns and, if shnV3 is used to encode, you will be able to seek the shns. Etree has all the programs that you need to listen, encode, and decode shns. The program written by Michael Weise (mkwACT and also found on Etree) also makes it very easy to convert to shn and a variety of other codecs.

Use shorten. With plugins which will allow for realtime decompression and playback (with searching within each song) available for XMMS, Winamp, and Macamp the only issue remaining is storage capacity and processing time involved in decompressing the files. Any Celeron or higher will handle the processing necessary and with 120gig drives well below $300 and 160gig starting to come out...that's a healthy sized cd collection.

A number of online communities use shorten for trading live recordings...www.etree.org is one such organization. WAVs are generated from a number of different sources, compressed, checksum's are generated, then the files are distributed freely.

Another great advantage of shorten is that if something comes along that provides better (or more desireable) compression you can un-shorten all of your files to their original state and recompress them using this newer compression scheme....something that no MP3 (or any other compression scheme that I know of) will do.

The reason the live music trading community (most notably etree.org) uses the shorten format is because there was not a way to widely distribute exact copies of, say, master DATs. Now, assuming the person transferring the DAT, did a reasonably good job, every person after that who receives the SHN files can create an exact copy of that DAT. This is crucial because of the way shows are distributed. One person gets a copy from his friend, and he passes it on to his friends. If there was a lossy step involved in the middle of the chain, each copy would be worse than the one before. Note tape trading. Copying a cassette is lossy, so someone who got such with a 4th or 5th generation tape was stuck with all of the artifacts that were introduced in each generation above. Even copying CD audio is not perfect: programs that do digital audio extraction need to do a good job reading the data without any error correction. Shorten makes 100% sure that every copy is just like the original.

I'm a taper, and a converter of live recorded music, so for this purpose, I'll record the original DAT tape of a show to hard drive, split the rather large wav file to tracks, then burn an audio cd for listening, and a SHORTEN disc or discs for archival purposes. It's a lot cleaner, and more bit-perfect for archival use to extract a check-summed [ md5 ] file using a series of shorten files, than to extract audio from the disc. Too much jitter.

For listening at work, or while mowing the yard, I use MP3, since we have idiotic Novell desktop policies that prevent us from using any non-approved executable. The only thing I've got is Windows Media Player, piece of crap it may be, but it's there. Even winamp is disallowed in our office, for which there's a SHN plugin, even!

I'd use ogg if I could, however.

In the Grateful Dead/Phish/Jamband trading community, there's a strong preference for the shorten (.shn) format. The .shn codec provides lossless compression, and compresses ~ 2:1.

If you fill a data CDR with .shn files, you can fit approximately 1 hour 55 minutes of audio on a single 650 MB disc. Plus, because you are writing a data CDR, the data is protected by better error correction. I'd really like to see CD players incorporate the .shn or some other comparable codec. It would be a "super CD" with 115 minutes of music, but none of the artifacts of lossy compression.

Sure, you can say that high bitrate .mp3s are "nearly" indistinguishable from the original digital recording, but if you can afford the bandwidth, why not have your music files in a format that is *identical* to the original digital recording. What's the saying -- it only costs twice as much for the very best ... in this case, it costs 5 times as much, but you don't have to compromise one way or the other, and that's, if nothing else, a nice feeling. Nice feelings are what drive the audiophile market, btw.

I'd really like to see .shn codec support in *some* portable player. A 1GB microdrive would hold ~200 hours of .shn data. Not bad, considering that those 200 hours would be true CD quality, instead of "near" CD quality.

I predict that within a few years, MP3s will go the way of 16-color graphics -- mp3 will be remembered as an intermediate stepping stone -- an obsolete historical format that bootstrapped digital audio onto the internet. They are not the future of digital audio on the net -- that future belongs to lossless codecs.

IMHO! :)

Tenacious D allows taping of their shows so spreading their live music, in any medium, as long as no money changes hands, is legal.

A list of some of Tenacious D shows in ciruclation is here.

Don't assume that just becuase a band exists means they don't allow their music to be traded. In addition, trading legally recorded shows IS supporting the band as it helps spread the tunes to listeners that may have never heard the band before.