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Sorry, that link is Furthur.

Furthur is a LEGAL P2P program that allows you to download concerts from bands who allow taping. You can download concerts in MP3 and and loseless SHN format. There are many bands you will recognize and a lot you 've never heard before. There are a lot of jambands such as Phish, The Grateful Dead, but there are rap, metal, jazz, and grunge groups on there as well. Best of all, its written in Java so it will run on just about any platform.

Furthurnet is probably my favorite that runs on OS X. Bands that allow taping (and they're more numerous than you'd think. Phish, The Dead, and The Black Crowes are there, but so is everything from Louis Armstrong to the Beasties) are traded freely on this app, and I've grabbed more than 35 gigs of tunes. Most serious traders use Shorten format (.shn), which is a lossless compression format that brings that patch from the soundboard right down onto your Mac's hard drive, no questions asked. You can translate these into aiff or wav files pretty easily, and burn CDs right from iTunes.

Furthurnet's UI and search protocol (borrowed originally from Gnutella, I believe) could use a little spiffing up, but it's a GPL'd, ad-free application that works great once you're used to it. I haven't gotten online yet and failed to find at least one show within a few minutes of searching for whatever artist strikes my fancy (though admittedly Doc Watson is about as esoteric as I get).

Course if you're just looking for warez, I haven't helped at all, but if you want some great tunes for free via your new-found love of the Mac, you can't get any better than Furthurnet.

"PS" If Limewire is running too slowly, it might be a "Java problem". Make sure your app has an Aqua look & feel to take advantage of Apple's JVM's hardware accelerated GUI widgets. Having a video card that supports Quartz Extreme would help a bit as well.

"PPSS" In what little spare time I find I have (when I'm not writing this post), I've been trying to port Furthurnet to Mac OS 9-. Had some luck, but nothing to release just yet. So if you're not using OS X, upgrade. :^D

Actually mainstream-skatepunks Pennywise do have free MP3s of bootlegs available on their website http://www.pennywisdom.com. They're not really interesting because all the Pennywise shows are basically the same.
Jambands like Phish have such huge tape-trading community because their shows are based on improvisation and they tend to be unique. Only band with real tape-trading/bootleg scene that could be considered punk is Sublime. Their bootlegs can be found on Furthur

For free punk music you should check out Out of Tune (Shameless plug, get my band's second EP for free from there) and ftp.unixpunx.org, which hosts a really great archive of independent music (and doesn't care about copyright laws at all..)

Lately I've been finding all I can download off P2P programs like Direct Connect and Furthurnet. Its mostly live shows, and they are all in .shn format, which is a lossless compression format that restores to the original .wav file.

These communities shun both compressed files like .mp3 and trading anything that has been released commercially. What you do get is great recordings of live music from bands like U2, DMB, Grateful Dead, etc., all ethically traded and in their full audio glory.

The audiophiles I know pretty much don't listen to mp3, ever.

i do a lot of trading of taper/trader friendly bands. furthurnet is definitely cool. it's a p2p app that allows for searching of bands, show dates, sources, etc, etc, etc. it's pretty cool. it's open source too. it's ported to both linux and windows (not hard since it was written in java, which is the only bad thing about it). it also uses pcp (packet chain protocol) so users can piggy-back off each other. it's pretty cool. i wish more people with the shows i want used it though.

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

Err... http://furthurnet.com/ is where you can download the Furthur.

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.

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.

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.

furthurnet.com

ALl the LEGAL, ONLINE, LIVE music you can have. check it out now...

for those of you interested in bands that promote the distribution of their live material try FurthurNet It's very similar to Limewire in look/feel but only allows the trading of music by artists that allow the taping of their shows (and videotaping as well).

Thanks for the suggestion. I've mostly gone back to listening to my own CD collection, but for a long time I was listening one of the various SomaFM streams, sitting back, coding, and occasionally writing down the name of a new group or album that I had never heard. I have made dozens of CD purchases based on that list. That source is gone now, and the list (along with CD purchasing for the last few months) is frozen with its departure.

Another funny anecdote: While driving (the only time I ever consider subjecting myself to broadcast radio) recently, I actually heard a song I liked. Missed the name of the artist, but I paid close attention to the lyrics to see if I could pick out keywords. Went home, logged in to the nearest P2P network and had that exact song in less than 30 minutes.

If someone would develop a system with that kind of response time, that would allow me to download what I want by the song, I'd pay for that. The RIAA has had at least half a decade to develop such a system, yet instead they have tried to legislate the technology back into Pandora's Box.

This disgusts me to no end, and I think I'm now fed up enough where this will now become a personal crusade for me. These leeches do the public, and the arts no good. They've refused to evolve, so now it's time for their extinction.

for those of you interested in bands that promote the distribution of their live material try FurthurNet

It's very similar to Limewire in look/feel but only allows the trading of music by artists that allow the taping of their shows (and videotaping as well).

There is a Java client for those non-native OS's (Linux, etc).

I use it daily, it seems stable enough on my machine, try it out and see if you like it.

Of the three P2P networks you mention, well really 2 since IRC is not P2P, Gnutella and especially Napster were basically created with the transfer of illegal content in mind. There are certain steps you can take to control what type of content is published to a P2P network. The easiest way to do this is have an activity log & authentication, but OSS folks would never go for that. A good example of a 100% legal public P2P network is the Furthur Network which has managed to stay legal by limiting what people can share by specific bands that allow taping. This system could possibly do the same thing by only allowing certain files to be shared and implementing cheksums so when you downloading a deb package your not getting goatse.mpg.

Furthurnet.com is, to quote from their site:

"...a non-commercial, opensource, peer-to-peer decentralized music sharing program currently under development by PCP Networks, LLC, with much support from members of the etree.org and Sugarmegs music sharing communities.

Furthur is unlike any other music sharing software on the Internet. Furthur is the first and only 100% non-commercial peer-to-peer network of legal live music created by fans for fans! We have no paid software or website developers, nor do we accept any advertising or compensation. We are developing Furthur to help spread live music to fans. Any musician that allows the non-commercial taping and trading of their live performances are fair-game for Furthur."

There is a *lot* of free music here.

Not only that, but there is an official Grateful Dead bootleg MP3 FTP site, which I tripped over a while back while looking for something else entirely. All free downloads from a decent server. (Sorry, I'm not a Deadhead so didn't bookmark it, but it should come up readily enough in a search.)

There isn't any official Grateful Dead MP3 FTP site, but there are many unofficial fan-run ones (and technically, they're not "bootlegs" since the recordings were all made with the band's permission). There are probably even more sites for losslessly compressed music, since audience recordings tend to MP3 very poorly. There's even an impressive, custom P2P client that's strictly for use with bands that allow trading of live recordings, and offers MP3s and losslessly compressed music (FurtherNet)

You'd be surprised at how many smaller bands actively encourage people to tape their shows, and not just the highly improvisational "jam" bands; many bands whose shows don't change all that much from night to night encourage it as well.

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!

As far as illegal uploads are concerned, there is a list of the bands and material types that are currently allowed. I haven't tried this app yet, I will as soon as I get off work, but I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created. BTW my domain, http://www.phataudio.org was originally an old school phish mp3 site ;)

They allow trading of their live performances.

Goto Furthur and download all the 100% legal music you could ever want!!!

Check out furthur is you want plenty of legal, free non-mainstream music.

Furthur Net