New File Sharing Networks

An anonymous reader sends in: "Most readers of slashdot have been following the exploits of the RIAA and their attempts to shut down Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. In response, it appears some live music fans have taken things into their own hands and started new file sharing networks made exclusively for trading live recordings of bands that allow that sort of thing. The main player, RNL has reached version 1.0, features a distributed architecture, supports linux, and is even GPLed. Another peice of interesting software is Furthur. Though still only in beta, Furthur has cool features like allowing a user to piggy-back another user's download to reduce the load of the uploader."

Comments

WinMX rules!

[Archie Steel]

Don't know it's not better known...Check it out here.

Re:WinMX rules!

[eniacpx]

I agree, WinMX is better than Napster ever was, it cuts th bullsh*t out and gives you what you need...in a nice simple interface whic reminds me of oldschool bbs's :)

Re:WinMX rules!

[Alan]

Yup, I have to agree... I used it for a bit and found it quite good for my mp3/porn/warez requirements. I don't know if they broke a file up into parts like edonkey2000 and kazaa/morpheous do, or if they had any funky technology like that, but they seemed pretty solid in the ability of the software to get from them to me.

The main problem, and the reason why I "left" them was as NewbieSpaz points out, there's no *nix client.

Re:WinMX rules!

[eniacpx]

Wow my spelling is crap today...

Re:WinMX rules!

[kz45]

Don't know it's not better known...Check it out here [winmx.com]

Here is another great client

I believe it will take the place of the much missed kazaa.

Re:WinMX rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, WinMX does not segment, not yet anyways, this is a promised feature of the next version. However, there are usually enough results such that you can just highlight a page or two, hit download, and you're bound to find someone who will give you great speed.

Etree?

[gagravarr]

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 :)

Re:Etree?

[stpitner]

burn+post may sound confusing to some. B+P stands for Blanks + Postage where a person mails out blank cd's and return postage to another person who collects the live shows, that person burns copies of the shows onto the blanks, and mails back the cd's in the provided packaging. I do this kind of stuff all the time with my collection, and it works well with helping out many people vs. trying to share up stuff to people via FTP or Direct Connect with my 40k upload cap.

Also, many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.

A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3, so that's much larger files that are dealt with when trading the live music. That causes a major strain on the bandwidth, and therefore makes B+P's a prominant figure in the live music trading world.

usenet

[Carbon Unit 549]

usenet works just fine thank you. I download at least 1GB/day :)

Re:usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you use a free newserver that allows downloads? if so what is it :)

Re:usenet

[abricko]

It is still the king of everything I need, mostly random but I still find what i want. LONG LIVE NNTP!

Re:usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

What sw do you use? I know my news server has a good feed, but I can never find a complete multipart anywhere.

Re:usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

I download at least 1GB/day :)

You need help...

How Long

[Em Emalb]

Before files start getting traded that the artists DIDN'T want released as free? Someone will crack it and ruin what these honest people seem to be doing, OR, they won't be able to keep up with cleaning out the non-free, copyrighted material.

Honestly, is it even worth doign anymore? Have a pure idea, watch it get cracked, then fade slowly to the background like the rest of the companies trying to do this. A sad world we live in today.

Or, maybe I am just jaded on these types of things.

*sigh*

Re:How Long

[moron0]

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.

Re:How Long

[magnified_plaid]

As far as I know, Furthur (which is closed source I believe) receives a list of appropriate artists/bands and limits you to searches for those bands. So as long as no one reverse engineers the protocol and writes another client they should maintain control of their network. There are already plenty of places for people to get their non-taper-friendly music (in addition to warez and whatever else) hopefully they will use them and leave Furthur alone.

Re:How Long

[evilviper]

Or maybe we'll just follow the Gnutella NG method.

X see's that Y is sending crap... X block's Y in his tables.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G get table from X, without Y. Y get's ignored by most everyone.

Re:How Long

[commodoresloat]

How long Before files start getting traded that the artists DIDN'T want released as free?

That won't happen unless someone does something stupid like post these URLs to slashdot.

oh....

Re:How Long

[dylanhassinger]

For crying out loud, i'm shocked at how cynical my fellow slashdotters are. The arrival of FURTHUR is a MAJOR step in the right direction, both for the music world, and the P2P community. I've been using Furthur for about 6 weeks now and let me tell you it is *the* killer app for a music lover. I like it even more than the golden age of Napster. Why? BECAUSE THE MUSIC IS WAY BETTER. the bands on Furthur make Quality music, not more of that crappy commodity-pop-flavor-of-the-day. Could copyrighted material infiltrate the Furthur network? Perhaps. But it would take a lot of effort, and it would have to be masqueraded as a live show by a bootleg-friendly band. As it stands, I have HOURS and HOURS and HOURS of downloaded legal music from Furthur that I haven't even had a chance to listen to yet. I have so many downloaded Phish and Disco Biscuits shows to listen to that I haven't even bothered to search for illegally hidden Metallica album tracks. Furthur has almost DOUBLED my music collection in the last 6 weeks, legally and free! More than just a successful example of a P2P system, the Further model should shine as a glaring example of where the MUSIC INDUSTRY IS GOING. The bands on Furthur let their live music be FREE. Bands like Phish, the Disco Biscuits, Sound Tribe Sector 9, and of course the Grateful Dead, these bands embrace the "new economy" of music. In addition, these bands don't usually make a significant portion of their income from CD sales. These artists essentially GIVE AWAY their intellectual property (the music), and use it as an ADVERTISEMENT for their real-world products-- live concerts and merchandise. (which they make a way better percentage off of anyways). So it's understandable that the record companies are freaking out about file sharing. In this new business model of music, there's not much of a niche left for them! The record companies need to realize that file-sharing (both legal and illegal) is unstoppable. The PRODUCT for the record companies is no longer the music, but the packaging, the lyrics book, the art, and the service of distribution. They need to re-evaluate their position and figure out what niche they can serve in a world where intellectual property is practically free. That's what they got for shoveling crappy pop music into innocent children's ears! Furthur is here to stay. (Of course, so is illegal file sharing). But Furthur clearly shows the business model for "new economy" bands. And it's right on the money-- it's obvious to any true music fan, Phish is WAY cooler than Metallica. D-bad dylanhassinger@yahoo.com

Re:How Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Before files start getting traded that the artists DIDN'T want released as free?

How many people actually read the subject line before reading the post? I read that setence about 5 times before I figured out that the author was, in fact, speaking English.

Er...how do we control this

[Perrin-GoldenEyes]

I'm just wondering how they actually control the content of their network. If they really are just trading legitimate live recordings, then I don't really see how the RIAA could touch them. But I don't know how they can keep people from trading standard album recordings that will get them in [more] trouble with the RIAA.

If they do somehow control it, it'll be interesting to see how the RIAA reacts to this.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[Bonker]

If the src is GPL'd, as it is in the one project, then they *don't* control it. Even if the maintainers religously police their particular network of connections, there's absolutely nothing to stop Joe Q. Hacker from downloading the code, changing a few variables or constants, and releasing 'Gnuster'.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[Perrin-GoldenEyes]

Which, unfortunately, means that these are no diferent from the previous crop of file trading utilities. They're just as vulnerable to RIAA legal bludgeoning as everybody else. It's a pretty cool idea to keep it strictly legit and legal (ie no trading of copyrighted content), but they'll just turn into another incarnation of the file trading services that are being systematically dismantled by the RIAA.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[Sloppy]

p>Obviously, they won't be able to control it. But at least they have explicitly stated their intent. When determining whether vicarious or contributory infringement has taken place, apparently a tool's "primary purpose" is taken into account.

It's a good CYA move.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[CaseyB]

Exactly my thought. What on earth does the type of content have to do with a particular technology? It's like creating an image viewer specifically for pictures of boats.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[liquidsin]

from furthur's website:

All shows on the Furthur Network are 100% MD5 verified! When users initially share a show, Furthur will run an MD5 verification check, to ensure the file integrity. If any file doesn't check out, Furthur won't allow it on the network

This gives them a lot of control over network content. Don't want something on the network? Pull it's MD5 sum from your database.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[sporty]

It might become social boundaries, no? I wouldn't exactly go into the #linux channel asking for windows help or the #cars channel to ask about writing a resume.

It made me wonder if social boundaries would actually make gnutella and the rest less chatty. Like I don't have any movies on my hd nor am I on them to download movies, why should i receive traffic on it?

Problem is if I want to be on multiple networks, I have to have multiple connections. That or tags saying what I have, what I don't and the type of traffic I wish to propagte.

Just food for thought.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[grahamm]

All music & video (and most other) content is copyright. The question is whether or not the copyright owner has given permission for the copy to be made.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[illsorted]

If they do somehow control it, it'll be interesting to see how the RIAA reacts to this.

If they really can limit the content to live shows of bands with open tape trading policies, then there isn't a damn thing that the RIAA can do. There are hundreds of excellent jam bands (Grateful Dead, Phish, MMW, etc.) with trading policies that allow the trading of live material over a digital medium.

Best of luck to this project.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[mjjareo]

When the Furthur client is complete it will be integrated with the database of tradeable music located at db.etree.org. This integration will include checking the posted files against the md5 signatures in the database. This will make it close to impossible for people to post files that are illicit.

That, along with community policing, which has been very effective to this point, should be enought to keep this system legit.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up!

Well said.

Re:Er...how do we control this

[Anonymous Coward]

If the src is GPL'd, as it is in the one project, then they *don't* control it.

Not quite. Only the Furthur client software is available under the GPL. Couldn't find the server software.

They *do* control it in the sense that there are some number of "central" servers. The operators can blacklist anything inappropriate.

Anyone tried Furthur?

[Archie Steel]

It actually sounds kinda cool...I mean, Gnutella is kinda cool in principle (though the new Limewire superservers are sucky!), but in actuality it's not that efficient. I wonder if Furthur works well on an IP masqueraded machine?

Re:Anyone tried Furthur?

[whipping_post]

Furthur works great on an IP Masq'd machine. Beware though, this is true BETA software...

Great community and a great concept though.

Re:Anyone tried Furthur?

[slashpot]

I've used it a lot over the last few months - found out about it on the original free streaming website Sugarmegs.org

Re:Anyone tried Furthur?

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthur does not support supernodes as of yet. We are the process of developing a supernode concept to improve the network.

- Furthur Developer

Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[f00zbll]

Even though it's not for copyrighted material, I can't help but wonder what RIAA's reaction is going to be. Will they use the same argument "you can't ensure it is only used for non-copyrighted material?" or will they start pushing stadiums to do a body search for tape recorders. In either case, I doubt they will sit back and do nothing.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[spatrick_123]

All of the bands they mention are groups that have specifically stated that they allow and/or encourage their fans to record and trade their shows. Hell, Pearl Jam even announced it was okay to trade/make free copies of the 72 live shows they released commercially last year. Presumably the record companies defer to the bands on this point.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[nsanit]

Presumably the record companies defer to the bands on this point.

Well, the way I understand recording contracts is that the recording company owns the recording, but the band still owns the music. The band rarely gets enough of a cut from the contract that sales hurt their personal bottom line. Huge bands like Pearl Jam, Metallica et al are big enough to negotiate that sort of deal. This is why Lars from Metallica was one of the few artists who cared about Napster. If you'll notice the RIAA, not the artists, is suing people. They claim they are protecting the artists, but they are really looking out for their own pockets.

Most bands dont make money on the record, they make money on the concerts and appearances. Granted, they do make money, but it's usually small compared to what they make from other sources...why else would they tour? The recordings basically serve them as advertisements.

The bands typically own all rights to the music itself (not the recording) and they have the right to allow or disallow fans to record concerts.

Usual dislaimers apply...IANAL, esp a contract lawyer, and have never seen a 'typical' recording contract and am just make observations on what I've heard and read.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[f00zbll]

There are plenty of bands that totally say "dude, record if you want. we encourage it." What's to stop RIAA from forcing ticketmaster and venues to ban recording devices? They could come up with a handful of reasons or excuses to ban electronic devices. Even worse, RIAA could get all the labels to agree add a clause in their contracts governing bootlegging. If I was a greedy RIAA exec, I could add in a clause that says:

the artist will cooperate with the label to ensure the highest rate of return on investments, which include assisting and reporting of copyright violation and improper use of material that causes negative financial impact. The artist agrees that derivative works are covered in the preceeding statement.

I seriously doubt RIAA would succeed, but it doesn't mean they won't try. How many starving musicians are going to read the paragraph above and think, "this might make it so the audience can't bootleg." Lawyers are great at writing language that appears harmless, but gives the company great advantages.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[spatrick_123]

The relative importance of sources of income vary greatly from band to band and even from album to album and tour to tour. For instance, U2 made an enormous amount of money on this last tour, but lost money on their last two tours. Why? Corporate sponsorship.

A band like Pearl Jam that sells "only" a million copies of an album worldwide and doesn't charge that much money for concert tickets makes a huge chunk of their money off of merchandising. Of course in their case there is no corporate sponsorship, and without that in can be very expensive to tour while paying and feeding a large road crew.

Basically, I think it's important to realize that different bands make their money in different ways, and there's no universal rule.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[mosch]

As somebody who tapes, sometimes with a standard rig, sometimes with stealth equipment, I can tell you that venues already do search for recording equipment. You know that little pat-down you get, they're not just looking for guns. If they find your little Sony PCM-M1 DAT deck, and your ultra-small B&K mics, you don't get to see the show.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[mosch]

What's to stop RIAA from forcing ticketmaster and venues to ban recording devices?

Mostly the fact that TicketMaster has no reason to further alienate their clients, unless they'll make a nice pile of money from it. There's no business model that justifies implementing your paranoid delusion, relax.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[f00zbll]

Remember when Pearl Jam tried to fight ticketmaster? Who won? I admit it's a bit paranoid and I seriously doubt it will happen, but that's not to say RIAA won't try and ticketmaster won't seriously consider the idea. Ticketmaster is legalize ticket scalping, so what's to stop them from breaking yet another law.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[jms]

A lot of bands have had to fight with the recording companies to ensure that they retain the right to authorize audience recording.

The recording companies always add a "no audience taping" clause to their recording contracts, and it's up to the band to negotiate that clause out.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[f00zbll]

Although I agree with you that most bands own the actual music, that's not always the case. In some cases, the artist signed their rights away like billy joel, or signed the rights to the master away like prince. It is up to the artist and I absolutely agree with that. As other's have said, how each band makes money varies. Even if the artist signs a good contract, I'm sure the label still pushes them to ban bootlegging with soft talk and other bs. Dont' under estimate the power of persuasion of labels.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[karnal]

So let's take this one step further -- I've thought of doing this -- what are some good places to hide the equipment?

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[Computer!]

what are some good places to hide the equipment?

On your girlfriend. Seriously, the heavies are always afraid of frisking women too enthusiasticly. Many larger venues have female security staff also, but even they won't check in your girl's shorts. Socks and lower legs are good, too, since very rarely does anyone get the full police-style patdown. Now, if only someone would make a DAT that looked like a cellphone...

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[mosch]

Put the deck in your wallet pocket, and throw the mics and their battery box in your girlfriends purse, under some unused tampons. Or plug headphones into the deck, have some commercial music playing on the DAT, and hope they don't see the words 'digital audio recorder' on the deck. Hell, I can fit my stealth mics in pack of cigarettes, with room to spare for actual cigarettes. Be creative.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[K8Fan]

Stuff the recorder down the front of your pants. The jocks who work security will not squeeze your package.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[Merkins]

Most bands dont make money on the record, they make money on the concerts and appearances.

I would disagree with this, maybe the bigger acts make money, but touring is very expensive. You have accommodation, equipment, crew, unions, marketing, etc etc etc.

Most bands tour to promote an album, not the other way around.

Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA?

[elflord]

I would disagree with this, maybe the bigger acts make money, but touring is very expensive.

Even the bigger acts don't always make money. Their revenue is much higher, but so are their costs.

Hrmmm....

[$0 31337]

... the more people sending you data, the quicker your download will be!

Really? Even on my blazingly fast 56k dialup connection? If I had 1 person sending me data I could get an amazing 4.5kps while if I had 10 people sending me data I would get .45kps... not so good... Oh well.. I suppose they mean well

Re:Hrmmm....

[djweis]

No, let's say you and 4 friends all have adsl, 640/128. The four friends all have a file you want to download. Getting it from one of them will give you a 128k download, due to their upstream cap. If you grab chunks from all of them at once, you can get it at 512k.

Re:Hrmmm....

[Brownstar]

But, if you're downloading from another 56k dialup user, he can only upload at 36k, while you can download at ~52k, leaving about 16k of your bandwidth available.

Instead you download from 2 dialup users, and can use your total 52k.

As you scale up higher bandwidths, the increase can be more dramatic because it's harder to find upload capacities equal to your download capacity.

Of course this is with the understanding that your bandwidth at the time is being dedicated to downloading the 1 file.

Re:Hrmmm....

[$0 31337]

I don't think that your comment applies to my 56k dialup connection...

Re:Hrmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well no, and your 56k dialup isn't much use to people without electricity. So what?

Re:Hrmmm....

[rabidcow]

If I had 1 person sending me data I could get an amazing 4.5kps while if I had 10 people sending me data I would get .45kps.

.45k * 10 people each sending it = 4.5k

With symmetrical connections, you get essentially the same speed (minus a little overhead), but most connections are asymmetrical. Most home connections (other than modems) will let you recieve more than you can transmit.

Of course the problem with that is that all these other people have to dedicate more of their line to you than anyone else. If ten people send you pieces of one thing, but only use one tenth of their bandwidth, you don't get any benefit.

Doomed

[gazbo]

A P2P file sharing network that can only be used for legal files is doomed to failure. Either it'll end up being used for copyrighted material illegally, or it'll never get a decent number of users.

Go ahead, claim that *everyone* uses filesharing for uncopyrighted material. Just at least admit to yourself that it's not true.

Re:Doomed

[beddess]

i dunno, i've used futhur and found plenty of good
stuff, haven't seen anything copyrighted there yet.

But it's for trading whole jamband shows. which
people have been doing through the mail for years
with tape trees and with just ftp sites. This is
just adapting it to another medium. And uses all
the much hyped 'advantages' of p2p. It's been
growing consistently so far.

Re:Doomed

[zzyzx]

Depends what you want. For my needs (getting Phish and Dead boots) etree servers suit me just fine.

FileNavigator Rules

[jbiz_owner]

Just found this p2p software filenavigator, www.filenavigator.com. Found everything I was looking for. Connnects to gnutella, opennap and its own p2p network. All at the same time!

What about....

[Evanrude]

Other types of files like video, text, etc. Doesn't this network have the same basic properties as every other p2p system?
The piggyback feature would be excellent for larger files types.

furthur was created by etree members

[dmnic]

as a means on facilitating online transfers instead of mail-trades. all .shn's are md5 verified before being allowed to share.

Re:furthur was created by etree members

[jwalther420]

Actually...etree.org was based on online trading via FTP transfers. Snailmail trading has been a side product of etree since there is never enough bandwidth to go around.

Furthurnet was developed in part to ease the burden on individual site operators and also give better access to the general masses (those not running sites and on the "inner circle")

Re:furthur was created by etree members

[dmnic]

I realized Id forgotten to mention the FTP transfers after Id submitted it. but still with Etree, it was all dependant on the individual site-ops. then you had to be willing to sort thrugh long announce lists then hope the site op would send you l/p info, then hope you could get access. unless you were friends or knew some of the site-ops, you'd be lucky if you could ever get access to most of it.

WinMX

[Marcus Brody]

Another good one is WinMX

I get very good results with this. I have extensively subjected it to my "Matmos" test of file sharing programs, and shown it to be as good as kazaa/morpheus.

The main strength of the program is that it has its own p2p protocol, but also allows you to connect to multiple OpenNap servers at once (unlike napigator). If you are patient, you can log onto a sh*t load of servers and get excellent results.

However, there are some drawbacks. The interface is a little buggy (but a little more for the "power" user than morpheus). Also, getting a good list of OpenNap servers into the program can be a real bastard. I strongly advise looking here and here for solutions to this problem. Also, as the name suggests, there is no linux version :-(

Re:WinMX

[Anonymous Coward]

the moderators are really dumb sometimes. Er, the guy prolly hadnt seen the previous post, cos this was posted pretty darn earlier. Also, it provides much more useful info than the previous post. Mod it back up please, not because he deserves a slap on the back, but cos others deserve to read it.

Good old capitolism

[ajs]

This is what capitolism and a free market are all about.

The music sharing phenomenon is too big to be a fluke. There's a serious market here, and that's what really has the RIAA scared. They know that, at some point, a market will flurish which breaks their members' business model.

Now, I have no exposure to this new network, so I don't even know if it's commercial, but I can assure you that with a demand this large, there will be thousands upon thousands of people trying to figure out a way to turn it to their economic advantage, and I say more power to them! The first key is the fact that there are already bands that want their music recorded live (Phish comes to mind). Next, there are new bands who have nothing to lose by sharing their music.

Given these, I think you could build a base of bands that promote their music (more specifically, their concerts) via a file sharing network. Then, you just have to find a way to brand yourself so that you remove the geeky stigma of file sharing (make it easier to use, get some high-profile musicians to mention that they use it, give it away with low-cost student computers, etc).

This is going to be a really fund decade. I suspect that this particular business will not descend into the kind of deccadence of the current music industry for at least another 5 years or so, but then, perhahps I'm just an optimist.

Re:Good old capitolism

[jglow]

Giving something like that away with low-cost student computers would be a bad idea. A lot of the major universitys out there block access to ports that these p2p networks run on.. therefor distributing it with student computers would be either redundent or just a good way to get a lot of people pissed off.

Re:Good old capitolism

[Elvis Maximus]

Capitolism? Is that the ideology that wants to put domes on everything?

Sorry, I had to.

Re:Good old capitolism

[Happy Monkey]

So that's what happened to Earth on Babylon 5. They went from capitalism to capitolism.

Re:Good old capitolism

[JohnDenver]

Sorry, this is Slashdot. Free markets are bad. Antitrust laws are good. The federal government should give everyone broadband and make the Big Evil Corporations pay for it.

As long as we're exagerating...

1. Capitalism's benefits just happen to be creating wealth and increasing the standard of living, but it's really all about winning!!!

2. Antitrust laws aren't fair, because they punish the winners despite the fact antitrust laws only punish monopolies that conspire to exclude competitiors from distrubution entirely! Anti-trust laws are only around to punishes winners!!! Boo!!!

3. We shouldn't have a federal government, so we can let the states battle it out to become the winner!!!

4. Public institutions shouldn't coddle weak people by providing education and other services when they've been found to be INCOMPETANT!!! They're losers, therefore they should lose!!!

Look at me!!! I'm a winner!!!

Ok... Maybe my email was a bit rediculous on your views, but you started it!!! :P

If you're looking for anonymity,

[Anonymous Coward]

use Freenet ( http://freenetproject.org/ ).

Small excerpt from their About page:

Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:

• Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
• Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
• Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
• Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.

-end excerpt-

Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.

OS advocatists take note: Freenet has been written with pure Java, so if you can get a Java interpreter for your OS, you can run Freenet. And in this particular case, using Java doesn't always mean the software will run slow. It's all about the implementation.

Re:If you're looking for anonymity,

[Anonymous Coward]

Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.

If it should be considered stable why doesn't it have version number 1.0?

Re:If you're looking for anonymity,

[42forty-two42]

This is my favorite. I'm naturally attracted to anything (a)infrequently used, (b)new, or (c)free. Freenet and Linux both meet these criterion.

Re:If you're looking for anonymity,

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee. Linux being 10 years old and used by quite a few people.. I don't know how it fits your A and B... and C is a lively debate.

Why not just open shares ?

[CDWert]

Why not just open a unprotected share on you computer set max number of clients, run a port scanner that indexes all other open shares on whather class c you tell it to.

Set up an index server that does this as well as downloads a lists.txt file that has all the songs in your share directory indexed, a shell script on a cron tab to reindex and upload you lists,

FUCK the RIAA and MPAA, they would have to remove network capability from all computers.

Im not trolling Im serious. Make it as grey as possible. There is no way MS / SUN /IBM is going to remove the ability to network file share, make this p2p an extension of that. Most modern operating systems have the cabability built in.

GREY, GREY, GREY .
Make it about the comanies violationg free speech, not in the lame ass way others have tried, ALSO a point you can sue judges, and cout officers, police etc, IF IT HAS BEEN PROVEN they VIOLATED you basic civil rights, Making people stop sharing whatever they wish I belive is a violation of my free speech. Set up a honeypot service, that only trades uncopyrigthed materials and lie in wait for the RIAA and some overzealous most likey bribed judges, and open fire, first nail the RIAA on hacking attempts, then go after everyone in line.

If the courts become succeptiable to injury as weel, maybe some of this crap would never make it in the first place.

Yes, I have reached karma cap and need no more, please mod this down as needed :)

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Windows filesharing ports are already blocked by most ISPs (otherwise 'hacking' is as easy as using the network neighborhood).

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

if your isp blocks a port you want to use, get a better isp.

wait, let me rephrase:

if your isp blocks a port, get a better isp.

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your isp blocks a port, get a better isp.

More than 50% of ISP's block these ports. Also, most people have only 1 choice of ISP in their area. Choice is largely non-existant.

Also, sharing your drive is a pretty bad way to go about things security-wise. (People share BackOrifice, and a new autoexec.bat, and you are 0wn3d on reboot).

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that easy, hear of smbrelay? Basically if you can get someone to send you your smb credentials (easy through a malicious ie web page), then you can send those credentials right back to the other machine and log on, that's how insecure smb is, and THAT is why we, as an isp block this service that should never be used, unless you're on a trusted network.

You should be thank for an isp is looking out for it's users, because not many people know about this, because microsoft would rather you not know, and hasn't fixed it yet to my knowledge. It's an insecurity in the protocol itself, not easily fixed.

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, when I went to school this is what I did. Machine was wide open, many people's were. If I wanted something it wasn't tough to look through the gigs upon gigs of shared files on the local network, for a movie to watch, new album to listen to, etc.

Banwidth wasn't an issue then, but unfortunately now I only have a 384 sdsl, compared to a t3 at school, damn I miss that connection. :(

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[marick]

Nice idea, but a friend of mine tried this, but his ISP, UC Santa Cruz, doesn't allow anyone to have "open shares" on their computers. They threatened disconnecting him for doing this exact thing.

Re:Why not just open shares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, sharing your drive is a pretty bad way to go about things security-wise.

Well duh. That's why you don't share your entire drive. You share specific folders.

New King - Direct Connect

[FiberZen]

The new king of file sharing networks is DC "Direct Connect" from http://www.neo-modus.com/ Iv seen'em all but this was good enough to really impress , which is something these days! Current Amount of Public Users: 45301 Current Amount of Available Data: 1000.10 TeraBytes!! "Tired of other file-sharing communities such as Napster, Gnutella, and Scour? Tired of Napster Clones in general? Looking for something new? Get ready to change the way you think about peer-to-peer file-sharing. NeoModus®' Direct Connect(TM) offers a complete set of tools to locate any type of media."

Re:New King - Direct Connect

[jyak]

Direct Connect is okay. It is a little confusing for the average user but bascially it is a windows version of mIRC. The only down side of DC is that some poeple don't have 10+ Gigs shared in order to connect to hubs.

Re:New King - Direct Connect

[JatTDB]

"windows version of mIRC"

I'm gonna go find a corner and weep for a while...

Re:New King - Direct Connect

[ymgve]

mIRC is a Windows app. Duh.

It's more like IRC, with only one channel, no linking between servers, but with each server having a list of what files every client has. It seems OK enough, but server multisearch is hell to get working behind NAT. (It doesn't support multi-peer downloads either, and you need gigabytes of files to be even allowed to connect to the biggest servers).

All in all, good app, but not really my taste.

Re:New King - Direct Connect

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for a minimum limit of shared file in DC is so someone who shares nothing (or next to nothing) can't download from other people who have decided to share a lot of data.
A sort of anti-leeching mechanism - of course what ends up happening is people mount network drives 10 - 15 times and share the same content over and over again.

Bands that Allow music trading

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of thing has been going on for a while via FTP and loosely based networks like etree.org trading lossless quality shn files.

It even works for Hillbilly music. Check out www.bluegrassbox.com for an unbelieveable (hundreds of gigs) resource of extreemly high quality audio files in shn format.

And remember, Friends don't let Friends use MP3!

Furthur is great - RNL? Nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

RNL as the main player because it is in version 1.0? I think not. Check out the RNL band list - no one you've ever heard of. Furthur has lots of good live music from bands that most people have heard of and enjoy. I've been using it for about 2 months now, and it makes getting whole shows very easy.

etree.org is okay, but it is just a listing of ftp sites when you get down to it. Yes, it is organized well and has lots of other info, but when you get down to it, just ftp sites.

The other major player in the live music scene right now is direct connect and shnapster - this is a live music hub using direct connect software, and it works well.

Furthur is the easiest to use with the coolest technology. Let's hope it takes off a bit more and continues to be as stable as it is.

Re:WinMX rules! - Problem

[NewbieSpaz]

Requirements
Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000
Internet Explorer 4.0 or above if running Win95/NT
Pentium 166 w/ 64MB ram or better recommended

What about us *nix users??

Piggybacking? Hrm... not really.

[clump]

* Packet Chain ProtocolTM : PCP chaining allows users to 'piggy back' a download off another user. For example, person A downloads a fileset from the host, person B will then download from person A, person C will download from Person B, etc.. This allows everyone download a show at once.

Though I am no byte-level expert, this isn't really anything new or its misleading. What this seems to refer to is how the traffic would be routed. IE, if "Joe" has live Pearl Jam and 3 people request it, the network is smart enough to take bytes from people farther along in the download. Even then, thats more load-balancing.

Otherwise, this is no different from any other P2P filesharing mechanism where files naturally propagte from a source and are eventually downloaded from other nodes. Still, if your network were *smart* enough to resend packets as little as possible (IE, if the network would multicast concurrently-requested packets) then this would be leaps-and-bounds above current P2P.

Re:WinMX rules! - Problem

[ImaLamer]

You do point out a obvious problem, but the network and client are in fact great.

The best ability of the client is that it can be used to connect to any opennap server.

While not handeling segmented downloads, it does let you rank searches by bit-rate and the like.

This seems to be the thing that lacks in other clients. This way my draw to Napster, but WinMX is IMHO the only client which compares. Why shouldn't it? It's based on opennap... an obvious napster cloned protocol.

How do they distinguish...

[goldspider]

...live recordings from studio recordings (the kind usually ripped from CD's)? I can't imagine that someone actually listens to all of the music being transferred through the network to determine if it's live or not, and I doubt there's software that can do this either.

These just looks like yet another crop of well-intentioned systems that are openly inviting abuse. Whether that is the true intention of the developers, with an honest-sounding mission to cover their asses, we really can't speculate... yet.

We shall certainly see, though, once the RIAA inevitably turns its attention to these new networks.

Re:How do they distinguish...

[zzyzx]

The people in charge of it do. Believe me, the fans of bands that allow taping can be more agressive than the MPAA in stopping illegal trading of stuff that shouldn't be. There's a record store that sells Phish bootlegs. Whenever the owner posts about anything on rec.music.phish, about 10 people gang up on him to tell him to go away until he stops selling them.

RNL - To big.

[stevey]

I'm sorry, RNL may be great , but I'm not going to use it.

I went to site to have a look at it, and started downloading the Windows installer, (hey I'm at work), 5Mb! There's just no way I'm going to install a filesharing client that's so big

Re:RNL - To big.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then use the non-windows client, which also works on windows and weighs in at under a meg.

Re:RNL - To big.

[DirkDaring]

"I went to site to have a look at it, and started downloading the Windows installer, (hey I'm at work), 5Mb! There's just no way I'm going to install a filesharing client that's so big"

Wait - you won't download a 5Mb install file.. but you will download gigs of mp3s?

Re:RNL - To big.

[ryanwright]

Wow, five whole megs? I downloaded a mouse driver the other day from Micro$oft that was 13 megs (and no, I wasn't happy about it). A five meg app doesn't seem that big a deal to me. If it was 20 megs, I'd have a cow along with you, but 5 seems quite reasonable considering the size of most Windoze software...

Re:RNL - To big.

[stevey]

Wait - you won't download a 5Mb install file.. but you will download gigs of mp3s?

Nope .. I'm an ex-DJ, so I've got tons of CD's lying around.

Currently I have around 20Gb of MP3's on my homenetwork, all ripped "by hand", not a single downloaded track in sight.

Downloading even one MP3 of decent length over a 56k modem would give me pause for thought...

MD5 Checking & illegal uploads

[asv108]

I really like the idea of using MD5 to ensure file integrity across the network. I hate searching for a file on Gnutella and finding 13 different versions. Of course, the tape trading and sharing communities have been on the cutting edge for quite some time. Phish and Grateful dead enthusiasts were the first to embrace, lossless formats such as SHN, and even older technologies such as DAT. Laptop recording is also taking off as well, they even sell a modified cursoe powered picturebook that is made for concert taping.

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 ;)

Re:MD5 Checking & illegal uploads

[Anonymous Coward]

take a bath, hippie.

Re:MD5 Checking & illegal uploads

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it works. You can't post a new file unless its md5 matches something on the central server. md5 is not used to identify duplicates here, its purpose is to limit exactly which files can be shared.

Re:MD5 Checking & illegal uploads

[Anonymous Coward]

Go get a cappucino enema, you fscking yuppie.

Does anyone know..

[L-Wave]

...of a client for linux? This "free" trading network sounds like a really good idea! I dont' see why music industry or the RIAA would complain, if anything people can sample live music of bands and go out and get albums they like! =) intereesting concept =)

Re:Does anyone know..

[whipping_post]

Furthur, being Java based, works on Linux. I find, in fact that it works better on Linux than on windows.

I imagine this has to do with memory allocation but not 100% sure.

"Even Weed" -Tiki Barber

True human spirit

[rmadmin]

This is the true human spirit. It don't matter how much money you have. Hell, look what Hitler had to work with. Didn't he kill himself? RIAA, you could take tips from Hitler!

*I get knocked down, and then I get up again, never gonna keep me down*

Oh.. I better delete that mp3, I got it from napster =P

Electronic music only sharing system

[motardo]

Soulseek lets you search for ONLY electronic music, like Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and Others. I have friends that release their stuff on there too

-motardo

Re:Electronic music only sharing system

[Anonymous Coward]

i still haven't got soulseek to work but atleast was able to run it after trying an older version. May, I recomend this: for a great catalog of music and many hours of browsing & listening.

hexagon sun directory

NetMess

[Anonymous Coward]

Is another one decentralized and open source. It works through HTTP proxies and firewalls.

http://go.to/netmess

MODERATORS: MOD PARENT UP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

blah blah blah

Indeed it does.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simplistic, fast, reliable, and very decentralized.

I don't use Linux (I used SuSE for a while...but I really didn't need it), but it'd be nice if there was one...Linux people typically have a lot of DiVX. :P

So Much Music, So Little Time

[Flagbrew]

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

Re:So Much Music, So Little Time

[sphix42]

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 :)

Re:So Much Music, So Little Time

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, I understand that Brittney Spears allows the non-commercial taping and trading of her shows. Meaning that she IS eTree-friendly. And believe it or not, I have seen Brittney shows on eTree servers...even a FOB Schoeps source.

The live music community has long called for musicians to allow the free taping and trading of their shows, so I guess this is our own fault...

Re:So Much Music, So Little Time

[Flagbrew]

Sorry, I offhandedly said three or four years. I've probably used etree for 3 1/4 years (which fits nicely between the qualifiers). We (myself and some other amateur dead archivists) certainly were in the first wave of shorten users in Northern Arizona, and have avidly pushed lossless compression format (as well as etree) to our friends. No harm intended, just trying to spread the word. And no, my server doesn't qualify due to upstream speed, but I certainly tell folks fell free to grab a 256kbs stream overnight. Its all about the music isn't it?

Thanks for the site. You've certainly helped the cause on allowing folks to freely trade the most amazing music available.

Welcome to RNL!

[raindog151]

Welcome to RNL!

Would you like to install xGator? xGator allows you to fine great deals on products specifically tailored to you!

[ ] Yes [*] No

installing RNL-1.0-01a.rpm.....
installing xGator-2.4.1....^C^C........
modifying /etc/hosts.allow.^C^C^C^C^C....^C^C...
modifying /etc/xident.conf..^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C....

Congratulations! RNL has been installed!

The beauty of Furthur

[whipping_post]

Besides the fancy protocols, the best features of Furthur, as I see it are the ones that make trading of shows easier. For instance:

* 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

Must...get...multicast...working!

[squarooticus]

For truly effective peer-to-peer of popular data, multicast would be most appropriate: in the optimal case, it would produce a rooted minimum spanning tree, whose edge costs are some combination of bandwidth constraints and bandwidth costs.

Re:Must...get...multicast...working!

[Orasis]

We did a significant amount of work in this vein with Swarmcast and have been building a lot of the (rather complex) technology necessary for Reliable Multicast

Multicast is not panacea though, because it is not very widely deployed on the Internet, and since there is no caching in Multicast, all of the receivers must be downloading near the same time to realize the bandwidth savings...So in many ways P2P caching has advantages over multicast, which is why we do both.
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks

Re:Must...get...multicast...working!

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you multicast on the internet?

Re:WinMX rules! - Problem

[Marcus Brody]

Getting a good list of OpenNap servers into the program can be a real bastard. I strongly advise looking here and here for solutions to this problem.

some other info

[jon_c]

a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.

One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au

My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)

Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.

Re:some other info

[Anonymous Coward]

Chord is not someone's Master's thesis. It is a full-fledged research platform that is used to explore P2P application ideas and the P2P principles themselves. Please go to the Chord project page for more details. Recently a lot of research level applications have been built on Chord. Examples of published applications are Dhash and CFS

The architecture of Circle system is very very similar to Chord. The developer of Circle has claimed to have been developed independently but at a much later date than Chord.

Re:some other info

[Peridriga]

My understanding of the quick sort using a binary tree would mean the data would have to be in order.... Ordering the list would take a centralized system... Or some real voodoo w/ idle network data transfer and a distributed idle proccess usage such as distributed.net/set@home.

Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[ImaLamer]

At this point, the question needs to be asked:

Why doesn't the RIAA come out with their own damn P2P?

It could be fully under their control. They would be able to block certain songs, and maybe only let certain 'hot' singles out. Most of all, this would give them stronger legal basis when fighting current P2P companies and networks. They can point to their own network saying they own all rights to distribute their music, and thus other programs are violating their own legal market. Their refusal to distribute music electronically has hurt them more than anything else. We 'steal' music online, because there isn't one good for-pay network out there.

But, of course we still don't buy into the fact that P2P has hurt music sales. I believe one problem is the fact that a average CD costs $15! When I was still paying for music a CD usually cost $12.99 - if it was $15 I wouldn't buy it. I was shocked to see "SALE!" signs over CD's at Media Play reading in the upwards of 15-16 bucks.

But by their own account P2P saves the Recording Industry money. They haven't admitted this out loud, but read this from their website: [speaking on why the price on a CD isn't 30 cents]

Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.

Huh? Makes sense... kinda'. But when I search for an artist I find all sorts of new songs. Many of which are great, but never make it to the radio.

If the RIAA adapted the Fast Track technology [and of course make other than Windows clients] they could promote their own music on that main page. They could even tag certain songs as "hot" or "new".

I mean, they can iron out the details, but considering they've got loads of cash. They've got the marketing minds that brough us O-Town and the like. Why can't they put this together?

Why are we hard at work marketing their songs? Why are we using our bandwidth and time? Why are we donating our computers to distribute music? Why are we bothering with P2P?

Simple: It works. We've found a better way. It's not free music. It's because they refuse to step into the year we live in.

Wake up RIAA, you can't fight it any longer. Go after the guy pressing thousands of CD's and making money off of your work. Leave us alone, we aren't making a thing. It's wrong to be making cash on their works. It's not wrong to refuse to go back to an old system that is dying quickly.

Every computer today is sold with a CD-RW. Let us do it.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[inerte]

Why doesn't the RIAA come out with their own damn P2P?

Because if it has filters nobody is going to use.

Long emotional question, short factual answer ;-)

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[maddman75]

But by their own account P2P saves the Recording Industry money. They haven't admitted this out loud, but read this from their website: [speaking on why the price on a CD isn't 30 cents]

Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.

Its not about money, its never been about the money. Think the stars are being starved because of P2P? Watch MTV Cribs sometime, they don't seem to be doing too bad.

Its about control. It isn't that you might hear something new you like off the net and buy the CD, that's irrelevent. You might hear something other than what they want you to hear. They control every aspect of music - when it is played, how often, what songs are singles, and who gets the next shot at stardom. Most telling IMO is that the record studios time the release of new singles and albums based on when the artists last song drops off of the "TRL" program on MTV. If people can simply go out willy-nilly listening to whatever they want, the perpetual butt-raping of artists might have to end.

See, if everyone keeps listening to the same great artists instead of picking up the next diva or boyband that comes down the pipe the record company isn't dealing with wide eyed new stars that they can lock into a contract and squeeze for an insane amounnt of money. They are dealing with artists who've been around the block and won't sign anything just to avoid the risk of being turned away.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[swb]

I don't think that production and distribution of CDs is the big expense that the recording industry bears, I think its the costs involved in recording and production that are so expensive.

Think of what studio time must cost to have a five-man band and all the people involved. Its not just the band, a recording engineer and a producer. There's loads of other engineers to mic everything, a couple of guys on the console, producer, roadies, catering, not to mention the time to rent the studio equipment. Then there's the guys involved in the mixdown (producer, engineers) and the equipment time. Mastering, etc etc. All expensive, equipment and people intensive.

Production and distribution, as has been stated elsewhere, is a buck or two per disc.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[Anonymous Coward]

You complain about cds costing over $15 in the US, and yet in countries like Japan they charge 2800yen on average. Sometimes more.

Was it the Ayumi Hamasaki A Song for XX that cost ~$50? How about 1000yen mini cd singles?

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of what studio time must cost to have a five-man band and all the people involved. Its not just the band, a recording engineer and a producer. There's loads of other engineers to mic everything, a couple of guys on the console, producer, roadies, catering, not to mention the time to rent the studio equipment. Then there's the guys involved in the mixdown (producer, engineers) and the equipment time. Mastering, etc etc. All expensive, equipment and people intensive.

And every penny must be paid off by the artist before he sees a penny of royalties.

The sole functions of the recording company are:

1) Provide a loan to produce and promote the album, that must be paid back by the artist before receiving any royalties.
2) Stand between the artists and the radio stations, to ensure that no artist who hasn't signed their copyrights over to the recording industry ever gets on the radio.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[ImaLamer]

I think you're right.

It's also about distribution rights. Not the record company, but the stores, the CD makers, etc.

But please let's not blame MTV for bad music. They take it up the a** for the RIAA a lot, but plenty of what you see if based on what you buy. People buy crap.

Look at MTV2. They represent consumers better. The range of music is greater and barely do I see 'boybands'.

RIAA and MTV didn't invent boy bands, we did. They just laugh at us and collect the dough.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[ImaLamer]

Music production has little to do with the costs.

The majority of it, by RIAA's words, is marketing.

That's the thing. With the internet they can slash their marketing costs in half. Word of mouth, the biggest seller of music, has been expanded a thousand times by the use of the 'net.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[ImaLamer]

Complain?

I don't pay that price.

I have however seen music CD's that cost over $500, but that is mainly because they are 'rare'.

I listen to streaming audio, radio, etc.

I refuse to support their devilry.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[ImaLamer]

Nobody? I think not.

If they offered a service where I can download an mp3, ogg, etc, with unlimited rights to those songs [no wma] - that would be a start.

I don't want to sit here typing out a huge plan, it's not my job. But if they offered a 'premium' service where you can download any song, any full album, many music geeks would pay up. Not everyone wants everything for free.

If they had a free service where all the search results are displayed, but only their 'hot' songs could be downloaded - that would be a start. Let me get the latest Britney Spears hit for free. If I liked it, I'll pay for the rest.

Furthermore, they can make songs available which there is no market in making more CD's. Cd's that are 'out of print' would be a huge draw for consumers.

Sure, there are people out there that want free, illegal, music. But plenty of people just wished we could get music legally, and cheap.

If they had the P2P program they could advertise there [with restraint]. They could promote what they wanted, and they could best develop a plan which provides a fair system to us, and them.

They do have rights to.

{and imalamer goes back to search for mp3s}

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[swb]

And every penny must be paid off by the artist before he sees a penny of royalties.

Paid back you mean. The front money is paid by the recording company. Studio time, technicians, session musicians, consumables (food, media, office supplies, etc), equipment all costs real money RIGHT NOW, not later on when the album sells a million copies. It's not unrealistic for a record to cost $1m to make. That doesn't excuse the profiteering of the record companies, but it does mean that if you want to get cheaper albums you need to cut the costs of making the record in the first place. Less dope, hookers, and hush money might help.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[Jason Levine]

Why won't the RIAA make their own P2P app? Because then they'd lose control of the music. Granted, they're losing control anyway, but let's step into the RIAA's shoes for a second.

The only thing that gives them "power" is the fact that they control the distribution of quite a lot of music. If they were to let people download MP3s of their songs, those people would be able to pass the MP3s to their friends. They'd lose "physical" control of the music. (Physical in this sense meaning who the file goes to.) Nevermind that MP3 rippers, P2P apps, and CD burners already have loosened this control.

If the RIAA charged even a nominal fee for the MP3s, the fee would be "shared" by friends. (E.g. Say the fee was $10 a month. Four friends and I could get together, register under my name, and split the $10 a month, paying only $2 each instead of $50 combined.) Thus they'd lose monetary control. Nevermind that those same MP3 rippers, P2P apps, and CD burners can turn a $15 CD into 5, 10, or even 50 CDs to pass along to your friends.

The RIAA execs look at the Internet and see a swarming mass of music pirates nipping at their heals. Yet even they can't discount that there's money to be made online. That's why they're trying to come up with a means of controling online content.

(Ok, time to step out of those RIAA shoes)

Of course, the record execs should realize that they could *gain* control via an online music service. If done right, the service would reduce the reason to pirate music. (Why pirate that $18 CD when you can buy it online for $5?)

As the public relied more and more on their distribution services, less and less people would sign on to P2P apps to trade music. Thus less and less music would appear on the P2P networks.

And from a PR standpoint, they could be seen as being "pro-public" instead of being seen as control freaks who want to restrict how the public listens to music so they [the execs] can maximize their profits. And the subject of fair payment of artists would be much easier to sweep under the rug. Let's face it, Joe Q. Public really doesn't care whether or not Britteny Spears is getting fairly paid for her music so long as he can download it off the 'Net. (This isn't to say that the RIAA's treatment of artists should be swept under the rug, just that it's in the RIAA exec's best interests for it to be. After all, less money to the artist means more in the exec's pockets.)

So they *should* make a P2P app, but they *won't.* (Or if they do, it'll contain so many built-in "control" features that it will be much less useful than a copy of the latest P2P program.)

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, from RIAA figures posted to slashdot once, 50% of the cost of a CD goes to the retailer. Certainly, a good chunk of that is marketing, but it's also inventory costs, storage, distribution, and paying the wages of snotty clerks.

Which is why the RIAA would love Internet distribution because they could eat the retail profit (well that's the amazon.com theory anyway). The question, which none of you insightful slash boobs have never answered, is how they could do it without getting ripped off like mad.

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[Eythian]

Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today.

Unless I'm mistaken, the purpose of advertising is to reduce costs by causing more of the product to be sold. How can they justify increasing the cost of something to offset advertising? If they stopped advertising, sold less of the product, but made as much or more money, would that not be the same to them, and better to the consumer? (And then, file sharing utilities would be good as they would provide the record companies with cheap advertising for their low-cost albums, and even more people wold buy them).

Re:Where is the RIAA and distributers?

[ImaLamer]

I have explained it.

A free service with very few files.

A cheap service for 'hits'.

A premium service for out of print.

A crazy mad service for anything you want.

Should they offer full CD's? Not to everyone who pays a few bucks a month.

The point is, if the system makes sense: People will pay. They don't want to steal, but we.. er they have to because the current system is fsck'd

Forever

[pyite69]

I have been using etree.org for 3 years now and it is just
as good as ever. The member stick to only using
taper-friendly bands (phish, grateful dead, allman bros,
etc) and use standard protocols: ftp, email, and irc.

It is a much looser connection than something like napster;
it is really just a mailing list with a bunch of individual
ftp servers. If someone puts non-trader-friendly music,
they are banned from the mailing list for life by the list
nazi.

Yes, it is RIAA-proof.

The only real problem is that there is never enough
bandwidth!

They can check out what I'm downloading.

[malarkey]

Another piece of interesting software is Furthur. Though still only in beta, Furthur has cool features like allowing a user to piggy-back another user's download to reduce the load of the uploader.

So, now the RIAA can piggyback on my download and prove that I was downloading illegal content?

Re:WinMX rules! - Problem

[Archie Steel]

VMware is a good solution for those windows apps you can't let go - although a Linux client would be great! I haven't tried to run WinMX with WINE yet. Has anyone?

Etree.org has a unique way to do it

[pyite69]

Their "organization" is just a mailing list of people who
regularly post an email with their contents, and ftp connect
information (FTP is the "file transfer protocol" - it's the
ultimate).

If someone posts non-trader-friendly material to the list,
they are banned by the aggressive list nazi(s).

It's been working for almost 4 years now...

There will always be...

[Anonymous Coward]

...people trading music illegally. No matter how many P2Ps get shut down, as long as recordable music has been around, people have been trading it or selling it illegally, ever given a casette tape to a friend or relative...? whatever. I read a post about how much it costs for record companies to record new artist, take risks per successful band yada yada. fuck it. artists should record their own shit, distribute it for free on P2P and make their overhead back and profits from shows. period. take out the fat useless middleman. and this would help cut down on stupid repetitive producer bands like n'sync etc.

-K

Not doomed at all

[pyite69]

I've been using etree for years. I don't care if it meets your
personal criteria for a "decent" number of users; it has more
music than I could possibly download and listen to. And it's
not just hippie bands like the Dead, other bands e.g. U2,
radiohead, Dave Matthews, and even the evil Metallica
allow trading of their concerts.

Re:Not doomed at all

[gazbo]

I don't care if it meets your personal criteria for a "decent" number of users

OK, I've been slapped and rightly so. What I meant was that it will never reach even a fraction of the popularity of Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, Morpheus etc. If it has what you want, then great - don't get me wrong, I think that it's a good idea.

What I was implying is that the hype surrounding the networks I mentioned above was due to their huge size and popularity; this hype is irrelevant for this network, as it caters for a (relatively) niche market.

I'm sure there's a point in there somewhere...

Re:Not doomed at all

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that you need to stop believing the hype.

Re:Not doomed at all

[jonabbey]

The point is that you need to stop believing the hype.

So you're saying that the revolution will not be indexed?

Re:Not doomed at all

[Anonymous Coward]

The interesting thing is that there are a small but growing number of people who are voting for audience taping with their dollars. I rarely if ever attend concerts where I'm not allowed to tape. If I don't attend the concerts, and don't end up hearing the music, I don't buy the albums either.

These days, permitting audience taping places a new band at a HUGE advantage in creating a loyal fan base.

The RIAA wants you to stop recording and trading their music. I say you do one better. Stop buying it also, or you're putting money in the bad guys pockets.

Slightly OT: Kazaa locks out Linux clients...?

[Linux Freak]

It seems Kazaa is locking out Linux clients from connecting to their network. I know the network was down due to their recent sale to another company, but now the Windows clients work (apparently), but the Linux client remains unlinked from their download pages, *AND* existing clients cannot connect.

Oh well. The gift project (http://gift.sourceforge.net/) appears to be coming along nicely, so screw Kazaa. :p

What about the DMCA?

[hendridm]

Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that...

I've often wondered why the RIAA can't use the DMCA against the authors of P2P software, which would allow them to attempt to take down even the decentralized, anonymous P2P technology (sure, there's no central server, but you can sue the guy who makes it). I realize that once it's released it can circle the Internet forever, but that sure hinders development. And if development becomes a community effort, they could sue any provider that hosts the effort. To me, the DMCA seems vague enough to provide this opportunity.

Why don't the threaten to sue the author of eDonkey or the Gnutella clients? I suppose it's a tedious task, but that's their job. It's no more tedious than shutting down FTP sites...

Re:What about the DMCA?

[Stonehand]

They're not circumventing any effective technological access protection measure, nor are they claiming too. At least, Napster and their ilk aren't, because the .MP3s ripped don't *have* any access protection measures. So DMCA shouldn't apply. Regular copyright law, however, still might, if the services have as their prevailing use the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.

Re:What about the DMCA?

[The Mgt]

If someone could figure out how to do software development over freenet (freeCVS anyone?) then the RIAA wouldn't know who or where the developers were.

Re:What about the DMCA?

[42forty-two42]

And they don't decrypt anything themselves...

Re:What about the DMCA?

[McFly777]

With complete anonymity couldn't anyone pollute the CVS tree, thereby destroying the viability of the software in question?

not a good battle to fight

[pyite69]

Then the RIAA would lobby for, and receive, the ability to
have ISP's cut you off. Great.

What is more important is to have bands who allow legal
trading of their live music be more successful than bands
who don't. If you measure success by concert ticket
revenue, bands who allow trading: Phish, the Dead, Metallica, and U2 were among the most successful bands
of the 90's - Phish and the Dead didn't have a single
radio hit and weren't exactly big on MTV.

There is a lot of good legally tradable music available; try
it out.

Re:not a good battle to fight

[NullAndVoid]

Probably the reason bands like Phish and the Dead are/were bigger on tour than the radio is that they are much more oriented towards live performance than studio production. They're jam bands, dedicated to excellent live performance. Pop groups are carefully produced for consumption by radio and video, and their live performances tend to recreate the same experience.

Britney fans would be confused and angry if she explored new variations of her songs on stage ("that's not the way the song goes!"), whereas Phish fans don't want to hear a perfect recreation of a CD track.

Just a thought

[Anonymous Coward]

A number of Privacy and Anti-Censorship groups use a n of M secret sharing algorithm to decentralize content so that no single server actually contains the content but needs at least n of m total servers to regenerate the secret. Has anyone thought about applying this concept to p2p? It seems that with a scheme like this, no one server would actually contain the mp3s but the data could still be retreived. A system like this with servers in multiple countries would be really hard to shutdown..

RIAA reaction

[Erris]

I'm sure the RIAA will do all in it's power, leagal, ethical and otherwise to kill this. They will surely try to upload their comercial garbage and encourage others to do so. They will also upload poor quality recordings and other noise like the "coo-coo" recordings they stuck on Napster, in a vain attempt to dilute the collection. At least until they have complete control over all network access.

It's not going to work. When they ruin one service dozens of new ones will be formed.

They haven't touched Usenet yet

[Baki]

Another network that primarily is intended to share legal information, but that "happens" to be used for illegal (alt.binaries*) file trading as well.

Should they do so (and this applies also to this new network so clearly meant for legal exchange only) than it only becomes too obvious that the RIAA in fact wants to forbid any direct communication between people.

Friends don't let Friends use MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should get some friends that actually understand the WAV - MP3 conversion and know what tools to use and how to use them.

Here's a hint: they don't use MusicMatch.

Re:Friends don't let Friends use MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

We understand WAV - MP3 conversion, and have made a decision not to use MP3 technology at all.

CD quality is the baseline. The absolute minimum acceptable quality. MP3 falls below that baseline, so we don't use it.

Re:Friends don't let Friends use MP3

[TheKey]

Hmm.. I just wish I had the bandwith to download anything larger than MP3s. As it is, with only one phone line and a (rather crappy) 56k connection, I have a hard time waiting for MP3s to finish dling.

Plus, if I get stuff at about a bitrate of 160 rather than 128, I can't tell much of a difference. Personal opinion, I suppose.

Windows

[inerte]

For Windows users:

There's an Open Source project hosted on Sourceforge called Gnucleus. Here is the project page.

It supports multiple hosts download, so if you were an user of Xolox, but want a client that development still continues and you want to get those large files using multiple connections, get it now. Sadly, download of partial files from other hosts is still not possible (since there's no consensus from the Gnutella protocol developers about how this should work).

Gnucleus even has a LAN mode, so you may run it to share files over your network that has locked ports or net access blocked (great for colleges!).

VMware costs $500

[yerricde]

VMware [vmware.com] is a good solution for those windows apps you can't let go

So instead of letting go of your Windows apps, you let go of your money. VMware Workstation costs $300, and Windows 2000 Pro for VMware costs $200 plus the connect time to download the service packs. How again do you prevent people from cracking or infecting your box while you download from Windows Update? On the other hand, a year of TransGaming costs only $60.

I haven't tried to run WinMX with WINE yet. Has anyone?

According to CodeWeavers' app database, most features of WinMX work, but you need a copy of Windows to run the installer.

Re:VMware costs $500

[Archie Steel]

So instead of letting go of your Windows apps, you let go of your money. VMware Workstation costs $300, and Windows 2000 Pro for VMware costs $200 [vmware.com] plus the connect time to download the service packs.

Actually, the VMware Express package is still available for download, and the license is a lot cheaper (around 50$, IIRC). Although it will only run Windows98 (and only one virtual machine at a time), that's enough for most Windows apps - and who doesn't have a copy of Windows98 lying around...

According to CodeWeavers' app database, most features of WinMX work

Still, I haven't talked to anyone who got it to work...I'd be interested!

Re:VMware costs $500

[Anonymous Coward]

How again do you prevent people from cracking or infecting your box while you download from Windows Update?

And just how are they going to crack or infect your box? Not to mention that Linux distributions have a whole Hell of a lot more holes to patch than do Win 2000 Pro installations.

Source

[kipperDude]

is it not posible to give source code + compiler and make file
for a P2P file share net work
as eductional exsercise
it would be nice to educate people in P2P :)
kipper

Finally!

[thesupermikey]

It's been a pain in the ass to find A place to get Mp3s of live music. Napster was a breading ground for mislabeled music, and the other programs are just as bad. Don't get me wrong http://www.nugs.net is one of the best places to find Phish http://www.phish.com and dead http://dead.net . Other sites dont update or are slow, unreliable and tend to have very little buy way of new bands.

P2P for B?

[foo fighter]

I'm still looking for a good case-study/white-paper on successful use of peer-to-peer technologies inside a business.

Like instant messaging, most of the services are created with home users in mind. That means they lack the enterprise-strength management and security features needed by business.

Trying to use MSN Messenger (for example) inside our organization allows connections to the outside world. Same thing with the Fasttrack file sharing systems.

Has anyone used IM or P2P successully in a business? What did you do to keep the system secure, and how did you manage it?

These technologies are awesome and it's easy to see how they could benefit business.

Re:P2P for B?

[yora]

Trying to use MSN Messenger (for example) inside our organization allows connections to the outside world.

In fact MSN messenger is the only popular IM software that you can use in a LAN. Though to get it working you will need to have MS Exchange 2000. I had this set up at my earlier organizaion, and we cud connect to both the msn internet servers and to our local exchange servers. And in our company, we used to use MS exchange only for this feature!

MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM

[yerricde]

many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.

For one thing, FLAC performs a few percent better than SHN and has a more free license. For another, tests performed by r3mix.net have shown that it's possible to encode MP3 at a variable bit rate centered about 192 kbps and lose nothing audible. (Whether this is legal under the Fraunhofer patents is a different story.) MP3 and Ogg Vorbis produce significant quality loss in only the following situations: 1. low bit-rate operation, 2. crappy encoders, and 3. repeated conversions of wav -> compressed -> wav.

A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3

What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible, but it's still a measurable loss.

Re:MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM

[whipping_post]

What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible [pineight.com], but it's still a measurable loss.

Actually most live music collectors, at least the hard-core ones, want ALL the details about the source for a given show- right down to the microphones used, and in some cases, the location of the taper at the show. Things like analog->wav and digital audio extraction should always be indicated in the source which is distributed with the files, regardless of whether the method of distributing is etree.org or furthur or something else entirely. "Even Weed" - Tiki Barber

Re:MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM

[zzyzx]

Here's a standard info file for a show taken from etree.org:

12/31/99 Big Cypress Seminole Reservation
evening set, aka "ph2000-01-01"; Earthworks SR-77 > Lunatec V2 > ADC-20 > DA-P1 & M1 (concurrent); Location: Front row, stage left corner of tapers; DAT > CD > SHN: PCM-R500 > Audiomedia III/Powermac G3/233 > Pro Tools 4.3.2; Panasonic 7502 (burn/extract); taped and mastered by M. Vernal; no music missing; d4t1 ~:23 noise is fireworks; alternate tracking using 6 discs, with 2x80 and an overburn

Yes we are an obsessive community

Re:MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for those wondering what all that means:

Earthworks SR-77 -- Microphones
Lunatec V2 -- standalone microphone preamp
ADC-20 -- standalone analog-digital converter
DA-P1 & M1 -- Tascam and Sony DAT decks, respectively.

Re:MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM

[zzyzx]

Oh and the reason that they were running 2 decks is that they were taping a set that ran for over 7 hours.

May have to check this one out!

[night_flyer]

currently I get all my live bootlegs from alt.binaries.sound.mp3.bootlegs, but instead of going out and looking for a particular artist, Im presented with a vast array of stuff that I may or may not want, the only way to tell is to DL a song or two.. I have found many good concerts by people I dont normally like.

Audio fingerprinting can pinpoint a crowd

[yerricde]

How do they distinguish live recordings from studio recordings (the kind usually ripped from CD's)?

For one thing, amateur live recordings typically doesn't have as much high frequency content as studio recordings. For another, audio fingerprinting technology can look for the crowd noise at the beginning and end of each song.

Re:Audio fingerprinting can pinpoint a crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that a fair number of bands that permit recording also provide soundboard patches as well, so there are plenty of amateur live recordings that are studio quality, depending on how much attention the soundman pays to the tape mix.

Yonder Mountain String Band, for instance, provides an exceptionally beautiful sounding soundboard mix to their taping loyal.

Audience taping/trading is governed by a strict honor system. Sure, we could trade around studio CDs easily enough, and probably get away with selling bootlegs, but we don't do that.

It's about appreciating and enjoying music, and appreciating the privilege of being allowed to make live recordings of our favorite artists. It's not about violating the rights of the people we admire. It's as simple as mutual respect -- something the RIAA will never understand.

rnl --> konspire, incomplete source?

[Anonymous Coward]

After looking at the source, I see that the Rootnode file sharing system is built on a modified version of konspire.

I also see that not all of the class files are present, (where is Client.{class,java}?), even though the source tarball ships with a copy of the GPL. For that matter, for some of the classes, only the *.class files are in the tarball and not the *.java files.

Come on, guys, get with the program!

Content-Addressable Web

[Orasis]

With the Content-Addressable Web standard, we have built secure hashes into the very fabric of the network. CAW goes so far as to use them to provide a uniform URI for a unique piece of content, regardless of its location on the network.

--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks

Re:Content-Addressable Web

[LetterJ]

Are there any open implementations of this standard?

Re:Content-Addressable Web

[Orasis]

We're working on it, something will probably be ready in time for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference.

--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks

What!???!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey,

Were you just posting a hypothetical to be funny? Well, that is kind of funny, as I do love sarcasm. But, I haven't downloaded this RNL thingy you speak of. Does the installer really do that? If so, that should have been at the top of the page. And, if so, the moderators better see you soon.... good thing you're logged in or I wouldn't even have seen that!

Re:What!???!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he was just making a joke. RNL doesn't have any spyware or any other programs installed with it. Go look at the source for goodness sake. It's on sourceforge.net

Funny joke, but RNL doesn't do that.

Jibe and Onion Networks

[Orasis]

Jibe has a wonderful product for enterprise file and data sharing and I think is making some good progress and will be quite successful.

My employer, Onion Networks, is focused on building enterprise content delivery solutions using P2P. 2002 is off to a great start for us as companies are immediately seeing the value of P2P for cutting costs and increasing reliability within their networks.

--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks

www.espra.net

[Anonymous Coward]

go have a look already!

'Controled file sharing'... (or 'Central server?')

[DougMelvin]

1) How can it be valid to claim that a network (such a Kazaa) has no central server, when in fact, to use the service, you first have to connect to a Central server to get an account, and then have to connect to that same server to 'logon' to the network?

2) How can one really ensure that the music being shared is allowed to be shared?
Check the file header? (Like that couldn't be cracked in under an hour)
Use a huge database to store filenames and checksums of shareable files?
What if a user changes the encoding of a file. Can they still share it? (as it no longer resembles to 'allowable' file)

As someone that runs one

[ethank]

I run a website called Murmurs.com, which is for the band REM. We run a Napster-clone on our servers using SlavaNap as the main server (Windows yes, I know, but it was more stable than OpenNap). The desired client is WinMX.

REM has a kind of blind-eye mentality toward the sharing network, so long as what is being shared is live or unreleased tracks. As well, we allow sharing of other bands which support this mentality (Wilco, Pearl Jam, Patti Smith, Radiohead, U2, etc).

A lot of the files are sourced by someone running a free FTP server (called ThinkTankDecoy, which makes sense if you know REM history). People download from that server and it permeates through the shared server.

Ice Magazine recently ran a feature on our sharing system, a U2 one and Pearl Jam. Here's a quote:

"At www.murmurs.com, www.fivehorizons.com and www.u2bloodredsky.com- three unofficial but overt REM, pearl Jam, and U2 sites- one can easily nevigate past message forums and band news to locate mp3 concerts uploaded by fans. The U2 site is set up like a database, and provides tips for people un familiar with PTP. The REM site requires user registration, and directs how to install its own custom file-swapping software. It also recently featured an exclusive interview with guitarist peter Buck. when told that both a rare 1980 show and thhe entire, unedited portion of the recent MTV "Unplugged" broadccast had been posted to Murmurs.com, he replied "I like the fact that we've done this huge mountain of work, and that every now and then I'll find a bootleg of some 85 German tv show...."

Ice Magazine is maintstream industry press.

Considering the size of U2, PJ and REM, its nice to see that at least some big bands don't listen to the RIAA's squawking.

Ethan

Furthur is the goods.

[undie]

Furthur is an absolutely amazing piece of software. I've been in the Etree community since the beginning (I seeded the first PCP tree), and I've been waiting for something like this.

Trading FTP server addresses/logins on a mailing list always seemed sort of antiquated to me. There was always talk of creating a P2P program specifically for the Etree community, and I'm glad it's finally here and ready for prime time.

They call it a beta, and there are a few rough edges, but it's been running (and doing multiple simultaneous transfers) for the last 10 days on my machine without stopping.

Last I looked there were about 850 clients connected - I'm hoping after this story this number will jump and there'll be even more great music on the network.

Frost might be closest to what you are looking for

[Sanity]

Frost is a Freenet client which supports discussion boards and keyword-searching. It requires that you have already installed Freenet, but works well. It has an active community of users, and continues to be improved on a daily basis.

Ironic

[zzyzx]

Anyone else notice that the fortune at the bottom of this page (1/24/02 9:32 PST) was, "I'll be Grateful when they're Dead." Seeing how this story is about Deadhead taper networks, that's a tad ironic.

linux p2p Issues

[WyldOne]

After dabbling in p2p for a bit. I found PHEXworked for some large files. However I found all the p2p client/servers had a few things problematic about them.

• While they all could search, none could find matching files by hash code(be it rc5 or whatever it uses).
• Of the ones that did multi-home download, none ever kept trying to find sources for the files in progress (enhancment/feature?).
• My biggest beef with all of them is that none could continue a d/l that had stopped. So every time it re-started it would start at the beginning.
• Only a few of them could resume searching/downloading if the client died(or I killed it) (gtk-gnutella could save the d/l requests)
• Spammage - you could do a exact title serch, and get hacking info, or porno or ... well you know what I mean. Heavans forbid if any commercial company really got serious about it.

'Piggy-backing' would be nice, but reliabe would be better. In the end it has a ways to go. Large files are the biggest problem.

Hash Table system or Quicksort?

[FirstNoel]

I'm kind of confused. I thought sorting a hash table would royally f*** it up.

Isn't that the whole point of a hashtable is so you don't have to sort it. Just do some calculation off the lookup criteria and use that to find the entry in the table.

It seems contradicting to say it's a quicksort/hashtable.

I've been out of school a few years though, and I wasn' the best at data algorithms...

Sean D.

Re:Hash Table system or Quicksort?

[jon_c]

I'm not sure how the hash works either. but from what i can tell the peers connect to eachother in order of the hash making searchs faster (kind of like a skip-list)

peer1 [0x001] -> peer2 [0x05] -> peer3 [0x08]

i'm 99% sure it doesn't work like a standard hashtable, i think the hashs are just for generating sortable keys, but i could be wrong.

i compared it to a quicksort, because the author compared FastTrack to a buble sort [O(n^2)], wheres his seemed to be the same as a quicksort [ O(n log n) ]

-Jon

Re:Hash Table system or Quicksort?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chord/Circle provide distributed Hashtable service. And yes you are wrong in saying hashes are just for generating sortable keys. Hashes are used as node identifier as well as content identifier in these systems.

Filename checking? Why?

[jonabbey]

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.

Why would one even need to look at the filename? Calculate the md5 signature, look it up in the database, and if you find a match, you're good to go, regardless of the filename. An md5 signature is 16 bytes long, that's the same length as an IPv6 address, the kind they describe as being sufficient as allowing every atom on earth to have its own I.P. address. Shouldn't it be vanishingly unlikely that someone could alter a piece of music so that its md5 matches with something previously registered?

That's assuming that someone is actually checking out these files before entering md5's into the database, I guess. Is the safety factor just based on the fact that you won't approve a filename that doesn't match the known list of acceptable bands? I suppose if you can't search for something illegal based on name that it doesn't matter in some sense whether it is in the system or not..

If You Already Own It, It's NOT Illegal...

[JLucien]

Over half of my cd collection is across the Atlantic right now.

So if I download a cd that I already own, how am I breaking the law?

JLucien.

Burning bridges is bad capitalism

[Jeppe Salvesen]

The music business works by legislation. File sharing is outside of their realm of control, but rather than embracing it they have chosen to fight an unwinnable fight. File sharing will always exist, since it is essentially indistinguishable from regular protocols. Heck, if push comes to shove, we'll just ssh-tunnel between our file sharing clients.

Back to my point.

The RIAA are history. After all, they've had limited positive effect on the artists they are supposed to ultimately serve. Wanna know how an artist makes serious money? They go on a tour. Then again, we need to hear about the artist and be excited about the artist in order to bother seeing the artist live. That's what the music industry has provided - 'till now.

I still buy albums that are genuinely good, but I usually check them out on mp3 first. Maybe I'll stop buying albums and start going to more concerts? They are more memorable than a slice of reflective surface, anyhow!

how they control it now...

[mikemulvaney]

The main control used by furthur is in the GUI. When you share a set, you can only choose for a specified list of artists that are taper-friendly. Also, when you search, you have to specify an artist from a pull down list.

This isn't all that secure, of course, because someone could share the latest Britney album under "Tenacious D", but then a lot of people who actually like good music would be pissed off.

Also, the furthur interface is relatively open, but the PCP protocol that it uses to share files is not. So they retain control over the underlying protocol, which *might* give them a better chance at controlling content.

Right now, content is basically self-controlled. If you don't like Phish|Dead|etc, then you don't want to use furthur. But oh man, if you do, then futhur is great.

-Mike

Re:how they control it now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anyone who actually likes good music would really care.

eventually comes much sooner...

[mikemulvaney]

Otherwise, this is no different from any other P2P filesharing mechanism where files naturally propagte from a source and are eventually downloaded from other nodes.

If I am downloading a new Tenacious D seed from some dude, and another guy starts downloading the same seed, then furthur will allow that guy to download the show from me *while I am still downloading it*.

Some of the magic here is because of the md5 checksumming. When I find a copy of the Wiltern show from 10-24-01, furthur can check the md5's and look for other people who have the exact same show. When I start downloading, I can download from all those people at the same time.

And more importantly, furthur will let people download from me while I am downloading.

This solves the freeloader problem to an amazing degree. Even if I pull files out of my shared collection as soon as I download the whole set, I am still sharing the sets that I am currently downloading. (A recent upgrade allows users to cap the upload speed, which helps keep furthur from sucking down all of your bandwidth, which is something that it used to do quite freely.)

Furthur is the best P2P client I have ever used, bar none. Another great feature is that once you tell it to download a show, it will keep trying until it gets the whole thing. Its totally fire and forget: the md5 checking makes sure that you are getting the files you really asked for.

This works great for live shows, because most shows come from the same source. Since everyone has a lossless shn from the same guy's DAT tape, the md5's are all the same and we can share the show easily. The important thing is that there is usually only one source for each show, so everyone with the 10-24 show has the same shn's.

This wouldn't work quite as well for ripped mp3's from a CD, because each mp3 would be slightly different, so you would get a bunch of different seeds, and furthur wouldn't be able to sort them for you.

Anyway, if you are into live music at all, you should really check out furthur.

-Mike

Re:WinMX rules! - Problem

[ImaLamer]

Yeah, another way is to simply use the napigator list.

www.napigator.com/servers.html i believe.

Trippy MX is the best.

I like the way WinMX moves the good servers to the top.

Problems with Freenet

[The Panther!]

I started running Freenet about two weeks ago. Here's my impressions:

• Relatively easy to install (just run the .exe)
• Requires you to download a newer JVM. Not a big deal.
• Hard as hell to get connected to another client, because there's no central server. Once you get a single good peer, though, it starts learning new connections and it improves dramatically. The first several days is really frustrating. This is why most people dump Freenet immediately, as first impressions are everything.
• It's not turnkey. You must search and find peers to put in your hosts file. It doesn't work 'out of the box'.
• There's no way to search for files. It means you must already know the exact address of what you're trying to download. Writing a search engine is supposedly possible, though non-trivial.
• Download speeds are poor, due to encryption and other factors relating to anonymity, I believe.
• Frequently, files will download partially or with zero length, but have their correct name, implying it is complete. (Morpheus/KaZaA use temp names until a file completes, which is nice.)
• Freenet runs a small web server for configuration and retrieval. The web interface is 'programmer friendly', but not user friendly.
• Files must be 'inserted' into the network. This is a pain if you're trying to share 40gb of mp3 files, or change what is shared daily.
• Files are not guaranteed to exist in the network once 'inserted'. Only files which are requested stay alive, from what I've read.

But, all these issues don't prevent me from running Freenet. I find it comforting to support anonymity on the internet, like in the old days. It's really not up to scratch for P2P file sharing, though. Never will be.
Frost, on the other hand, seems like a really slick attempt at totally anonymous newsgroups built on top of Freenet. I've run it a few times and like it. It's slow as molasses, but that's not Frost's fault (see above).

Re:Problems with Freenet

[Sanity]

Requires you to download a newer JVM. Not a big deal.

This isn't really the fault of the Freenet developers, they actually target Java 1.1, but have discovered bugs in many of the currently available JVMs, including the release version of Kaffe (it is fixed in the CVS version), IBM's Linux JRE is also screwy, Sun's seems to work fine though.

Hard as hell to get connected to another client, because there's no central server.

Freenet has improved dramatically in this regard over the past two or three days (with some recent bug-fixes), you may want to try it again.

It's not turnkey. You must search and find peers to put in your hosts file. It doesn't work 'out of the box'.

Both the Linux and Windows releases come with up to thirty recently tested node references now (again, just in the last few days). You can also download fresh references here (the Windows installer now does this automatically on node-startup).

There's no way to search for files.

Freenet isn't intended to be used in the same way as Napster or Gnutella, none-the-less, you may be interested in trying Frost which not only allows you to do keyword searching for files, but also has a Usenet-like discussion board system over Freenet.

Download speeds are poor, due to encryption and other factors relating to anonymity, I believe

Download speeds will improve as data becomes more popular, but you are right, the crypto does impose an overhead.

Frequently, files will download partially or with zero length, but have their correct name, implying it is complete. (Morpheus/KaZaA use temp names until a file completes, which is nice.)

This is a client issue, Frost (mentioned above) uses .tmp files just like Morpheus and KaZaA (and without the spyware!).

Freenet runs a small web server for configuration and retrieval. The web interface is 'programmer friendly', but not user friendly.

Again, try Frost, it is much more user-friendly than the bear-bones web interface to Freenet.

Files must be 'inserted' into the network. This is a pain if you're trying to share 40gb of mp3 files, or change what is shared daily.

Again, Frost makes insertion of files much less painful, and once you insert your files you don't need to keep your node running for them to remain on the network.

Furthur website overload

[furthurnet_team]

www.furthurnet.com is getting "slashdotted" right now and the server is overloaded. We are in the process of setting up a mirror site to be able to download furthur. We will post the location very soon.
The current furthur network has over 15,000 shows available, which totals over 5TB.

Re:Filename checking? Why?

[mikemulvaney]

One problem is that there is not a big enough database of md5's. There is an ongoing process at etree to certify seeds as "dank" seeds, which basically means that they are the best available source for that particular show. You can see a list of some of those here:

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

/.ted already?

[42forty-two42]

Furthur's page seems to be running IIS, though...

Furthur solves most of those problems

[mikemulvaney]

While they all could search, none could find matching files by hash code(be it rc5 or whatever it uses)

Furthur does md5 checking to group together the files, and once you start downloading it looks at md5's to figure out what it needs to download. AFAIK, All internal file identification is done by md5, and not by file name.

Of the ones that did multi-home download, none ever kept trying to find sources for the files in progress (enhancment/feature?).

Furthur will look for other sources every 15 minutes (or whatever you set it to). If you start a download, and the guys you are downloading from all leave, you can just let it sit in the Partial tab. Come back in a few days (or whatever), and the show will probably be fully downloading. You never have to do anything after you click "download".

My biggest beef with all of them is that none could continue a d/l that had stopped. So every time it re-started it would start at the beginning.

Furthur can do this of course. It can piece together downloads from multiple people who already have the file, and even from others who are currently downloading. And if the download is interupted, it will pick up where it left off when a source becomes available.

Only a few of them could resume searching/downloading if the client died(or I killed it) (gtk-gnutella could save the d/l requests)

Furthur can do this, too.

Spammage - you could do a exact title serch, and get hacking info, or porno or ... well you know what I mean. Heavans forbid if any commercial company really got serious about it.

Well, furthur is still dependent on what people put in the file descriptions, so if someone wanted to put a bunch of spam in there, they could. I haven't seen that happen yet, though.

-Mike
PS I'm not afiliated with Furthur in any way, other than as a satisfied user

Re:Furthur solves most of those problems

[WyldOne]

Well I tried it. first thing I got was a bunch of warnings, and then it seg-faulted. well back to the drawing board. Maybe they will fix in further releases (oh groan I know)

Those comments from REM's guitarist

[ethank]

These might be of interest to some. This is what Peter Buck said about MP3 sharing:

ERK: Do you think there will be a resurgence or upheaval in the music industry like 91?

PLB: What I think is going to happen is that the major record companies, and they are in this position, where they are run by accountants and promo people who don't know about music. So they're just imitating each other. The promo people go, "We've got to have a boy band" and the accountants go, "We need to sell a few more records."

ERK: Seems to be kind of what the mid 70's were like.

PLB: Yeah, and it needs to be that...I never held a huge distinction between major labels and minor labels. I'd buy things on Warners and Columbia and things on Dragcity and Bloodshot. Nowadays, I buy records and I don't ever see myself buying a major-label record unless Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen come out with new ones, which they are. There is just nothing on a major label that interests me anymore, and I'm like a lot of people. I'm assuming that for the rest of my record-buying career, I'll be buying records from independent labels, and that will be great.

ERK: Or self-published artists like Aimee Mann.

PB: I just got the four Roger McGuinn CDs you get through his website.

ERK: I think that is causing a huge thing for record labels. Websites have eliminated the need for distribution deals for some artists.

PB: When you're talking about Destiny's Child, where you can sell 10,000,000 more records if you get the right video and promotional push, that is when you need a major label. If you're talking about someone who is playing...a smaller artist, there almost is no need for a record company. Essentially, I think a lot of things are going to go through MP3, the net. You know, the play music I put up for free. Have you downloaded it?

ERK: Yeah, it was great!

PB: It was something that I wanted to put out there. It was only 7 minutes long. I trimmed it down to what I liked the best. I wanted it out there and didn't want to press it, choose a cover, a title, charge people. Essentially, I just wanted it out there. I'm into the idea of spreading things in that way. Eventually, I'd love to download whole concerts that way.

I'm proud of what we do, and I respect people like the Grateful Dead and Pearl Jam who put out every show for the tour. I'd just assume people do it for themselves. Bootleg it and everything. I like the fact that we've done this huge mountain of work, that every now and then I'll find the bootleg of some '85 German TV show.

ERK: With the promo tour, after every promo performance, we basically had MP3s up right after.

PB: I think that's cool. I like the idea that if you're a fan... You know, I'm a Dylan fan and I have hundreds of Dylan bootlegs, some of them I play a bunch, some I never play again. I like the idea that this eliminates the mafia middleman that has pressed these CDs or vinyl.

ERK: I've noticed that, since I've been doing the fansite-type thing, that your involvement with the Internet has increased exponentially. Do you see any more of that in the future? Exclusive stuff on HQ?

PB: You know, I personally would love to. I'd love to put up whole shows, make them available. Limited pressing CDs in the future. For the last record, Reveal, there is a whole CD of instrumental stuff that is pretty interesting.

ERK: There is Shine, and the Electrolite-sounding one.

PB: Yeah, yeah. There is a whole four days of recordings from Athens where there are eight things we never bothered to record again. That kind of stuff would be fun for fans to have available. Right now, we're still too forward-thinking to think about the catalog, but I think I guarantee that sometime through the website or fan club or both, we'll make available in a commercial or noncommercial manner some of the archive stuff.

Re:Piggybacking? Hrm... not really.

[rubybroom]

It really is piggybacking.

See, say someone on a 56k connection has a file that is in high demand. Then someone on a T1 starts downloading it and ends up with 60% of it. Then someone else with a T1 comes along and starts downloading it...they'll be downlaoding at least 60% of it from the other T1 guy, rather than forcing the 56k guy to split the upload to both because the first T1 doesn't have the complete file.

This can easily extend to a chain of people. The protocol allows each client to immediately pass on any packet it successfully receives, regardless of whether or not they have the complete file.

Oh to have mod points....

[InfinityEdge]

Those who have them, mod this one up!!!!

FUD fighting at its best.

please don't get religious

[GunFodder]

The debate about what frequencies are audible rages on, please don't throw wood on that fire. There are some people that want audio sampled at 96khz and 24 bits and others that are happy with RealAudio streamed over a dialup connection. Can't we all just get along?

-1 Troll

[Sanity]

I assume you are trolling and so will ignore most of your ill-informed comments, save this one.

The idea that Gnutella is more scalable than Freenet is laughable. Gnutella employs a broadcast search meaning that every time you search for content in a proper Gnutella network your request can hit thousands of other peers in the network, in Freenet each request will hit at most 25 other nodes.

If you genuinely believe the drivel you have spouted here, I strongly suggest that you do some research before you demonstrate your stupidity again.

Re:-1 Troll

[leuk_he]

Comparing the search function is not a good idea.

In freenet you have to do an exact "search" to find a key. really, the search function is not really a search function at all. it is the "get me the data assiated with this key" function. If you did your research you would have found this out.

don't forget gnutella is also evolving. Look for recent p2p subjects on /. to find this out.

Re:-1 Troll

[Sanity]

In freenet you have to do an exact "search" to find a key. really, the search function is not really a search function at all. it is the "get me the data assiated with this key" function. If you did your research you would have found this out.

I assure you, I am very familiar with Freenet. It is true that Freenet doesn't do keyword searching right now, although there is no reason that its searching algorithm couldn't be generalized in future to achieve this.

Gnutella is indeed evolving, towards a Napster-style centralized architecture, and we all know what that gets us.

Re:-1 Troll

[evilviper]

You obviously don't know a thing about Gnutella. First of all, a broadcast is a tiny little packet, while FreeNet files are going to be far larger than that, traveling essentially in serial broadcast. Just imagine broadcasting a 700 Meg ISO. Considering that the FreeNet cache is approx 90 Megs, no ammount of mirroring will help.

Secondly, Gnutella has a TTL option. On average, Gnutella clients have a default hop count of ~7 before they are dropped. In other words, it's not traveling through every node on the network. To get greater scalability, reduct the hop count.

Re:MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM (what isn't?)

[Kontraktor]

>What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? >It's negligible [pineight.com], but it's still a >measurable loss. Yes, but it is somewhat unavoidable if we want to work with music in the digital realm. That is why it is so important to keep loss to a minimum; there are so many variables introduced by all the equipment needed to record live music in the field (see ZZYZX's posts in this thread). As an etree user, I can let you in on a dirty little secret. Many of the shows traded on etree (and Furthur I assume, but I admit, I have not used it) were transferred (DAT > WAV) using inferior soundcards, which can introduce noise and drop samples. So these files are then compressed with SHN and spread through the net, with the errors justified, because the md5's match. Some soundcards are capable of bit-for-bit transfer, but so far, this knowledge is not really broadcast except amongst *really* obsessive music/tech geeks (dankseeds).

Sharing copyrighted music

[fmita]

On their website's index page, it says :
What is it?
RNL is a file-sharing program for trading legal recordings of live concerts. This is not for sharing your copyrighted mp3s. RNL is a way for fans of bands that support live recordings to share shows in the quickest way possible.
Is there any way this can be actually implemented into the program or otherwise, or are they just hoping the RIAA will give them a break for their good intent?

What about Direct Connect?

[brizna6E]

Of all the Morpheus/Kazaa articles on /., I've never heard once of Direct Connect.

I've used both programs for awhile now. Direct Connect is much better and there's more stuff available. You can find much more one one Direct Connect Network than all of Morpheus. Cummulative, there's more data too. 405 TB available right now on the Morpheus network. 947 TB on DC. However, there is 11 times more people on Morpheus, heh.

Try a download manager

[Jerp]

I just wish I had the bandwith to download anything larger than MP3s. As it is, with only one phone line and a (rather crappy) 56k connection, I have a hard time waiting for MP3s to finish dling.

When using slow connections or just downloading a large batch of files, I use a download manager called GetRight for windows. It can be configured to download a batch of files, with such features as download scheduling (eg, have it dialup and download every night from 12am to 5am), bandwidth throttling, and pause/resume capability.

I've downloaded gigs over a 56k modem using this app with no hand-holding. Simply, it takes care of business.

Technical details?

[Wesley Felter]

Claims like "New search technology, fastest search times yet" are nice, but where are the details? How do these systems actually work?

Furthernet.com - SLASHDOTTED!

[BigBlockMopar]

Quoted from www.furthernet.com:

Ack... Furthur's been slashdotted! ;)
Our slogan is now: "We should have used Apache!"

Well, d'uh.

When I saw the IIS Server Busy error, they lost all their credibility with me.

Re:Furthernet.com - SLASHDOTTED!

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, come on! what is this, the Inquisition?! i am so sick and tired of this "anyone who uses Windows is an idiot" dogma, which is why this is the first time I have been to Slashdot in months.

if that's all you ever have to contribute, you must be a real putz.

Re:Furthernet.com - SLASHDOTTED!

[BigBlockMopar]

oh, come on! what is this, the Inquisition?! i am so sick and tired of this "anyone who uses Windows is an idiot" dogma, which is why this is the first time I have been to Slashdot in months.

Nope, not true. In fact, I think M$ still has the best compromise between GUI and features and available software. I run Windows 2000 on my main desktop machine; believe me, I'll be running *NIX as soon as KDE has the very few remaining things that I need it to have. (KDE is *so* pretty.)

However, running Windows 2000 on a routable IP addess is dangerous and irresponsible for Handsome Hubby to surf the net, let alone for someone to actually serve pages.

You'll be pleased to note that the machine from which I am typing this does not run IIS, and has an IP address of 192.168.0.1.

It's like a Corvair: the only safe way to drive it is in slow little circles in a parking lot.

if that's all you ever have to contribute, you must be a real putz.

No, that's not all that I have to contribute. Though I am a real putz.

edonkey never quoted

[marcas1]

edonkey 2000 has never been mentionned. it's not open source, it's not GPL, most of eDonkey's users run under Windows, but it works well (P2P, search engine & download engine are separated, file segmentation and multisource downloads). How many /. readers knows/uses it? Are there too much security holes?

Re:edonkey never quoted

[marcas1]

Nevermind. I didn't use correctly ./ search engine options...

did you submit the bug?

[mikemulvaney]

I'm sure the furthur team would be interested in hearing about your problem. You can submit bugs on the sourceforge project page.

-Mike

Re:MP3 is "lossy," but so is PCM (what isn't?)

[sethb.nyc]

Actually, information about which cards do good digital input (e.g. Zoltrix) and which always resample even when it's not necessary (even when the input frequency is supposedly the recorded frequency) is often posted on etree, dat-heads, budd, and numerous other places. True, dankseeds is more excessive, copying everything twice and comparing the resulting .wav files for identity.