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The AudioGalaxy Story

mouloid writes "Now that Audiogalaxy is blocking all songs. One of the ex-programmers of AG writes about his days with the AG team." Interesting read.

15 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. MP3z by batboy78 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Looks like its back to newsgroups.

  2. Kuro5hin by alexmogil · · Score: 4, Funny
    Slashdot links to a Kuro5hin story? What's next, they're gonna make chips outta chicken feathers?

    Erm. Wait.

    --
    A winner is you!
  3. what they should do... by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hopefully AG will take a cue from Kazaa, go out of bussiness, and have another company (such as Sound Universe) located on an obscure Pacific Island with no extradition treaty take over the task of managing the central server and the distribution of the client....

  4. original audiogalaxy blew by j1mmy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anybody remember the original audiogalaxy? It was basically a glorified FTP search. For the sites it indexed, it also listed up/down ratios, access restrictions, etc. Both it and scour were the first ones out the door in terms of sharing beyond a P2P client. They both started hunting down windows shares, then indexing open windows shares (the owner of which would have no idea), then trying random logins to FTPs, etc. I had all this crap in my server logs as they tried to break into my Samba shares and FTP site to index my content. I had to ask to be removed more than a few times. Bastards.

  5. Re:Good plan, though by colmore · · Score: 5, Informative

    Burn the CDs, see the show and buy a T-Shirt, the artist will get a much greater percentage of your money.

    Record Labels and distributors get something like 90% of CD revenue.

    --
    In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
  6. Making me miss 1999 again by Skyshadow · · Score: 5, Interesting
    His little sections about "corporate culture" made me realize what it was I really miss from the .com boom:

    It wasn't the free soda, it wasn't the shitload of money thrown at everything (well, ok, I miss that, too), it wasn't the company buying beer on Fridays or paying for lunch...

    What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid off. Now, at 25, I'm still the youngest person in my office (and in many offices I interviewed in while I was job hunting). As such, many of the companies are lacking that energy that made working during the boom seem, well, special.

    I miss that.

    --
    Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
  7. The Moral Thing to do by FreeUser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The moral thing to do, of course, is to actually buy the CDs and put money towards the artist, to reimburse them for providing you with nice music.

    No, the moral thing to do is to send the artist one or two dollars directly, rather than buying the CD.

    Artists are generally at the mercy of the recording labels, and are typically paid $0.25 for each cd sold, while the recording label pockets the vast, vast majority of the profits. Supporting those institutions which are ripping off the artists, of which the recording industry is by far the worst offendor, is a very immoral act. Your $1.00 to the artist for downloading their entire CD off of whatever p2p or distributed service you use puts a great deal more money in their pocket than buying the CD legally does.

    When it comes to buying the music online, where artists are paid fractions of a penny per song, the difference is even more pronounced and the artist treated even less fairly by the recording label. Download the ogg or mp3 file for free and pay the artist via fairtunes, or directly, instead. You will be doing a great deal more to support the artist than you will be if you go and buy their CD legally.

    Note: I say this is the moral thing to do, not the legal thing to do (for those too clue-challenged to tell the difference). IANAL and am giving moral, or ethical, not legal, advice.

    But the vast majority of college students are just too selfish to realise that.

    Hearing that from someone who is promoting a "support the music industry, it is your moral imperetive" shill is really precious. I would simply point out that, for anyone defending the RIAA on this tack, to ponder the following words:

    Pot. Kettle. Black.
    Mote. Beam. Eye.
    Glass Houses. Stones.


    In comparison to what the Recording Industry has done to artists over the last 70 years, the p2p services and the worst non-commercial copyright violators on the planet are saints, and that includes those college students you so deride.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
  8. Re:Good plan, though by ScumBiker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IAAM (I am a musician) and I know for a fact that most bands don't get shit for the CDs that are sold by the majors. We sell CDs at our live shows and we get all of the profit. Same with t-shirts and hats. The majors are in reality no different than the Mafia, except that they don't kill people (that I know about anyway). All they are in existence for is to rip off musicians and songwriters. I do both, I sell jingles to local radio stations and work (on the side) on background music. I make enough to (barely) pay for my equipment.

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    --- Think of it as evolution in action ---
  9. /.'ed by NeoSkandranon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Kur5hin gets slashdotted...that'll do wonders for diplomatic relations..

    --
    If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
  10. Finally by The_Shadows · · Score: 5, Interesting

    *The numbers in this rant were acquired from Sniffer Pro.*

    Personally, I'm glad AG is down. At my university of choice AG was taking up, at any given time 50%-80% of the badnwidth. That is just ridiculous. It was the only (music) sharing software the campus hadn't blocked (aside from Good ol' Hotline, RIP). Of course, everyone knew how to use AG, 10 people used Hotline (myself included). Maybe.

    It just got frustrating being taken down to 4K for legit downloads. My roommate started playing with Gentoo. That's a fun install if your bandwidth is castrated. When I was needing to do work, it was frustrating to know that I couldn't get decent connection rates because everyone else was getting their fix it Britney and N'Sync. Of course, I was also occasionally nabbing things from HL(got to test drive XP[thank you, but no]), but I didn't care what rates I got there. There was always a resume DL feature.

    Though, honestly, it wouldn't have been as bad if they'd download and close the connection. I think 60-70% of the AG traffic was out-going.

    If AG is truly dead, may they rest in peace. I, OTOH, enjoy my bandwidth.

  11. Fun with word wrapping... by Enry · · Score: 4, Funny

    What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid Found something more interesting than coding, eh?

  12. Yes! by citizenc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Because the indexing worked so well, that meant you could queue up a song and the system had a good idea of where to find it. It would look for someone who had a file with the same artistID/songID pair, and then alert the two clients to begin the transaction. Once you began downloading a particular file, it would make sure you would only get the file with that specific file size/check sum. Doing it this way also allowed the satellites to resume easily and transparently. It was awesome to jump on the web site before you went to bed, queue up a few hundred songs, and when you woke up in the morning most of them were there. You didn't have to care about who had the songs, it did that for you. I can't stand having to micromanage my downloads, having to pick 5 different versions of a file to assure myself of getting one of them. Some of the newer p2p apps are much better at this, but still none can compare.
    YES! This is, by far, what made AudioGalaxy so much better then Gnutella, OpenNap, KaZaa, FastTrack, and any of the others. The result of the above feature is that you could find the rarest stuff out there, because the system would automatically start transfering the song when it found a host.

    Does anybody know of any other applications which operate in a similar manner?
  13. Re:Good plan, though by joshsisk · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you think it's a myth, check out this article by Steve Albini. In case you don't know who he is, Albini is a career musician who, among his other accomplishments, produced at least one Nirvana album.

    Make sure to check out his royalty breakdown at the bottom, based on his experience working in the record industry. It's pretty interesting stuff.

  14. Re:Audiogalaxy lost it. by medcalf · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's funny. The files the RIAA really wants to stop, Brittany, Nickelback, etc. are available on any one of the hundreds of P2P providers out there, they aren't stopping a single pirate by shutting down AG, but the lesser knowns and out of prints now are homeless.

    Just think about this for a second. Which is the greater threat to the RIAA, 1000000 ripoffs of the latest Brittany single (maybe a thousand real sales lost) or the possibility of independent artists finding a way to distribute music and make money without needing the RIAA's member companies? I'd bet that RIAA is way more worried about the latter than the former.

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    -- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
  15. Archie? by complexmath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's kind of funny that so much controversy has been going on over what is basically a re-engineeering of one of the oldest internet services. Why not just resurrect Archie?