Slashdot Mirror
MP3.com Archive Not Lost (1.7 Million Songs Saved)
macdaddypunk writes "We all remember last December's grim news: MP3.com closed its doors, warning thousands of musicians that 'all your content will be deleted from our servers.' However, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, most of the original MP3.com archive was never deleted! Two companies, GarageBand and Trusonic, claiming to have a legitimate copy of the archive, are now enabling former MP3.com artists to visit www.MP3isBack.com and recover their MP3.com music, instantly re-generating their artist pages with just a few clicks. Trusonic, itself a Vivendi spin-out, focuses on licensing music to retailers for in-store airplay. GarageBand, like a HOTorNOT for music, offers free mp3 downloads and claims to host the definitive charts of independent music."
...that all your content is not belong to /dev/null? Sweet.
This just goes to support theory that once you put something on the internet, it exists forever.
While most of the music loaded up there was utter crap, the few gems that were hidden among the dross really made the service worth it.
I'm glad someone was able to save the data, this will definitely make retrieving the files easier for everyone.
I have been pwned because my
I'm surprised and pleased to hear that all those tunes didn't go swirling down the bowl, after all. Nice job. It's akin to a musical violation of Conservation of Energy!
Can't stop the Beta? Time to evacuate to ##altslashdot at webchat.freenode.net - Slashcott in effect.
3...2...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
http://archive.org has an entire section for music. And archive.org is composed of librarian/historian types, not questionable-business-model e-biz types (ie MP3.com). Their mission is to make sure digital things do not get lost. And they could certainly take several TB of additional data, since their archive grows at a ridiculous rate as it is.
Furthermore, the songs could be licensed any way the artist wants- from public-domain to super duper copyrighted with a http://creativecommons.org license.
http://reeddavid.com
I smell a lawsuit from the MP3.com Domain owners who think this could be a "trademark infringement." Maybe I'm just lawsuit paranoid, but it just seems so likely that these people are going to be handed a nice subpoena...
I mean, come on - one single writable CD can hold a hundred or so songs. How hard would it be for even the most prolific band to keep a copy of everything they submitted to MP3.com.
Ok, so I don't keep everything I post to usenet, or slashdot, but only because the work to recreate them is rarely worth the effort. If you've spent enough effort to get a decent quality recording, there's no way you'd even keep the MP3 as the master copy, but hey - more power to those who didn't care enough.
The songs that TruSonic/GarageBand have are only the ones that were included in TruSonic's broadcasting program. If you didn't opt-in, your songs are gone (or at least, TruSonic just doesn't have them). Also, it was already known a while ago that TruSonic still had these songs, it's just that now the authors are able to access them again.
or can you retrieve all your original work and then store it somewhere cheaper? like http://music.download.com/
MP3 is not a lousy codec. Rather, it is one of the best that we've got. It is supported on all platforms unlike proprietary codecs such as WMV and QuickTime. It is more recognizable to the general public than the Open Source zealot's codec of choice, Ogg.
If anything, it was a very good decision to encode all data on the MP3.com site as MP3 rather than something which no one had ever heard of (no matter how much technically better it may be) such as FLAC.
I have been pwned because my
I'd like to congratulate the author of this snippet on their ability to work in a link to HOT or NOT.
HOT or NOT on slashdot. I never thought I'd see the day...
The space unintentionally left unblank.
OOh! And don't forget, it'll need more bandwidth than kernel.org, to handle the INCREDIBLE strain of supporting those massive FLAC files!
Get over yourself. A lossy codec doesn't automatically mean that the music is crap.
"Unlistenable?" Geez, and here I was, thinking that the mp3 codec became famous because people USED it. Must've been a dream...
It was also the sampling frequency they used. others use a higher sampling frequency for better results.
as for FLAC/SHN as soon as mp3 player's can read them and play them back I'm sure people will start serving them, but for now they are a very niche market
Is there any place like mp3.com was but with FLAC/SHN encoded files so that I can hear the music the way it was written?
Yeah, I bet you've got "golden ears" right? Stop being such a twat.
On the other hand, these MP3's are a little out of date. One of the nicer things about independent, free music is that its brand spanking new, usually. This archive is old. Maybe that doesn't matter to some people, but even music a year old to me sounds "old", if you know what I mean. You can definitely tell 80's music from 90's music. There are subtle changes year to year. Some people can pick up on these differences, and these people won't be satisfied with the archive.
So, to summarize, seek out the new independent music, wherever it may be.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
in a nutshell.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
As a recording artist, I have a lot of friends who were directly impacted by this whole thing. In fact, a friend of a friend lost an entire album worth of his stuff when his hard drive crapped out a couple weeks after MP3.com closed down and supposedly deleted all the music. I suppose he might be able to recover his old recordings now, but of course with all the attendent red tape, it will be an uphill battle. With all the copyright issues and flipflopping, you can never tell where you stand as an artist. One minute you have a deal, the next minute they screw you. This is just another example. More than anything else, we need consistent, principled application of copyright policy, not companies who "deleted it before they decided to keep it" or whatever's going on here.
Yes, at FLAC/SHN.com
twat.
He didn't say 'lousy', he said 'lossy'. Two different things.
And thank you for that sideways implication that only "Open Source zealot[s]" recognize that ogg is technically superior, both in terms of less-size-for-equal-quality and better-quality-for-equal-size, so your insular little mind can automatically dismiss anyone who brings these facts up as a 'zealot'.
At least you didn't misspell it "Open Sores." Guess we should be grateful for small mercies.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
PureVolume.com is a much better alternative to garageband and mp3.com. What I like most is how simple and clean each bands interface is. Check it out! http://www.purevolume.com
Also, many of the artists on purevolume have, or had started with mp3.com.
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
Here's a mirror
Music off MP3.com is encoded with MP3 (a lossy codec)? Who'da thunk it.
Some great no-name artists work were saved.
Good news.
Sounds like a decent offer for artists. Their service sounds rather good, and it's a decent offer (3 songs for free). And unlike P2P, it provides promotion capabilties essentially allowing people to keep track of a band they are interested in.
P2P is just hosting. People still need to find it, and figure out where to find more about the band.
This looks like a decent service. I could see some small bands with websites linking to their page on the service. A good way to organize your bands online promotional info and let fans keep up to date.
I'd personally rotate the songs every so often (if they allow that, which I think they do). Let people keep coming back to hear new songs.
Just my $0.02. It looks like a decent site. I hope some bands will make good use of it.
Other than the few people who are signed but still have files available (Armchair Martian) who is worth listening to?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I don't know why, but that wasn't really supposed to be funny. Is it just me or is it the moderators?
have high-quality master backups of their recordings? At the very least, CD quality, but probably a higher-quality multitrack thing? I can't imagine a band actually losing access to their recorded work because of MP3.com's shutdown.
The value isn't backup, but the hosting and marketing value.
Mp3.com is a pretty easy domain to remember, and it seem like the natural place to look for music. So it was commonly known and got a lot of hits. Popular, corporate-sponsored artists were also featured, so as a nobody you were at least on the same website as somebody. Therefore it was one of the best places to host your content.
What good is having your music online somewhere if no one knows who you are? MP3.com provided a place artists could at least have a foothold. if you were on MP3.com, you may have been nobody, but you were somewhere and you had a shot at being found. Without the hot domain, you really are, to millions of consumers, nobody.
Umm, GarageBand? Isn't that an Apple trademark? Of course, they did register the domain long before (1999) Apple released their product of the same name (2004). Anyone smell a lawsuit coming up?
I can't imagine that they were saved with only a few clicks.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Impressive!
The truth is 90% of the people can't tell 256k mp3 from the original cd track.
/ /www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusiccla ssical/mp3test.html
http://wso.williams.edu/~jmaster/shnmp3/
http:
Google turns up plenty of listening tests. What good does SHN do through a $2 sound card DAC and 2 inch pc speakers?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well, yes. But you have to pass it through a couple of filters, auto-pitch-tune it and slap a barely dressed teenager into a film clip.
;)
LoL! Good one
Sorry, but you're a moron. A well encoded, high bit rate (or VBR) mp3 is audibly indistinguishable to virtually anyone. Sure, a "cd-quality" 128kbps mp3 may have artifacts, but that is the fault of the encoding, not the format. Go download LAME and encode a file using it's standard settings & I challenge you to tell the difference from the source. Of course, for the test to be fair, you need to listen to the source on the same system (ie, your computers speakers). Most people tend to listen to the CD out of there stereo system & mp3's out of there $10 computer speakers, & wonder why the mp3's sound so bad.
reeddavid.com has nothing to do with archive.org or MP3.com!!!!
He didn't say 'lousy', he said 'lossy'. Two different things.
"so that I can hear the music the way it was written?" sounds like it would apply more to "lousy" than to "lossy". Sure, the 128 kbps MP3 that MP3.com started out with was lousy, but it eventually went to 192 kbps before dying. Even PCM WAVE and its equivalent representations (such as .shn and .flac) is a lossy codec, as the mixdown operation used to produce a stereo PCM file loses the information about which frequencies were in which tracks.
that link is broken
course not... it's in the Google cache dummy!
What's better: MP3 streaming or Ogg Vorbis streaming?
(I find whatsbetter?com more fun than hotornot.com.)
I am as shocked as you are. I wonder what THIS will get modded to.
Apple licensed the name from Garageband.com. No lawsuit. Don't worry.
MP3's and they aint yours.
Suck it. Suck it hard.
Nota bene: I think you mean "unlike other proprietary codecs such as..."
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
would've linked to this
harmonious design
we're back. http://www.garageband.com/artist/CaWiWh
Because there were at least five or ten good songs in that archive!
The CB App. What's your 20?
anyone got a bittorrent?
That site seems pretty cool but I really like garageband's genres. I used to spend a good chunk of time reviewing the electronic music and found a number of truly great songs. Unfortunately, I cannot use their service anymore because of some formating issues with RealOne player on the Mac. I just get an error cryptically citing"dnet." Their forums offered no clue the last time i checked. Anyone who can help resolve this problem will receive good karma (figuratively speaking : )
harmonious design
The guy who wrote the first review you mentioned tried doing a diff between an mp3 and the source wav file in an attempt to figure out what lossy means! yikes.
...keeps .mp3s as his only copy of their music and ditched the master recording they were ripped from?
before Slashdot got to it.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Actually, you probably could get some crazy compression if you get lossy on the riffs. I'm sure you could fit the entirety of the Chilli pepper albums in 5 or 6k.
The cycle continues...(this is really not supposed to be funny).
I'm waiting for the MPAA and MP3.COM to sue these 'pirates' for making independant musicians' music available to themselves.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
TERMS & CONDITIONS: What am I committing to?
For every song you host with GarageBand.com, you must agree to the contract below. It probably looks scarier than it really is, but please read through the whole thing. The key points are:
You confirm that you own the music you're uploading and that it obeys all content laws (e.g. it's not pornographic), that it contains no viruses, and that you're not a minor.
You grant us non-exclusive permission to use this music however we see fit (as part of a marketing promotion, for example)
Rest assured, however, that we're not going to sell your music (unless, of course, you decide to sign a recording or licensing contract with us).
Please, have your attorney check this out. We're sure you'll find it's fair and surprisingly chilled out. Here's the whole enchilada:
GARAGEBAND.COM INTERNET MUSIC HOSTING AGREEMENT
We have attempted to outline below in straightforward English the terms you agree to when you host your music at www.GarageBand.com ("GBC"). Please be aware that these terms if accepted by you, create a binding legal agreement between you and GBC which affects your rights. We strongly urge that before accepting these terms you print out a copy and review it with your attorney, manager and other representatives and if you have no such representatives that you seek other independent qualified guidance. We reserve the right to make changes to the Internet Music Hosting Agreement in the future, although these changes would not apply to you unless you accepted the revised terms.
The basic submissions terms which will constitute our agreement if you accept by clicking the "I ACCEPT" box or submit any material to GBC are as follows:
1. GBC Rights.
Any sound recordings, musical and/or vocal works, pictures, videos, song lyrics and/or other materials (collectively the "Material") submitted by you shall be available for us to use on a non-exclusive basis anywhere and everywhere throughout the universe without any payment to you. We will not sell or license your music to others (making your music available to visitors of our site shall not be considered a sale or license), but GBC will be authorized to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform,
publicly display and digitally perform and/or distribute the Material in whole or in part, alone or together with other material. GBC shall also have the right to use the Material for the
purpose of promoting GBC products and services and to use the name, likeness and biographical material and any logos, marks or trade names of you or any individuals performing or otherwise represented in the Material or the artist or
band included or referred to in the Material without any payment to you or any other persons or companies.
2. Ownership of Materials.
At all times you shall retain full ownership of the Material while granting to GBC the following non-exclusive rights: By accepting
this agreement and/or submitting any Material, you are guaranteeing to GBC that you are of legal age to enter into contracts (you're not a minor) and have all rights, approvals and/or consents necessary to submit the Material on the terms provided herein. You also guarantee that no permission is required from any other individual or company for us to use the Material and other rights provided herein. You further guarantee
to GBC that the compositions, recordings, lyrics and other materials contained in the Material are original, created only by you and do not contain any "samples" or excerpts from
the material of others and do not otherwise infringe on the rights of any other individuals or companies. Although we're big believers in free expression, you also guarantee that the
Material does not and will not violate any laws or be defamatory, libelous, pornographic or obscene. Finally, you guarantee to GBC that the Material will not contain any "viruses" or other information which may damage or otherwise interfere with GBC computer systems or data or tha
it'd scare the crap out of me to actually *license* anything I produce to someone like that. I'm fine with giving them specified usage rights.. but that's pretty much a writeoff to do what they want with it, as long as it doesn't directly net them income. The second disclaimer is enough to make sure I wouldn't sign this, really.
It's a "here, we'll take this. Oh, and by the way, you can be liable for it too!" license.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Trusonic FAQ
4a. I was told that my music was going to be deleted after the sale of MP3.com. What happened?
Trusonic has the audio files of songs upload to www.mp3.com, but only if those songs were enrolled in the Trusonic Music Program as of December 19, 2003. Trusonic does not have access to songs that were not enrolled in the Trusonic Music Program.
Good to know. I'd mod you up but I forfeited my mod points by posting. :-) Anyone else care to?
That 2TB iPod purchase is justified at last!
1.7 Million songs in my pocket!
not -1 offtopic... Stuper Poopers...
The great thing about garageband is the reviewing process. The way they've set it up, if you want to submit a song for peer review, you first have to review 15 randomly chosen songs from other bands. You can also review extra songs to put your songs up for review next. This way, you can't inflate your ratings by downloading your own song all day, and you can't get your friends to give you great reviews because of the random selection.
So, even though the reviews still depend on the questionable taste of all the other struggling musicians on the site, they're distributed and considered as fairly as possible.
Christ... They oughta remind you to check your links before you post or something... The real link: Trinidad Fiasco
There is absolutly no chance of the post being modded down now that you've done that AND if someone DOSE they'll probably get metamoded into oblivion as people won't look past your title to see WHY only seeing a random AC with no mod points of his own.
...."
Posts like this remind me of wanabe crossing guards.
Your about to cross 10 lanes of traffic and the light says "Walk". There is no way you'll cross in the 15 seconds a typical cross walk light gives you.
Once your almost on the other side when the light flashes "don't walk". Just then someone spots you and plays "crossing guard" accusing you of j walking.
Maybe you've had a similar experence? Someone makes accusations when acting on ignorence. So many of thies "mod parent up/down" posts are exactly that. No actual use of mod points, No actual risking of M2.
Instead post the vital details and let the moderators deside for themselfs. Don't say "mod up/down" just say "This guy has nothing to do with
Don't break the "forth wall" talking to the mods. Just respond.
Of course, there are those with uber-expensive audio equipment that will tell you MP3 is inferior to Ogg Vorbis outright. I've used all sorts of LAME settings to get something comparable to Ogg Vorbis at 224 kbps or so, but why should I have to go through all those hurdles when I can simply encode my music with -q 7 to get something that sounds about exactly the same?
Besides, not all parameters work best with all sorts of music either - MP3 royally screws up a lot of recordings I have at any bitrate or option I've used (Profanatica demos, early Emperor recordings, Clandestine Blaze, etc.), but it's the same with Ogg Vorbis. So the only way for me to enjoy those without resorting to the originals is to encode it using FLAC or some other lossless compression.
The point is that encoding music "right" is an art that's difficult to get right since "one size does not fit all."
Down. If you had said "I'm as shocked as you are. I'll probably get modded down, but I'm wondering what it'll get modded to" would have given you + points.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Having spent hours downloading/sampling many hundereds of songs from unsigned bands, only a handlful (less than 10) weren't deleted.
Anybody have a decent way of finding new music from unsigned bands?
Only rock, metal and pop music.
no techno or remix type stuff please.
Watch out! He might call you an OGG zealot!
(You're right, though)
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Or give them $100 for 'lifetime' membership, though they obviously cannot guarantee they'll be around for anybody's lifetime.
Yet another mu$ic indu$stry scam ... composers are forced to pay in order to get their stuff heard. Hey! Is anybody listening? We're the ones doing the work. You should be paying US!!
On garageband, you can recover only 3 songs. If you want to recover more, it will cost you $ 6.99 per song..
The truth is 90% of the people can't tell 256k mp3 from the original cd track.
Everything on MP3.com had to be encoded at 128 kbps. Some people put a lot of work into tweaking their encoder settings to get decent-sounding audio, but most didn't bother.
I agree that 256 kbps would be fine for downloads (with a good encoder like LAME or FhG). But if I was paying for the music, I'd want the option of getting a losslessly compressed file.
Do you mean we should now support Alexa and install the Alexa toolbar?
I had this crap band, back when I was 14, and we put some tracks out on the, then new, mp3.com. No one remembers the password, and we're all just trying to forget how crap we were, so if I want them to delete the songs, how do I do that?
Although technically always keep a backup is a rule to live by, it isn't always as simple as that.
"Murphy's Law" although largely seen as a joke can (and often does) strike at times like this. Like your hard-drive dying during a major backup. Or your software crashing just before you're about to do your regular save.
Plus keeping your work on a site like MP3.com could be seen as an implementation of "off-site backup". And the chances of an archive site and your hard-drive losing your files at the same time is very slim. Not impossible, but still slim.
These things happen, and it's easy to point out the mistakes that someone else made. But it's also easier than you'd think to make the same mistakes.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
I'd say part-learned, part personality. I've certainly learned the virtues of keeping backup copies, never deleting until a mobile copy has reached its destination, etc, the hard way. Mainly by losing data that, had I bothered to think beforehand, I'd have kept a spare copy of.
However, being a techie means I've learned from this. (Mainly 'cos I don't want to lose-data/look-dumb again) But I've seen people who never seem to learn.
I think the main thing is that techies tend to learn the lessons from the unimportant stuff (multimedia clips and downloads being relatively unimportant compared to work-data), so we get into good habits before the important stuff. Non-techies tend to learn when they lose their dissertation/lesson-plan/big-presentation.
Of course it's not quite that simple. I've seen techies who don't backup work-servers, and also people who don't really "get" computers beyond Word and MSN who have levels of redundancy that'd make a geek proud.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
n/t
The genre-list of GarageBand.Com is very restricted. They don't even have the genre classical.
Compare that to the elaborate list of genres and sub-genres that mp3.com offered and GBC is no serious contender.
Sounds like a good idea, and then I went to recover our old tunes. Nice of them to say that you have to pay if you want to recover more than three, after signing up. Grrr.
;)
Then it insists you choose three artists similar to you, from a rather limited drop down list. Someone should tell them that not everyone makes guitar-based music.
All our tunes are on our own website anyway. Couldn't find a link to delete the Garageband.com account (what a crap name anyway!) so I am awaiting an email back about it...
Oh, and download some tunes if you want, but I know they're not great, so don't bother flaming
Brewster Kahle
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I thought I was the exclusive copyright holder of my own material. How is it that they are able to get away with charging me for my own material that I had been assured (by mp3.com) was already deleted? And @ $7 usd at that?
Seems a series of well thought out loopholes made all of this possible.
//i have as many lives as people i know.
GRRRR!! After very specifically making sure that NOTHING was checked off to say it was ok for them to send me mail, and having found out that garageband are a bunch of scheming fucks, I go into my settings to see that they have reversed all my selections and have opted me IN to receiving ALL of their 'announcements' and 'lists'.
Anyone here a lawyer?
//i have as many lives as people i know.
The iRATE project downloads music from sites like these, and gives them to you inside a music player. You then say how much you like various tracks, and it compares your ratings to those of other people, and gives you more stuff it thinks you'll like. You end up with a large collection of indie music that is filtered to be what you consider good stuff. (And then you can buy CDs of it to support the band if you like :)
For the person who asked about good music on MP3.com: I've been missing my complete Laziest Men on Mars collection forever (they did the All Your Base song, but some of their other music was really good too).
I also liked this one guy SuperPope.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Everyone has suffered from data loss, but any serious musician will back up his computer work every day he works on it.
It's not hard to back up. Get a good backup program like second copy 2000. And another hardrive would help. Don't get fooled again.
free online diet tracking.
Oh great, but can I recover my unpaid artist royalties that MP3.com owed me??
I just used it, and all it is is a series of steps that...
A. Let's them, with your permission, access the information.
B. With your permission, then transfers the song data over to them.
They have nothing until you grant them permission.
You mean now the Music Picture Association of America is going to start suing people for distributing music? Where will the insanity end?
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
With that name, Garage Band, you can bet that Apple Lawyers will be hassling this company before the close of business today given its exposure in the media. Remember that GarageBand is the name of an Apple music-editing app that is part of iLife 2004. Then again, this outfit may have taken the name first.
Just a thought.
After the collapse of MP3.com, a lot of artists went on to cut out the middle man, and now sell their own music from their own sites.
The same support systems that existed for MP3.com still exist for independent artists doing their own thing. The same message boards, same chats, same artists, pushing and supporting each other's music. But now instead of passing on the latest MP3 scam, they share the information that helps others to build their own sites and sell their music directly to their audience.
We had an MP3 site. We made a nice bit of cash while they were doing pay-for-play, which immediately stopped when people were frauding the hell out of them. My favorite, which wasn't exactly fraud, but was a great idea was "if you play this song, you'll get a long porn movie after the song". We never resorted to this, but we did get quite a bit of free porn this way.
This actually worked, but needless to say, MP3's charts weren't always the way to find the best music. Pushing your own site is a lot harder, but we've found ways to do it, and we average about 50 - 100 downloads, per artist, per day on our site. Even more after our artists perform at a local show. All it took was a few flyers on the college campuses in our hometown and some car mags bought cheap from Vista Print. (All our artists have one for Nattytown and one for themselves; so simple, so easy).
It may not sound like a lot, but everyone can't make iTunes money, and we know we're not going to do it with unknown artists. But it's more money than they were making sitting on undistributed cd's. And even if it's a dollar a day, that's $1 we didn't have the day before.
If we can do it (and believe me, hubby and I are only step removed from being Joe & Jill end user), then anyone can. Of course we are hoping that one of our artists will "blow up", but I think we have more of chance doing that our own way (and we're still making money meanwhile) than by using an MP3 spin off.
I doubt we'll go that route again. Why should we spend $99 for their service when we can upload music to our own site for free?
Sites like Buy A Beat.com and our own Nattytown.com, don't need MP3, their clones, or their copies, or "partners" any more. I hope other people wake up and don't get sucked into using a remake of MP3's crappy service when even the worst of sites can keep their money with a little bit of effort.
irate is a GREAT idea, but IMHO the software isn't quite there yet... please give 'em a hand if you're a programmer (I think it's java-based, if I recall correctly).
you can't expect a site to host 10-20 terabytes of content and stay in bussiness with banner ads!
I own a rather large independent MP3 (and Ogg) site. TruSonic emailed me and later called me about licensing as well as "message(ing) the previous MP3.com artist community". Yeah, that's right MP3.com artists' email addresses were and still are for sale for anyone who wants to SPAM them. So the fact that they sold rights to the files themselves doesn't surprise me.
"I am contacting you on behalf of TruSonic, Inc. My name is Derrick Oien and I am the former President of Vivendi Universal Net Music and Media Group which included MP3.com, Rollingstone.com, eMusic and TruSonic. The purchasers of TruSonic have an established relationship with a large number of artists from the MP3.com website and are currently looking for a partner to maintain an ongoing relationship with an artist community website.
TruSonic is interested in entertaining offers from potential partners that would include the ability to message the previous MP3.com artist community within certain parameters, and establishing a licensing relationship for independent artist content for TruSonic's retail music business.
We have already been approached by a number of people and would like to make sure we give the various players the opportunity to respond. We would be interested in considering either exclusive or non-exclusive offers.
If you would be interested in discussing this further, please feel free to respond to me at (removed). We anticipate concluding this business in the next several weeks so a prompt reply would be appreciated."
Seriously, the whole underlying argument here is that these independent artists lost their recordings.
Look, if you're dumb enough to only have 1 copy of a recording, and dumb enough to only have that recording in mp3 format, and dumb enough to entrust that one copy to a free internet service, then hey, you've just learned a valuable lesson.
Yes, it sucks that bands lost this one service that hosted their songs for free, but there are many, many others out there. Just pick one.
Oh, and keep archival copies of everything you record on various media in various locations. Especially if you've got original multi-track stuff, never *ever* leave the studio without your own copy.
Aside from all this talk about lossy compression, some of you might want to know that CNET has recently launched music.download.com as a substitute for previous users of MP3.com to release their music.
I previously had an MP3.com account, and after I got the notification that the service was going down, I got an e-mail, along with the rest of us, from CNET announcing that they where going to set up a service like MP3.com.
CNET Downloads.com Music will still have artist pages with your photo, bio, song listings, etc. You can only upload 192kbps stereo MP3s (which is unfortunate because I was hoping for OGGs as well, but they need to do that for their streaming software).
It's still in the beta stage now. It should go public in "a few short weeks", but if you are an artist you can sign up now and start submitting your files. So, not only is the MP3.com archive not lost, but a similar service is comming back as well.
Greetings once again,
We have good news! We've just launched the Download.com Music artist beta, and you are invited to come upload your music now. We've been working around the clock in an effort to help you get your music back online, and now it's time to take the first step. Submit your music now:
http://music.download.com/
You will be able to upload your MP3s, a photo, a bio, and other salient details. Note that this is a beta launch, which means that we need your help to smooth out all the glitches and help us find bugs that might come up. The Download.com Music site will launch to the public in the next few weeks.
If you choose not to sign up for this free service, this is the last you'll hear from us.
We're excited about the beta launch, and hope you are too. We'd like to once again thank each of you for your patience. Get started uploading your music right now!
http://music.download.com/
Aaron Newton
Product Manager
Download.com Music
music.download.com
If you do not want CNET to send you any more commercial e-mail messages, go to: http://nl.com.com/unsub_all.jsp?brand=cnet and you will be able to unsubscribe from any future mailings.
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I think trolling is the last form of true outsider art and political dissidence available in industrial society.
On the contrary, it's far easier to near the difference between MP3 and the source CD on good stereo equipment. Try ripping a CD track to your hard disk as alossless (WAV, for example) and creating copies of that file as MP3s of varying bitrates. Then burn them both back to an audio CD and listen to the result. See how much you can tell the difference...
± 29 dB
The point is that encoding music "right" is an art that's difficult to get right since "one size does not fit all."
I have absolutely no problem with this statement. But the parent poster wasn't saying that mp3 was bad for some uses-- he was saying that it was bad for all uses. In other words, one size fits none. FLAC is great for some purposes (Archival, home use) but it's useless for others (portable & car MP3 players). Ogg may be -slightly- better supported in these areas, but only just.
Not everyone who uses mp3 are audiophiles. And the vast majority of us have better musical taste then to listen to black metal. I'm sure that there are other recordings out there that push the limits, but the vast majority will encode just fine at LAME standard. So, to turn your question around on you, why should I have to go through all those hurdles when I can simply encode my music with LAME standard to get something that sounds about exactly the same-- and I can listen to them wherever I want?
It is Java based, and I am a developer on it :) (hence the plug). If we were to get a couple more programmers, designers, writers, or whatever, it would move along at a good clip. A rewrite of the server is underway which will mean that making that side of things better will a lot easier.
Also, a lot of work has gone into the client itself. If you haven't checked it out for a while, go download the latest version (right now the CVS version is broken, hopefully that'll be fixed in a couple of days)
Out of the interests of complete information exchange, I thought I'd post this to the /. readers. Even though someone else has already mentioned it, here is a snippet from a press release.
San Francisco, CA - January 7, 2004 - GarageBand.com, the internet's largest legal source of free MP3 music, and Apple Computer have signed an agreement to share the name "GarageBand." The deal was signed in April 2003 but kept confidential by both parties until now.
Under the terms of the agreement, Apple Computer (Nasdaq:AAPL) pays GarageBand.com for the rights to use the name "GarageBand" for its music-creation software, part of the Apple iLife suite launched this week. GarageBand.com (http://www.garageband.com) will otherwise retain its original rights to use the name for a vast range of products and services.
GarageBand Link to the press release.Which, when you think about it, this makes sense. Apple paid to license the whole "one click technology" even though many people said "Yeah, but it's so obvious, how can it have a patent." Apple likes to be very one sided with respect to their legal department. They send enough cease and desist that they don't want to see one come their way so they just pay for it even if it's something that might be "obviously" no where near the same.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Of course they're one-sided, they have to be because they're a major corporation. They can't toe the line and stir up controversy like individual hackers on the internet, they have a responsibility to their customers and shareholders to obey the law and get sued as little as possible.
Our records indicate that one or more of your songs currently is enrolled in the truSONIC Music Program. If you want to keep that music enrolled in the truSONIC Music Program and permit truSONIC to consider using that music on truSONIC music playlists in the future, you do not need to take any action at this time.
If, on the other hand, you would prefer to remove all your music from the truSONIC Music Program, you may do so by clicking here.
This was sent out to all MP3.com artists in December.
Only the songs that were marked available for Trusonic retail service were saved. So if the artist did not check that box when uploading a song it is gone. The artist has the choice of 3 songs to upload on the Garageband site for free after that you have to pay. Garageband was a cool idea, but after awhile having 14 year olds tell you that your music sux gets real old. It never had the traffic of MP3.com or the services. I think the CNet resurrection of MP3.com's domain will be pretty exciting for artists. Dennis Jennings http://celestial-image.com