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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."
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...keeps .mp3s as his only copy of their music and ditched the master recording they were ripped from?
Few, if any, tunes would have been lost. The musicians that created them survive, after all. They can always re-record them. They might even like the second recording better.
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."
"Because there were at least five or ten good songs in that archive!"
While humorous, it leaves out one important fact: folk music (as in the music of the people) is important anthropological evidence. This is the kind of stuff that we as a society should save, even if it's crap because it contains the art, concerns, desires, ramblings, etc of the people at a specific time. The loss of the mp3.com archive was a big deal for this very reason. The previously unknown archiving of this database is great and will be useful for historians and anthropologists in the future.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I think trolling is the last form of true outsider art and political dissidence available in industrial society.