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MP3.com Archive Not Lost (1.7 Million Songs Saved)

Posted by timothy on from the greatly-exaggerated dept.

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."

7 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Thank god for this by ObviousGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 /. password was too easy to guess.
  2. Does the MP3.com library belong on archive.org? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  3. You mean these bands didn't keep a local copy? by Bronster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:You mean these bands didn't keep a local copy? by The_Mystic_For_Real · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't really think the issue was of the songs ceasing to exist, although they may, as bands break up and computers and cds get lost/stolen/broken all the time. I think that what would have been lost was all the work done to gather all the songs into one place. If the music had been deleted, then there may still be a copy sitting in someone's attic, but they may not want to track it down and upload it again.

      --

      _____

      Thank you.

  4. Talk about a flip flop. by Tower+Laid+Waste · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Wouldn't any half-serious musicians... by rsidd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:A consideration. by ibbey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.