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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
course not... it's in the Google cache dummy!
Apple licensed the name from Garageband.com. No lawsuit. Don't worry.
MP3's and they aint yours.
Suck it. Suck it hard.
would've linked to this
harmonious design
Other than the few people who are signed but still have files available (Armchair Martian) who is worth listening to?
Red Delicious (a sort of college-rock/acoustic Garbage group), Bitsream Dream (electronic with a formerly large list on MP3.com, but check out "Velvet Black" and the "Anger Management" remix, and "Buddha's Patio" doesn't suck, either), and Ghost in the Machine (not-quite-ambient, sort of an electronic Robert Miles), to name three that I discovered through MP3.com and at least a handful of their work made it to my personal playlist.
Or, how about Jonne Valtonen, better known (one upon a time) as Purple Motion of Future Crew?
Add to that a few dozen one-offs that made it to my playlist (mostly by artists I lack the name of), and although it makes a low overall S:N, MP3.com did indeed have some great music available there.
Because there were at least five or ten good songs in that archive!
The CB App. What's your 20?
anyone got a bittorrent?
Providing any of these folks resurrect their accounts:
Kim Justice (wrote Megatokyo-inspired songs).
Rick Richards (audio available here).
Prototype (audio available here as well).
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
plug: nufunq
.. I can't explain it, and you may not like it. But some people do. I've been approached once or twice by parts of the industry and I've never performed live or have spent a cent on promotion.
d'n'b, blissed out electronic jazz, electro-hiphop
"Old man yells at systemd"
...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
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
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.
That 2TB iPod purchase is justified at last!
1.7 Million songs in my pocket!
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.
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."
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..
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
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 :)
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.
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."
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
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