Slashdot Mirror
The Music Man
HellSpam writes "MacNETv2 interviewed a man who is claiming the title of "King of the Pirates". The man has over 900,000 songs, a collection that rivals even the iTunes music store(!). From the article:"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.""
"...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."
I thought there was a slight issue there.
I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.
And, also from the article, he apparently is doing this because he is on a quest to preserve all of the music of Western civilization in the event that a (presumably Panislamic) terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in, say, downtown Chicago, precipitating a complete and devastating collapse of the economies of the US and the West, changing the face of the currently free nations in the world forever (and losing all of our music along with it).
Why or how, exactly, one individual person with consumer-grade storage and computing equipment operating out of a residence is the absolute best way to do this is not covered.
I bet he has a lot of songs that I never heard, no I never heard them at all, 'till there was him.
What is this guy smoking, wanting to own a copy of every song ever recorded? This clearly cannot be done. What if I record a song on my hard drive, then take it out and smash the hard drive to peices? Oops, this guy fails.
**This begins my ever-changing sig
We need a -1 RTFA moderation option!
**This concludes my ever-changing sig
Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.
Don't worry, I'm sure he's got Journey in there too.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
He will probably never have to deal with the RIAA ever.
how many gigs of music that is?
The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
If I could afford the hard drive space. Then it wouldn't be an issue, but they fill up fast. I suspect quite a few people around here have the same problem.
~S
isn't whether or not he can do it, but how close he can get before he gets caught. Hmm... first post and already the site is /.'ed. Not a good sign.
RLU 180035, get yourself counted at http://counter.li.org
.. he's got all of ours ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
From my estimation (and relatively limited library, it seems): 2400 songs = 10 GB
So 900,000 songs would come out to be approximately 3,750 GB... or 3.75 TB of music.
We're not worthy...we're not worthy...
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:-7B7abphgzIJ: www.macnet2.com/more.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_0+&hl =en
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den.
Grand Mariner? That must be a pirate's drink, eh Matey?
Occasionally we land-lubbers will drink Grand Marnier though.
Slashdotted in 3 minutes, that has to be a record.
Like he'll last a month without RIAA takedown squads coming in and blindsiding him (arr.... the left side is me blind side, see, ever since the parrot snatched me larboard eye out...)
;-)
Seriously though... he might as well paint a phosphorous target on his back and run through a movie theater with a steadicam setup on.
From Google Cache ( http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3 A%2F%2Fwww.macnet2.com%2Fmore.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_ 0&btnG=Google+Search&meta= ):
The Music Man - King Of The Pirates Has A Goal - Own It All!
"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination."
What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of ever song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask "why?"...
When I pulled into the driveway of the King of the Pirates, an upper middle class neighborhood of stylish homes and SUV's, Infiniti's, and more Mini-Coopers than necessary, I was surprised by the normalcy of it all. His home was nothing short of spectacular, his wife a mid-30's ex-underwear model (honest!), and his two kids well groomed, apparently intelligent, and very wired. (As in technology-wise, not ADD) This is not the home I would have thought would be the enclave of someone out to pirate the hell out of the music industry. This was going to be very interesting...
Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den. He was absolutely thrilled to finally be able to talk to someone who was actually interested in what he was doing. Seems that 'the wife' as he calls her, was bored to tears hearing about his latest collections, or the latest Bit Torrent site he found; a treasure trove of hard to find music all ripped at 256-bits. The wife wants to know why he doesn't play more golf, like his friends. "Golf is the most boring game in the world, what I am doing is much more fun."
His Pirate Room - A MacGeek's Heaven on Earth
Doug has devoted one of the extra bedrooms (he has 7 of them) into what could only be described as The War Room. He owns three Power Mac G5's, and just added two iMac G5's. Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.
He has two cable modems and one DSL. One cable modem is "for the family", the other dedicated to his quest. The DSL line is a backup and is sometimes used when he had discovered a new site that offers a slew of new torrents he wants to mine. The wife, and the kids are all connected to the Internet through an Airport network, with multiple Airport Express base stations scattered among the house.
All the Macs in his command and control room have JBL Creature speaker systems, some white, some blue, and a burgundy one that I have never seen before. The entire room is lit with indirect 'rope' lights, giving the room a feel of living in the Star Trek universe. There are a couple of rich soft brown leather chairs and one long, very plush, baby-butt soft leather sofa that just screams comfort. I took a seat on the sofa and never felt more pampered or more comfortable. I made a mental note that once our pets' pass on this was going to be the sofa in MY house. For all I cared this interview could go for days, once ensconced in this incredible piece of furniture I didn't want to leave...ever.
The Wife bought us a pot of coffee (Jamaican Blue Mountain), two cups, and cream and a small bowl of 'equal'. With the coffee was a plate of fresh (fresh!) Dunkin Donuts Cinnamon Sticks. The interaction between The Wife and Doug showed that these two were a happy couple. The seemed to really like each other, and that, my friends, is more rare than you might think.
Once I got through ogling the various M
... Slashdotted already? The error page is nice though:
"Problem!?"
It's just so detailed and descriptive.
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
"RIAA come get me!!"
but working that out, 900,000 songs * ~3MB each is 2.7TB of music, jesus.
what the hell is the point, there is no way to listen to it all that is about 156 years of music!
Come on dude, there must be some slightly more valuable way to spend your time.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Why yes I do actually. Its my turn to read the article and tell the other lazy slash basards what it says. What am I supposed to tell them about an error message that just says Problem!?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
c'mon, Why say something and then quote the same something again?
But in an answer to "Can he own every song ever recorded?" Um Sure, why not?... sheesh
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
He will not own every song, even if he DOES have a copy of every song in existence.
Is he using iTunes to manage all his songs?
Get a friggin life.
To avoid those nasty RIAA sniffers. He probably is not sharing back. Of course the article is already DOA so I could not say for sure. As long as he is not leaving Madonna or Usher albums on his share directory, he probably has been existing below the radar. Whether or not you believe what he is doing is aboveboard, you have to admire his tenacity. I wonder if he has listened to all 900,000 to see if they all are high quality and they don't have someone shouting "Eat me" dubbed right in the middle of the song.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Ever seen the same song with different file sizes, bit-rate, and versions? He's gonna have tons of dups..
.. the most confusing slashdotted page I've seen. The article page says, in it's entirety:
"Problem!?"
With both the question mark and exclamation mark, I get to wondering. Is it asking me if there is a problem? Is it telling me there's a problem? Or is this some sort of statement based on quantum theory, and is both asking and telling me there is a problem at the same time?
Is he planning to get all the remixed stuff, too?
That should multiply his collection by a nice factor.
At $250,000 penalty (I THINK that's the max) per song, the RIAA could make 225 BILLION off this guy alone! I bet they lose that much per year because of him...........
I read this a few days ago. Quite frankly, not only is his reasoning completely ridiculous, but his methods are also totally suspect. I'm sure his ISPs haven't noticed anything peculiar about 100% downloading, all the time?
Pending a secondary source, I call BS on this one.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it?
If were talking major record label recordings then maybe (still very doubtfull). If you're including indie labels and all the "Johnny 4-Track and the Basement Specials" artists then there's absolutley no chance in hell.
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
Because the prison bus ride is definitely more scenic than the prison yard, right?
Some things, money can't buy. But if you want to get busted for copyright infringement on a shoestring budget, only Slashdot will do.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
He can never listen to all that music so it CANNOT be counted as 100% lost profit.
To counter the one going on about why, if he has a copy of every song in existence, when copyright is gone, we will not have lost the music. If the RIAA pull him down, he'll argue that they then must keep a copy until copyright expires or he'll have to charge them for the costs of collecting and keeping all their music for them
900,000(songs) / 1000(songs/day) = 900 days > 10 months
note that he "started slowly", which i assume means less than 1000 songs / day
the math does not add up for me. anyone can fix the anomaly?
Have you ever thought about the world outside your little mind?! MP3 is an extremely popular format. It's quite obvious that people prefer portability of large collections versus "good" sounding sound systems which take up entire rooms.
Merely because YOU don't like MP3s is no reason for the format to go away, as nearly everyone else in the world finds it suits their needs.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
does he have a backup of all the songs that used to be on mp3.com? That would like double his collection if not...:) he should host them all somewhere so we can all share the love.
I was thinking of doing the same thing. It would require use of sony's blu-ray discs or other large optical storage devices. The discs could be split into decades. Maybe someday one could own pretty much every song every recorded for a couple hundred bucks. Of course it wouldn't be licensed though.
Did some tart in a lake give him a sword? Help, help! I'm being oppressed!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Oh man, Now I know why my internet connection has been so slow for the past 10 Months. =P
"it's the journey not the destination."
That's right, because the RIAA wants your destination to be like no other...
Damien
Great, he's publicly stating that he uses Macs to do his work. Now I can't claim that Macs can't be used to file share as my defense.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
900,000 songs * $125,000 per song = (wait for it)
a $112.5 BILLION dollar fine
Google text-only cache of the article
From the article, this guy (or his wife) is apparently well-off (or in debt). Either way, he seems to be spending a lot of time because he's worried that "whether or not [we] know it" we are in fact "in the middle of World War 3" right now.
So not only is this guy incredibly ill-informed regarding current political events, he thinks the best use of his money and time is to spend it collecting all possible recorded music.
If he was really concerned about the state of the world, he would be doing more than sipping Grand Marnier and downloading the latest Chingy remix.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
How do you get "His goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded" from the above quote? So now even the submitters don't bother reading the articles? The funny thing is that the "goal" quote was ripped from Waxy.org.
I bet I have alot of songs that he will never get his hands on.
I have several chicago blues indie records from the 1940's and 1950's that are one of a kinds.
He is not going to get his hands on them. and one album I know I have the only surviving copy.
good luck buddy, because I'm not one of the only people on the planet that has such obscure rarities.
He must of watched too many One Piece episodes.
No one can replace Luffy!
2,7 tb - it's just 9-18 300 gb disks (depending if he uses some kind of RAID (ok, on macs, so probably he never heard about it ;P )).. not /that/ much to me..
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
What's this guy's soulseek/emule IDs? He's going straight to the top of my ban-list for not sharing!
Non-sharers are killing piracy! Help stamp it out!
Assuming $1 per song, the RIAA would claim that they were $900,000 out of pocket. Does anybody realistically believe that this guy would pay almost a million dollars if it wasn't possible to download these songs?
What about everyone's brother's garage band and other indie music? There are bucketloads of it.
The guy is a Mac nut, too. I am ashamed for my tribe. Steve "most common music format on an ipod is 'stolen'" Ballmer is probably writing up this little example as we speak...
And he's not allowing others to download from his collection. While I've never really approved of downloading music (probably largely because I had dialup during the heyday, so I can afford to be all snotty), he's freeloading and that's worse. I thought "sharing" was the whole point of p2p.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
I'm sorry everyone, but this guy isn't even CLOSE to having everything ever recorded / released on a CD by a (major) company.
ASCAP alone has over 200,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers, and they are only a piece of the whole puzzle.
At Amazon.com, just for the *Classical* genre, there are 32,000 sales-ranked CDs. Do the math, it cannot be done.
I hate to tell him that a single nuke, airburst high enough, would generate an EMP that could erase all he's working to accomplish. He'd be better off burning the music to CD or DVD.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
But I quit.
There's no End Game.
Assuming he 0wns 900,000 songs, and guessing each is on average 4 minutes it would take him 6.85 years to listen to his entire collection once through. Impressive to say the least!
900,000, at approximatly 3 minutes 30 seconds per song, comes to almost 6 years of music, played 24 hours a day. I'd be more than happy if my playlist only repeated every month.
According to a previous poster, 900,000 songs * 3MB per song = 2.7TB of storage required.
What media does he use for backups?
I estimate something like 570 blank DVDs for one backup. I would hate to think how long it would take to take a backup.
Then again, what does he use for primary storage? That's a whole load of hard disk space.
Without paying for copyright infringement lawsuits, just the cost of the disk space is already outside the hardware budget approved by my wife. Expensive hobby.
damn..
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
...when he collects 900,000 DIVX movies
The Music Man - King Of The Pirates Has A Goal - Own It All!
"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination."
What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of every song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask "why?"...
When I pulled into the driveway of the King of the Pirates, an upper middle class neighborhood of stylish homes and SUV's, Infiniti's, and more Mini-Coopers than necessary, I was surprised by the normalcy of it all. His home was nothing short of spectacular, his wife a mid-30's ex-underwear model (honest!), and his two kids well groomed, apparently intelligent, and very wired. (As in technology, not ADD) This is not the home I would have thought would be the enclave of someone out to pirate the hell out of the music industry. This was going to be very interesting...
Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den. He was absolutely thrilled to finally be able to talk to someone who was actually interested in what he was doing. Seems that 'the wife' as he calls her, was bored to tears hearing about his latest collections, or the latest Bit Torrent site he found; a treasure trove of hard to find music all ripped at 256-bits. The wife wants to know why he doesn't play more golf, like his friends. "Golf is the most boring game in the world, what I am doing is much more fun."
The Pirate Room - A MacGeek's Heaven on Earth
Doug has devoted one of his extra bedrooms ( 7 in all) into what can only be described as The War Room. He owns three Power Mac G5's, and just added two iMac G5's. Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.
He has two cable modems and one DSL line. One cable modem is "for the family", the other dedicated to his quest. His DSL line is a backup and is sometimes used when he has discovered a new site that offers a slew of new torrents he wants to mine. The wife, and the kids, are all connected to the Internet through an Airport network, with four Airport Express base stations scattered about the house. Music is constantly heard throughout the house, all different genres playing at the same time. Doug tells me that what I am hearing is unusual, most of the time the house is relatively quiet.
All the Macs in his 'command and control' room have JBL Creature speaker systems; some white, some blue, and a burgundy one that I have never seen before. The entire room is lit with indirect 'rope' lights, giving the room a feel of living in the Star Trek Universe. There are a couple of rich soft brown leather chairs and one long, very plush, baby-butt soft leather sofa that just screams comfort. I took a seat on the sofa and never felt more pampered or more comfortable. I made a mental note that once our pets' pass on to wherever pets go this sofa was going to be the sofa in MY house. For all I cared this interview could last for days, once ensconced in this incredible piece of furniture I didn't want to leave...ever.
The Wife bought us a pot of coffee (Jamaican Blue Mountain), two cups, cream, and a small bowl of 'Equal'. Along the coffee was a plate of fresh (fresh!) Dunkin Donuts Cinnamon Sticks. The interaction between The Wife and Doug showed that these two seemed to be one happy couple. The seemed to really like each other; and that my friends, is more rare than you might think.
Once I got through ogling the va
Man with too much money spent a little bit too much time watching Fox News...
KING:
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the iPod world go you,
Where downloads all are fine to do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
ALL: You are!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
KING:
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
ALL:
It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
KING:
When I sally forth to seek my prey
I help myself in a royal way.
I rip a few more songs, it's true,
Than a well-bred listener ought to do;
But many a head of a *AA,
If he wants music to play his way,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than e'er I do,
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
ALL:
You are!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
KING:
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
ALL:
It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Warning!!! DO NOT CLICK ON JUSTIFIED, this is an affiliate link.
People who trick others for their own financial gain suck, shame on you.
As far as the legality of it - look at the circumstances he does it under. Historical Record. Doesn't that qualify for some sort of educational usage and therefore fall under fair use? Like he says - he doesn't burn CDs, he doesn't let the kids use iPods on it - he's cataloging years of musical history.
Of course, DMCA got rid of fair use reallly quickly, but if the RIAA would haul this guy into court, I think that he would have a _very_ good defense. The fact that he's an Attorney also helps and that he probably is familiar with what he can and can't get away with.
I would love to do the same thing - but there's no way I can afford the SAN infrastructure I would need to do it. I would do it on the PC platform though - using iTunes. Simple interface and great features. Yeah - a fibre channel SAN dedicated to holding Music. Actually, if I would do it, I would do it with Movies also. Or anything I could get my hands on. Just to mirror all internet-connected intellectual property in the world. Oh, no, I wouldn't ever watch the movies or share the music - that would be pirating. Neither would I install the software programs I'm protecting. I'm merely keeping a backup copy of everything in case we actually find some WMDs in Iraq. Oh - and for safekeeping, i'll work with NASA and start beaming the collection off the planet to the moon or Mars - so that civilization can rebuild itself and have a nice collection of music, software, and movies to do it with.
It is important that you give us the necessary information so we can bring this man to justice. He is illegally downloading all the music in the world and that is killing our plans for world domination
Sincerely,
RIAA
P.S. Do you know where we can get some atomic bombs?
This guy is a psycho! Well, maybe not psycho but definetly very authistic...
He is downloading music 24/7 because we will all die from a nuclear bomb soon, and he doesn't even allow his children to put some of the songs on their ipod. And he seem dead serious about it.
I feel sorry for his kids.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
900000 records
Average record length = 3 minutes (conservative estimation)
Total play time = 2.700.000 minutes = 1875 full days (24 hour).
Which makes for more than 5 years of play time.
This guy never listened to its collection. Crazy guy!
Disclaimer: I have not RTFA, because it seems to be /.ed, although I only ried once.
The British Library Sound Archive has apparantly ammased 2.5 million recordings.
The late John Peel had a large library of music, much of which he never found the time to listen to. This may be going to Sound Archive.
This guy, 'The Music Man', has some way to go. And, his recordings are illigal downloads.
And - I even got modded Offtopic (while responding to a parent that was talking about the group)- LOL
...b3L0|/|G t0 U$!
Songs? What about symphonies, string quartets, ballets, and operas?
This guy hasn't even scratched the surface of Western music. Then there's a whole world out there.
CmdrTaco touched my penis :(
my pr0n collection is about two thousand years of instant action!
errr, my spaceship is waiting. gotta go, bb
"Doug: Because, like I said, it's illegal. I don't distribute the music, I only download it."
Does this guy have any idea how the bittorrent network works and what is this thing called upload.
You just cannot archive maxium download speed (and surely this guy is downloading very fast) with torrents if your upload speed is 0bit/sec!
- - - - - - - - - - -
anonymous bastard
so just how long will it take to play them all one after the other???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
And this guy's a Lawyer...
Dowloading files that play what sounds like music is not illegal and niether is burning those files to a CDR.
Selling those burned CDRs IS illegal of course.
There is no disconnect in evidence there. And of course he is not in any way a "pirate" since "piracy" relates only to the selling of other peoples works, not the copying of files.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
You can have all my wife's Showaddywaddy CDs and her Shania Twain stuff.
I don't mind where you "preserve" them.
Some math: 900000 song avs. 3 minutes = 45000 hours music = 1875 days of music = more then 5 years non-stop listening.....
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
Who would actually want to download a Creed song. Amazing!
better place.
I'm thinking that after Doug has completed is collection that he place "artists" such as Culture Club, Milli Vanilli and Barry Manilow on "protective" or "sacrificial" drives that are placed around the other drives. This way, when rampaging hordes, nuclear missiles or RIAA lawyers come in, they will have something to destroy, leaving the bulk of the music for prosperity.
In each of these three cases, the attackers will feel like they were successful, with humanity being the ultimate winners.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I am not really interested in his collection or playlist whatever...but Can I see the pics of his wife plss...I'm curious coz she's an ex-underwear model, I dont think she'll mind sharing her pics to us.
The RIAA'll be askin' fer yer booty, matey!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Dear Mr King of the Pirates,
We happen to own a lot of songs that are not in your collection. We would love to send a couple of people over to provide you with the songs that you are missing. Can you please send us your home address and what you look like? We'll be right over.
Sincerely,
The Recording Industry Association of America
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
"Well, it has been the practice of the RIAA only to go after the people sharing their music with others."
Of course, who else would they go after? The person who permits their songs to be *uploaded* is breaking copyright. Just as the person selling copied CDs is breaking copyright etc.
This idea is ingrained in law in Canada, downloading = legal uploading = illegal.
The Live Music Archive
http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php
Welcome to the Live Music Archive. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community.
Anyone?
Though he'd he'd have a hard time catching up with our fellow slashdotter here. Slaker, you're a hero to us all.
There is no way he can collect every song ever recorded, since at least 50% of recorded music has been lost. Recording companies routinely destroy masters and any copies left of albums that don't sell. Disc jockeys throw out hundreds of cd's and lp's each month. None of this is ever captured so this fellow will never get them. He won't even know they existed.
What is the copyright on all of their material? Databases (with facts, figures, lists) are generally not copyrightable but it would be nice if they had the database available to everyone :).
I was also thinking of making a smiliar database for all media files, with MD5 / SHA hashes so it would automatically hash your files and sort them as well as provide metainformation.
What nobody seems to be looking at is whether or not every song from western civilization deserves to be saved. Do we really want our soon-to-be alien overlords to know that we freely accepted the likes of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake into the category we accept as 'music?' This guy should have some filters on his download list so that he doesn't accidently download noise spam and call it music
Say 900,000 songs on his drive,
- 12 songs per album -- that's 75,000 albums
- $5 a CD (if you want to collect, you can go for near mint second hand CD, won't really change the quality, right ?)
That's roughly $375,000 worth of material.Now, 3 G5 at $2k + 2 iMac, another couple of $2k -- 15 300MB external drives (to get to the 4.4TB) at $300 each -- that's $14,500 in hardware, just for his quest... Add up the $40 a month for each broadband connexion, $120.
Ok, It would take a couple of hundred years to reach the $375,000...
So off to the plan B of my brilliant demonstration -- Is all this music worth being saved so future generations can remember us by ? I mean... Céline Dion ? Ashlee "oops" Simpson ? Meta "Used to do rock" Llica ?
I cannot believe that MacNET bonehead did not ask this guy if he leeches or not. Does he just run the torrent to get the file, not caring if he uploads 1/10th of what he downloads or does he make an effort to upload 1 meg for every 1 meg he downloads?
If you could RTFA (I understand it's /.ed right now) you would see that this guy is a lawyer.
I have the feeling that his actions are to directly benefit his career as a lawyer. This guy is just waiting/hoping/begging to have suit brought against him. He has probably carefully examined the law and feels that he has a chance of winning and becoming famous for his exploits.
He very carefully goes about his downloading. According to him, he never shares the music, even with his own kids. This meticulous behavior leads me to believe that this guy has found some looophole that will bring him $$/fame if he were to ever get sued.
On the other hand, it is a novel way to terrorize the RIAA...
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
needed to be done, i'm just doing my duty
The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:
Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year)
BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900
Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004
etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).
Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.
I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.
Ok, so this guy claims he only downloads and never, ever shares his music (and hence he's not a pirate). And yet he claims to get a lot of his music from torrents... Unless he's satisfied with very slow download speeds (and being a complete leech!) I think I'm seeing a flaw here.
he still can't get lucky.
Since he claims to get a lot of music off of Bittorrent, this guy is definitely giving it to others to get a decent download speed--and at 900000 songs, plenty of others have acquired other music thanks to his "hobby."
That's the nature of the protocol--you can't take without giving back. Even if somehow downloading but not sharing the music were legal, he'd still be breaking the law.
Does anyone else notice or think this is just an extreme veriation on the trend of being a PackRat?
He's just collecting this stuff because he can,
not because he needs it. Like all those kiddies with 500+ movies and hundreds of games on their FTP server. If they sat down and watched/played them end to end without breaks they would die of old age before they finished them.
Only two humans and one demon ever heard it, and these guys forgot how it went.
He's a lawyer, but doesn't comprehend copyright law.
He won't burn CDs for moral/ethical reasons, but considers burning music on DVDs for "backups" to be ok.
Never gives away music, yet uses P2P applications that, by design, force him to do so.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
What's the play time like? My 20k gets me through about 2 months or so...900k, though? And what kind of load time is he looking at if he decides to add all of those songs to a playlist on startup, having it show all pertinent info on every single song?
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Ahem. He has THREE broadband connections. That's $130,005,976 not $130,005,858. Don't spread your fuzzy math around here!
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
He claims to be an attorney, but thinks that anything short of burning a song on a CD and giving that CD to someone else is NOT illegal:
MacNET: I don't understand. Here you are downloading pirated music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, yet you won't burn a song to CD for me. Why?
Doug: Because, like I said, it's illegal. I don't distribute the music, I only download it.
Nevermind that
a) downloading music is illegal, in the US at least
b) downloading music from eDonkey or BitTorrent IS distributing, and he freely admits to using such tools.
And to top it all off, he claims to be saving Western culture by pirating music! LOL!
This guy is asking to be sued. I think it's pretty likely within a few months, he'll be in court.
Amazing, though, that the ISPs haven't cut off his account..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Ok, I read the article and this guy has his tinfoil hat on a little too tight I think. That and I'd be willing to bet he's just a liar.
;-)
He won't give anyone anything that he has either electronically or burned to a cd because it would be piracy. WTF!?!?!? He says he doesn't even let his kids load up their iPods with his music. However he listened to the new U2 album to death before it hit the shelves. He said he was going to buy that one but I'd be willing to bet he's enjoyed countless hours of music and never paid for it. That my friend is piracy. Trading with your friends only makes you not a leech!
I also highly doubt people just give him new torrents and such because they believe in his "cause." A lot of file sharing programs won't even let you login unless you have X gigs shared and this guy's poilicy is that he doesn't share.
This guy would have to spend all day getting new music. Let's do some math. The guy said he's been doing this for 10 months which means he's been averaging 90,000 songs every month. Now if we assume 30 days in a month that gives us 3000 songs a day and he claims to now get 1000 songs a day. Oh and he works as an attorney for 16 hours a day. So assuming this guy get's only 5 hours of sleep a night he might be able to spend 3 hours a day to start the downloads. Sure it's pretty easy to find the first few thousand songs but after that it's pretty hard to find 1000 songs a day that you don't already have especially all at 256kbits. I mean come on... April is still 5 months away.
Oh and someone should clue him in to the fact that when the nuclear blast hits his collection, it's gonna be gone too. So he should share the wealth.
OK, I know this said "upper middle class", but come on, this is a rich guy with too much money and time on his hands who has a rather interesting hobby. Anybody with 7 extra bedrooms, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and Grand Marnier to drink is NOT living a middle class lifestyle. Being an attorney, he probably also has the resources to fight the RIAA should they go after him, although as a downloader only he might well be right in concluding that they can't touch him.
Move along folks. Nothing to see here.
900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Hear the rhyme of the ancient mariner, See his eye as he downloads one of three Mesmerises one of the Kazaa guests Stay here and listen to the nightmares of MP3!
Made me laugh!
-kgj
-kgj
What he is trying to do is literally impossible. Furthermore he already has more music in his collection than he could ever listen to in his lifetime. I have been collecting vinyl for some 25 years, and come across his species before. They collect and collect and bag the records up in protective sleeves and lord over their super rare *SEALED* original pressing of "The Skullsnaps", or "24 Karat Black", which has never had a chip of diamond touch it to release the magic contained within. Compare this to the mindset of a deejay, who buys record upon record, and can't wait to play it in public so anyone within earshot can enjoy (or hate, some dj's have a cruel streak).... Just because you are an obsessive collector doesn't mean you can actually enjoy what you collect. Its like the plot from Toy Story 2, where they are collecting rare toys, when they really should be in the loving hands of a child.
I have several chicago blues indie records from the 1940's and 1950's that are one of a kinds
I am not too familiar with copyright law, but my father told me that when you become the owner of a recording that noone else has, you gain the rights to reproduce and sell said recording. There have been several precedents of this. Maybe you should copy your one of a kinds and get it out to some other collectors before something happens and they are lost to the world altogether.
music lover since 1969
He's using BitTorrent. Granted he's only sending bits and peices of anything he's downloading but to some extent he's HAD to have sent a complete album. Doesn't make any sense that he can say he NEVER shares with ANYONE and doesn't even let his kids put his music on their *cough* fag *cough* pods.
If you thought life in America changed after 9/11, multiply that by 1000 and you begin to understand just how destructive it would be.
"So you mean 911,000?!"
-- jimmycarter
when my father died i optained a box full of real to real tapes he collected and recoreded from the early 1950's to the mid 1970's some of which is quite rare, country & western, blues, bluegrass, folk, if i could find a good real to real tape player i would rip em all to .ogg and burn em to CD-r to help preserve em...
People always think burning masses of optical discs is some huge chore and it's actually almost effortless. I work with a publisher that adds CDs to books and we found that when we outsourced the work they were using CDRs anyway, so we just used four PCs with burners and we can easily do a thousand in just a few days in our spare time. It's really not a big deal and the price difference compared to outourcing is stunning.
Think about it. Let's say you use four machines and change the discs ten times an hour while you're browsing the web and doing whatever else. That's forty an hour. A thousand can easily be done in three days. It's not exactly labor intensive. It's certainly not as hard as people assume.
"You're a jerk, a complete kneebiter."
music lover since 1969
Help !
Does anybody know how many lunabytes there are in a terrabyte ?
There are countries (notably in Europe) where downloading music and videos from the net is NOT illegal. Whether this law applies to the person that's the subject of the article or not is a different matter. But is some respects he IS correct.
He seems to think our way of life is doomed and that we're fighting WWIII but midway through the interview he's talking about how it's going to be a decade before everyone has "gone digital". So do we or don't we have a bright future where the world "goes digital" and we all hum along together?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Shameless self promotion. 128k MP3s but if you sub 256 for 128 in the url can download those instead for higher fi.
.
Find me on iTunes
Assume the average song is 4 minutes long, he would have to listen for almost 7 years straight without sleeping just to hear his collection!
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
You know Mac users, alot of them are wealthier than pc users, so this changes the bell curve somewhat but this suggestion he is upper Middle Class is still absurd. I consider having 7 bedrooms rich, period. This guy most likely has a total of 10 bedrooms, assuming him and his wife sleep in one bedroom and his kids each have their own.
This guy is WAY behind. About two and a half years ago I used to have access to a "box" belonging to a guy in Korea ... he was pulling in an avarage of 150 albums a day and had been doing so for a while. He already had close to 700.000 songs at that time ...
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
I would like to claim to be the vice-king of the pirates. My eventualy goal is to steal every piece of digitalized media ever made. So far I have 0, but thats not whats important. What is important is the effort (the thought that counts).
Does this guy realize that by using Bittorrent to download all these albums he is in fact distributing copyrighted material? Does anyone know if the RIAA has sued anyone solely due to them having an open torrent of a copyrighted work as opposed to sharing on a more traditional P2P network?
If he's "The Music Man", does that make me "The Porn Man"?
it's the journey not the destination
My brain first read that as:
it's the journey not the destruction
Which made more sense for that split second....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
This article smells fake to me. Some of the claims are just a bit too outrageous.
900,000 songs in 10 months = 3,000 songs per day? How could he work a full-time job and have time to find all of these songs?
~3 TB = 300 GB per month? Wouldn't his ISP notice and shut him down?
He is probably planning on pleading insanity if that article leads to the RIAA discovering him. Attorneys are slimey and cunning. He has it set up and planned so well, this guy is seeding it ahead of the game.
You really got me laughing at the last line!
This joke needs to get the joke of the year award !!!
(Pssss....Do such awars really exist by any chance?)
Why does yahoo do this
I completely agree with all of that.
I've got 30205 'tunes' in my foobar2000 playlist. Most of them are CDs that I have ripped, a 5th or so are tunes i've downloaded. I'm quite proud of my collection and whenever anyone can't find a tune they like on it i'll note it down and get it next time i'm looking or buying. It's nice to have loads of music on tap. My server can stream to me at work through a web interface as well as servicing the other 2 clients at home. It's about 190gb of music, mainly in musepack format but with some flac and mp3. I've also got 110gb of video online, rips of my dvds and downloaded stuff.
The problem is, as I suspect this guy is ignoring, is that most of his collection is going to be shit. It'll either have no tags, or be completely mislabelled (ever tried to d/l the latest blockbuster film and it turns out to be Ghostbusters?), or even worse have incorrect tags. In a collection that size organisation is everything and he's either a muppet who spends all day tagging his files or his collection is going to be full of crap.
I'm willing to bet a good chunk of that collection is 128kbps mp3 made with some dumbass encoder off a ripped (and already compressed) stream.
Genres are another matter altogether. I've ignored them, seeing as one mans goth is another mans 80s.
Reading this article reminded me of the Star Trek episode "The Most Toys"
He has used that Kindness of the Internet to get 900,000 ( & up) and he wont give one to anyone or share?
Ever heard anything as Ludicrous?
If everyone had been like that he simply wouldnt have gotten any of those tons of music!!
He may be the biggest pirate,but most certainly he is the Worst pirate.
Why does yahoo do this
"King of the Pirates," eh? I wonder if he has the second FLCL soundtrack in that collection of his. Or maybe the title isn't so original after all. Oh well.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
to this guy and im @ 23,000, by the way does anyone know a good program for renaming the filename.....every program ive used so far just crashes when i load my music
And I just have to say that this guy's a mess of contradictions!
Don't get me wrong... I think he probably believes in what he's doing, and for the reasons he's stating, but he veers around a lot! (He's a lawyer evidently, so this might explain some of his behavior).
One one hand, he's trying to collect all Western Music, to preserve it for after the muslims take down our country (which is pretty apocolyptic, if you ask me!), and then he's going on about how selective he's being in with his downloads.
So once Osama and the other cowards have their followers detonate a few bombs in their name, it appears that all we'll have to listen to will be what this guy deems worth saving (again... If you buy into his rationale). Sorry, but I don't think that a rare, unreleased Mick Jagger song will really make an ounce of difference in anyones life if this guys vision of the future comes true.
It's a noble way of pirating, don't get me wrong... I don't think that anyone's ever taken the "I'm the keeper of the music" defense approach before. But despite all his convictions, in the end he comes across as a very well-off lawyer, who's simply too cheap to spend some of that money to support his music addiction.
This guy can afford to have five G-5 systems, many firewire drives (too many to even have hooked up, so it would seem), in addition to 2 cable hookups and a DSL, a wife and kids, several vehicles, ipods all around, as well as many DVD's and off-site storage for those DVD's, then why the hell can't he just put some of that money towards legitimate purchases?
I'll be totally honest: I have downloaded music, and still do on occassion, but I also buy CD's of my fav' artists when I can, and you want to know something? I live check to check like many of you. I just got paid Friday, and will be for the most part broke until next Friday, but I still can afford to support artists who I feel deserve it (and luckily for me, most of the bands I'm into aren't pimped out on major labels, so at least when I'm paying for their music, much of that money's going directly to them instead of some record exec's overstuffed pockets).
But my point is "If I can afford to pay for music, why can't this greedy bastard, who's obviously much better off then I, manage to do the same?"
It's not like he's paying for some, and then downloading the rest, he's openly proud of what he's doing - Which is basically stealing all his music, and using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to do so.
Sorry... I'm not against all the people out there downloading, but this guy is exactly who the record companies will use as their reason for further legal action: He's well off, he has money, and rather then spend some of that money on legal purchases, he's gone as far as he can to steal everything he owns. This is the kind of guy who's creating the RIAA vs. the world situation that we're in today!
The rest of his rationale doesn't add up either... On one hand, he's going on about how his kids cannot load up their ipods with his music, and how no one can have copies of it, as he's "the historian", and only doing this for society's good, but then he turns around and starts going on about how the new U2's so good, and how he keeps listening to it himself. When the interviewer questions his logic with U2, he quickly switches into "It's not my fault - It's just sooo good. And besides, I -er... already pre-purchased it online!" (yeah... that's the ticket!).
Give me a break!
Your self-righteous, cheap and greasy lawyer-ass is what's showing here: You want us to believe you're a digital Robin Hood, saving our music so that after America is destroyed, all of our kids will know what Mom and Dad listened to. When really, you're just bragging to the world, showing off your cool toys, your cool house, and your cool wife and kids via this article!
If a nuke is ever detonated on US soil by an enemy, I can only hope that it takes this guy, and all the other greedy
"Doug" now has a bulls-eye painted on his back.
The story gives out enough details that it should be easy for the RIAA to find this man with the help of any law enforcement agency. First off, he has two cable lines and one dsl line in a residential neighborhood. This alone is markedly atypical and would serve as a starting point to the search. Add on the fact that at least two of these lines will be constantly saturated. Next is mention of a wife in her 30s, two kids who would appear to be old enough to appreciate and understand technology ("wired"), a seven bedroom house, and his occupation as an attorney, all of which is information filed by the IRS. There are more little details in the story, but the info above would be enough for the RIAA to catch the man if they wished.
This guy is an attorney who - judging from the equipment and setup described in this article - has money coming out of his ears. What is he doing with that? Collecting music, so when the Jihad/Armageddon/whatever comes, it'll all be safe in his pretty suburban home, because the first thing them nasty Muslims will do when they take over the US of A. is burn Britney and her work. Could happen any day now, so keep those Torrents coming!
Yeah, rrright.
If he really is that concerned about preserving culture, why doesn't he devote some money and time to the Internet archive, maybe lobbying the record companies to set up a safe archive of their back catalogues? One should suppose that in a connected world a distributed, redundant archive is better than a pile of drives in a person's basement.
Nah - he has to do it by himself.
One of the key sentences is at the end of the article:
"Put a kid in a candy store and let them eat all they want and at some point they will stop."
Which amazingly is true, at least from my experience (I'm swapping music with friends, which is (still) legal in Germany when you own the original, unless you circumvent copy protection).
Not for him, though. He has to have it all.
Maybe I'm being cynic, but it's hard to believe this is more than an anal-retentive attempt to be King of the MP3 hill.
What really pisses me off, though, is a statement like this: "Youre not denying anyone else the product; you arent taking money away from the artist because the artist was never going to get your money." - which is the same lame excuse that every would-be "pirate" in the world uses. Only he has an important moral justification (Save Western Culture!), so it's A-OK.
Come on, people - this isn't the world of Fahrenheit 451. If you want to preserve important cultural works in the digital domain, vote for those that support end-user rights, generous public domain regulations etc., buy from companies that do not torture you with copy-protection schemes, spread the word. Sitting in a basement full of FireWire drives with music you will never listen to is just a poor man's version of the Evil Genius scheme.
I didn't RTFA but does it mention if all 900000 are unique. Also, if there are two mp3s that are the same except for the key (ie. C major and G major), does it contribute to the count?
Also, do covers count?
That was back in September. It's mid November now. I guess the GNAA is having trouble getting new wannabes to sign up.
Putting aside the logistical and legal considerations, I'm a little troubled by the idea that decisions about which music might survive the coming apocalypse are in the hands of a Duncan-Donuts-eatin' yuppie lawyer who is saving "the good stuff". A thousand years hence when the DVD and mp3 formats are rediscovered, do we want our recorded musical legacy to be classic rock? His repeated use of "band" suggests that this guy is a little too rock-o-centric...I hate the idea that we would lose Glenn Gould, Public Enemy, Bob Wills or, God forbid, Duke Ellington, to make a little more room for Van Halen's Sammy Hagar years. The whole idea that this guy's collection will somehow survive is absurd, of course, but if he believes it, he shouldn't be editing the playlist.
I've run into a number of these types of people.
A comic book collector who gets every issue of his favorite super-group. Then decides to get every cross-over. Then starts collecting each character's individual books. Then gets obsessed by the size of his own collection. Does he read all these books? Nope. Sealed away in vacuum sealed mylar bags. Could he read all of these books if he tried? Possibly, but reading them is long since become a secondary or tertiary goal. The collecting and justifyig his collecting is number one.
A television show collector who starts with her Happy Days video tapes made off of their antenae. Then starts collecting all of the merchandise (lunch boxes, records, etc). Starts collecting the spin-off series like Laverne & Shirley, Blansky's Beauties, Joanie Loves Chachi, and Mork & Mindy. Winds up paying huge sums of money on eBay for the missing episodes. She never actually seems to watch her tapes (or she might notice the horribly low quality of her recording). She just becomes obsessed. You can't buy her a birthday gift because if its at all related to these shows she wouldn't admit to not having one already, yet she claims no interest in practically anything outside of this realm.
I have a friend who has a compact Mac collection. He attempts to own at least one of every compact Macintosh ever made (like the Mac SE form factor, not like an iBook). His collection is huge. It takes up multiple rooms in his house. He has every "flavor" of iMac color produced. He has the extremely rare, black MacTV with its remote. He is missing a working Macintosh Color Classic II that was released only in asian markets, but he's on eBay constantly looking for it. Many of these machines he won't actually turn on because they were in working order and he's too nervous about blowing the built in monitors. It's an impressive collection, but it's only a collection and not an array of machines he will use.
Collecting is nifty, but when it starts being the end in itself it's time to find something else to do. You will not be satisfied with the collection itself. You will spend huge amounts of money trying to get ever more obscure items to add to it and you won't be satisfied until you get the Yak-Face action figure. What's worse is if you are able to actually finish the collection, if you haven't amassed something that you can use or enjoy on its own then you don't realy have anything but a collection that will only be appreciated by another collector (if then).
Collecting music may be different, but if this person starts a separate group just for the things he enjoys listening too then that's may be indicative of a collection obsession.
There is a horrible song by Styx called "Too Much Time On My Hands"
I wonder if he has that?
"I'm in the Jail House Now", etc.
--LWM
i doubt he could even collect every 'song' ever recorded by the artist witcyst, let alone more than about 5% of the total output of the world..
Is it just me or does TFA just scream 'fake'?
1. Get a single copy of every song made 2. Add a pay-pal link to your site with all the songs on it. 3. Get it /.'d
4. ...
5. Profit!
"And, also from the article, he apparently is doing this because he is on a quest to preserve all of the music of Western civilization"
Yipeee! All of Western Civilization's music preserved in glorious 128k MP3 format!
MOD this UP
I am quite familiar with downloading mp3s and I've found that there are quite a few downsides to downloading vs. purchasing in today's market.
1) Quality:
The quality of mp3s one is downloading are at times quite suspect. I don't know about anyone else, but I can certainly tell the difference between 128kbps, 192kbs and 256kbps without too much difficulty and I tend to want better quality (who doesn't?).
2) Organization:
Organizing anything over like I'd say 1000 mp3s gets to be a monumental task if you let it go to hell. In addition it doesn't help that everyone under the sun has different naming conventions and what not for all of their mp3s. Sure there are utilities out there to help organize mp3s, but I haven't found anything that really comes close to doing a good job of finding exact song duplicates (I mean EXACT duplicates where I can choose the better quality song I have over the crappier quality one) as well as cleanly renaming huge batches of songs without problem. It also becomes a big pain to try and search through all of your songs to find what you're looking for when your songs have different naming conventions.
3) Translation to Different Media:
I feel that the issue here is just a matter of data-loss. In the end when all is said and done 99% of compression algorithms lead to some element of data loss. When you go to burn mp3s to a cd or what have you, you're most likely play a song that has the cutoffs to its frequency spectrum within the audible range. Consequently the quality (once again) will suffer and you're going to hear things like an annoying low buzz on those awesome speakers you just got because the song's low end frequencies are cut short.
4) Taking it with you?:
Transferring through upgrades and what have you, or even backing up this type of data is such a pain in the ass. I can't tell you how big of a pain it is when windows can't even classify how many freaking songs you have. How do you backup even 90,000 songs reliably and hopefully cheaply? Even DVDs you burn aren't going to last as long as your parents' vinyl records have, so in 10 years when you try to find that hit from 2001 you're going to be hit with disc rot anyway! So what's the point of amassing such an incredible collection only to have it vanish into nothingness as you get older? Also, purchased cd's have an extra layer of scratch protective coating that, while not as good as many would like, is worlds better than having burned CDRS that have no scratch protection.
5) Do you really listen to all of them?:
I've noticed recently I'm thinking more and more of just getting rid of 99% of my mp3s and almost starting over with iTunes and what have you. Because if I purchase music most likely it'll be music I really want to listen to. Frankly, I only really download music to check out a CD to see if I want to plop down money for ALL of the songs (not just the single). Therefore, those mp3s I download, that I like just enough to not delete immediately, start to take up tons of hard-drive space needlessly. I think it's just a waste to keep mp3s you aren't really listening to nor ever plan on really playing again. Now, you do have these people who are out to save the music history of the world given a catastrophe. These people are nuts. There is no way in God's green earth that any consumer will viably be able to download that magnitude of achievable quality music and store it reliably as well. It's just a stupid excuse to keep downloading mp3s when there's already projects well established projects for doing so!
In the end I feel that it's silly to fight music or movie pirating, because frankly the only music or movies that are genuinely hurt are the crappy ones. Just look at the numbers, Finding Nemo grossed $339,666,356, Alicia Keys' first album sold over 7 million copies world-wide. Granted these are only two examples but there are many more. I submit that peopl
Ya gotta have goals. I suppose this guy aspires to be either the owner of the world's largest music collection or the first man publicly and savagely raped by the RIAA legal team.
Either way, he can still spell his namd "L-o-s-e-r"
ATTN: King of Music:
Dude...all day downloading music? Isn't there something better to do with all that time?
Let's do a quick calculation---900,000 songs. 3.5 minutes each on average. 3.15 million minutes of music. That's 52,500 hours or almost 6 years.
You could get 3 masters degrees; become a doctor or lawyer; travel around the world; or even troll every slashdot post. But you choose to sit at your computer doing nothing but downloading music?
You're sick, man. Can I browse your collection?
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Punk songs compress very well, so does white noise.
Only because you aren't concerned about the quality of the white noise; if you wanted to preserve it in as close to its original form as possible, it'd compress very badly, right?
BTW, I don't know shit about this beyond what I was taught as part of my Computer Science Communications and Graphics courses... and I've forgotten most of that. So if anyone remotely academic wants to chime in; be my guest.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
he'll need about 200 ipods to hold all his music.
Let's take his collection and place it on a satellite constantly seeding torrents.
Bye bye RIAA!
would you want to listen to the entire catalog of the Bay City Rollers, Poison and the Back Street Boys?
I know more and more twerps like this guy who compete with their peers by amassing the largest DVD collection, the most guitars, etc, etc. Does anyone else notice this?
Him and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/06/052322 7 should get together. What a waste of flesh..
irc.enterthegame.com #linux
"gaining the rights to reproduce..."
Two scoops of OCD? Three, dammit! It's always three!!
Is this guy stupid or what?
.torrent and eDonkey, so he has to share it when he are downloading the music... Or thats how i understand that theese networks works!
He is so protective about his collection, that he doesnt even want his kids to copy "his" songs, because it would be pirating..
Still he uses
-tfa- the Japanese didn't want to die -/tfa-
I know some old ww2 navy vets that might disagree.
Justifying copyright violation via a terrorist-armageddon-theory = hilarious. However, I have a hard time dismissing his arguments and still supporting things like the internet archive.
The article is slashdotted: just how many songs have been recorded? Apparently, it's upwards of about 1 million. In a century, averaging 10,000 per year, 1M songs is only about 500 albums per year. Could there be 10M, 50M songs? Does that make a verse == 1 nanoLibraryofCongress?
--
make install -not war
I don't agree with the theory, but his ideas are consistant when you note he gives no timeframe for even something lik ethe Chicago scenario - perhaps he imagines such a thing happening in fifty years.
:-)
He wasn't even 100% sure it would happen, I think of him more like the guys that built bomb shelters during the cold war. Perhaps nothing would happen, but why take chances?
The sad thing is that there probably are no commercial entities that care about music preservation as much as this guy does. Just like old films have been lost, I'll bet plenty of old music has been lost by the people that own it.
I would say it would be nice to have a PayPal link to donate to help his cause, but it sounds like he doesn't really need it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It probably wasn't too hard to fill several large hard drives with this drivel, but when you begin to look into other realms of music including jazz, classical, old C&W and even punk rock you hit a dead end with services like Kazaa and iTunes.
In fact, I spend much more time converting my old LP's into CD and MP3 using Soundforge 7 (yes, I own a legal copy) than I do looking online because there just isn't that much out there of real value.
If this guy was really interested in preserving music for the rest of us, he'd be out at garage sales every weekend and converting all of the Ventures surf music to MP3 for us. There is so much music out there that is not digitized that the mark he is going to make in his lifetime is like the scratches on my Eddie Cleanhead Vinson "Kidney Stew" CD converted from LP.
Oh, and these sound so much better than the label's crappy offerings once you've removed the clicks, hiss and scratches. If you've got an old record collection, get to converting. You'll be glad you did.
At 900,000 songs at 3 minutes a song, it'll take over 5 years of non-stop listening to here them all.
This guy's stated mission implies that he downloads EVERYTHING including crappy pop music from Britney and Ashlee and their kind. I don't think it would be a huge loss if western civilization ended and that music was lost.
he already has more music in his collection than he could ever listen to in his lifetime
900 000 * 4 minutes = 6.84477316 years - no problem! (Multiply by 4 since he'll only spend 6 hours a day listening to music.)
(Or are you saying you plan to kill him in the next 27 years?)
But... during those 10 years, you'll have ten years of new music! So you'll have to add another 3 years or so to listen to all of THAT! (And then during those 3 extra years there's 3 years of new music on top of THAT! etc etc etc...) :)
Nice calulations though...
"I do not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but I believe the gentleman is an attorney." - Samuel Johnson
To hell with whether the man has rights - *copy them now*. Do your best to find the original musicians; if you can't, make copies and donate them to LoC, the Smithsonian's folk music program, etc.
I'm not advocating infringement in the general case, but in a case where it is in fact a one of a kind recording, you owe it to musical historians to make a copy just in case, and LoC and Smithsonian would be very happy to get those copies. In fact, contacting them ahead of time might be nice, in that they may well be willing to handle getting a good recording of it made, finding the original musician, etc.
And yes, collectors suck. The whole point of buying music is to listen to it.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
nt
if thats all true, that guy sounds like he has a serious problem with Obsessive Compulsive Behavior
It could be quite possible to hvae a ten bedroom house even if not really "rich", it all depends on where he lives. The fact that he does not have a big XServ RAID array already in my mind marks him as middle class with an expensive hobby (though really - probbaly not any more expensive than photography or golf!!), not rich like Bat Cave rich.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It says in the article he uses Filemaker Pro (relational DB) to manage the songs - also that he replaces older copies when he finds versons of songs with better bitrates.
So, he probably has very littls duplication.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Years ago various labels converted their entire catalogs to very high quality bitrate (384khz stereo) and packed the data away in nearline storage.
At least that was told to us by a nearline storage vendor who was listing several labels as customers of their HSM product.
He named the sample rates.
Sony was one label mentioned.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
i wouldnt be proud of having every jessica simpsons song on my comp..
From the underwear model wife, to the sipping Grand Mariner upon arrival, the story strikes me as possibly being made up. I'd love to see some kind of screen shot verification of this 900,000 song collection. I've collected music for a number of years and the time that would need to be devoted to scrubbing p2p downloads, meta data, bad files, etc. or ripping CDs is astronomical. Per this article it seems that this individual has been at this for less than a year and with children (which need attention) and a 16 hour a day job I'm highly suspicious that anyone could amass this kind of collection -- particularly with the attention to organization that the article seems to indicate. I'm not calling the interviewer a liar, but I would like to see some kind of corabarating evidence of this urban legend collection to believe that it exists. Has anyone heard of other collections this large? iTunes apparantly has 700,000 songs. I've never seen anything on the internet or anyone who is alleged to have had a collection this large.
He lives in AZ, just outside of Tucson. He use to come into our private MIRC and dc++ networks, always downloading but never giving anything up. He had about 2.9 Terrabytes last year. We eventually had to ban him since he never shared. Interesting that he made the news...
This guy just wants to download Hilary Duff and Britney Spears mp3s.
He's just using the other ones to cover it all up.
I can see right through his guise!
First, I'm posting AC here, for obvious reasons. Hope someone sees fit to mod me up.
I'd like to offer a little first-person perspective as a collector who has amassed a fairly large amount of music. I don't have 900,000 "songs," but I'm probably getting within one or two binary orders of magnitude thereof. I think my approach is fairly different from that of the guy profiled in the article, though.
I don't collect "songs," actually. The vast majority of what I have is in the form of complete albums (CDs, LPs, whatever). I have about 16,000 entries in my "Music" catalogue. An entry can be a single CD or a set -- mostly double, triple, and quad-CD sets, but there are plenty of 6-, 8-, 9-, 10-, 12-, 20-, and even 60- and 80-CD sets scattered around the list. All in all, and including several thousand albums of spoken-word and comedy material (both of which I catalogue separately), it's well over 20,000 CD's worth of material. Which I guess amounts to 200-400K "songs" if you measure that way. Of course, I've been doing this for five years; the guy in the FA said he's been at it for about 10 months, so he's probably devoting a lot more time to it than I am!
I should add that my vinyl collection is also pretty large (haven't counted in a long time, but it's probably at least 2000-2500 records). Those I still play on occasion, although I've made a lot of inroads in getting this material (much of it rare) in digitized form, either by ripping it myself or by downloading it. And I have close to 1000 CDs, which I rarely listen to anymore since I've ripped them all.
For those who believe that all this is more than one could listen to in a lifetime, I should point out that -- assuming you listen to music 8 hours a day, which is probably accurate on average for me -- this collection would "last" less than ten years. I have everything online here at home (more about how, below) and I rotate my car and work MP3 players' "stash" periodically, and I'm usually listening to music in a sort of semi-random way. Specifically, I listen to tracks chosen completely at random from the entire list. When I hear something that fits my mood at the time, I often stop to listen to the whole album. So I do get a lot of mileage out of this wide-ranging collection.
The vast majority of this music, by the way, is world/ethnic/folk, jazz, and serious "art" music (classical, etc.) That's just my taste in music. Pop/rock music is only a tiny percentage of my collection although numerically it still accounts for several hundred CD's worth. I'm sure that this has helped to keep me under the RIAA's "radar" so far, because -- unlike the guy profiled in the FA, I do share my music. I spend a fair amount of time on netnews (abs.music.classical, absm.world-music, absm.jazz especially) and SoulSeek. I post regularly on netnews (often my own rips) and am fairly active on SoulSeek, sharing a lot of hard-to-find ethnic music and dl'ing from other discriminating collectors there.
The contacts and friends I've made have meant a lot to me. Most are in different countries, and I get to practice my languages (last night I was chattting in 5 languages to 5 different people in 5 different countries on SoulSeek) while expanding my musical horizons. I have visited several on trips abroad, and of course done some offline sharing (basically, mailing stacks of CD-R's -- or nowadays DVD-R's) too.
Like many others, however, I have curtailed my P2P activities somewhat because of the more negative atmosphere. I used to use DC hubs and would go online with my entire collection. I was usually pretty conspicuous, sharing almost 2 terabytes -- frequently the most of anyone in the hub. I don't deny that it gave me somewhat of an "ego-boost" at the time. But I haven't used DC in about a year and I was glad not to be involved when a few semi-private hubs -- not the ones I used -- got "busted" (for movie trading, I think) a few months ago. My watchword in the past year has been inconspi
that you can rationalize *anything* .
Your father was wrong.
There have been several precedents of this.
Name one.
ps: IAAL, but this post is intended merely as public education about copyright law and does not create an attorney/client relationship with djdavetrouble, or anyone else who reads it. Please consult with an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction if you have any questions about the law as it applies to you.
I think John Peel (now sadly deceased, a couple of weeks ago) has had him beat long ago - and legitimately too. And not just top-40 stuff - John Peel was a great force in bringing many new artists into the public consiousness.
t ml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/index.sh
John Peel had many BUILDINGS filled with CDs and vinyl records and other media.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I have a name for him. End-User Data Hog:
http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/EUDAH
mp3 doesn't support anything above 320kbps.
Hell, for that mattter, what sample rate? You list a frequency. And what sample format? 16-bit?
Bombs drops on his house, all data destroyed ..bummer.
If this guy is so keen on preserving culture, why not scanned books as well?
But is it really worth it? Isn't it all just footprints in the sand?
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
iTunes Music Store Catalog Tops One Million Songs. Still, that's an impressive collection.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
I thought this was a guy I know. Only he's BIG, uses Linux, his wife is definitely NOT an underwear model, and his kids are somewhat dysfunctional. All in all a nomal sort. The house and SUV fit and strangely one of his good buddies is named 'Doug'. These tweo need to get together and share their diff. As for the volume of material, yeh, it's about the same. All nicely indexed. His goal, the same, having a copy of everything. I need to pay a visit soon to see what he has in the way of Indian film music. Been looking for the Do Thug soundtrack and surely there's some good stuff I've never heard. Philipino and Malaysian folk music survey would be worth whiel too.
/.er) our brains are wired in a predictive mode and are satisfied when the prediction matches the input. WIth consolidation in the radio market and music being 'pushed', much like the proverbial dope dealer hanging out at the local schoolhouse, the music that gets played on radio is the music they want you to buy. It's driven by MARGIN. Why push something that's not gonna make the most $ for the copyright holder on each purchase. Purchase by radio listeners is assured because they have been TRAINED to like the music through repitition. Just think about it for a minute. How many of you have had a stupid advertising jingle so stuck in your head that you've seriously contemplated trepanning as mode of exorcism? This is what the constant, repititious, mind training, repititions, constant, repetitive, never ending, airplay does. You can bet your bottom dollar that these 'pushers' would be playing the 'Ari Bud' soundtrack over and over and over, if their programs tpold them it would generate more profit than Whitney Houston crack croaking the Star Spangled banner.
NOW, why is this sort of thing and 'sharing' good in general? According to Jeff Hawkins (palm pilot) in his bookOn Intelligence' (kindly suggested by a fellow
Oh yes, sharing good in general...It's a way to expose oneself to music that will never make it on the radio. When I hear smethign I really like, I go out and find a copy of the CD or vinyl because I want a nice clean HiFi copy to listen to. Yes, I buy the stuff! Do the record companies want my business? I think NOT! They would prefer that my exposure to music be limited to the mindless drivel the push on the radio. Repitition breeding familiarity and comfort should lead me to spend my $15 on 'The Olson Twins Christmas Special or some piece of political Bobo crap that makes them a bundle'. They don't want me buying an old firesign theatre or folkways CD.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
All the slashdot posters are placing their emphasis into the wrong areas. Most people are going on about the legal aspects of this activity.
Well, the legal aspects are secondary to the fact that this person is a serious private librarian. And he is doing a major public service by collecting all of this music into a single library.
Does the RIAA have a library like this? Do they have anyone who could build a library like this? Do any of the big five global record companies have a library like this? Could they build a library like this?
I don't think so.
This is a major achievement. Forget the chickenshit laws and celibrate the acomplishment.
With the systematic destruction of the public domain by the global media corporations, these people who are making a serious effort to preserve culture OUTSIDE of a corporate framework are major heroes!
We are facing a situation were the cultural media artifacts (audio recordings, books, and magazines) of first half of the 20th century are being systematicly destroyed by the media corporations. They will not release the material that they claim to legally own into public domain (in order to protect the half dozen or so copyrights that are still commercially valid from that era, they locked up the entire cultural output of the era), and they won't release it commercially because it is no longer profitable.
That means that hundreds of years in the future there will be a big gap in the cultural record for all of the output the first half of the 20th century. The books are being pulped as the paper wears out, and the media recordings are buried in permanent copyright extensions, which is a wholescale theft of the public domain.
Future cultural historians will TREASURE the work of these 'illegal' private librarians who are quietly working to preserve the culture.
They deserve our support, not ridicule!
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
lol. mod parent Up!
you are wrong idiot!
I myself have MORE mp3s than THIS guy!!!
(seriously) 42 filled 120 gig drives of complete albums, and only a little duplicates (have not quantified qhich had higher frequencies despite file size diffs)
It was easy. for years i used supernew and giganews, then www.newscene.com
There are amusing workarounds around the caps on the premium accounts
not one byte shared , only downloaded
and here is the BEST part
news.astra_XXXXXXHIDDEN_.com is 15 bucks per month unlimited speed and unlimited bandwidth
(replace _XXXXXXHIDDEN_ via research)
on a 2 megabit line (standard for over a YEAR on comcast cable i get 11 to 13 gigabytes every day per line
and before that i had access to T1 lines
you are all know nothing loser morons here
this guy is a SMALLER collector than I
not by a lot, but still I have more and no partial albums
but except for this one tiny post, i never care to share my obsession,
but all you naysayers are full fo crap
Please please please don't let this be under Perpetual Copyright (TM) (Pat Pending.) (All rights reserved, US Megacorps united).
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
Why do you need a personal copy of all the music? That's the whole value of a decentralized collection. You can have a terrorist blow up the network or even a good chunk of the nodes but chances are a very large percentage of the actual data will be intact on other nodes. For the first time in history we have a massively redundant warehouse of archived music. As time goes on that archive will slowly improve in quality and scope to naturally approach the full body and fidelity of recorded works. Compare this to the old days when you could have a fire or catastrophic disaster at the record company vault and lose all the original masters forever.
That's just the Infinite Monkey Theorem for MP3 files.
A few weeks ago John Peel passed away, according to many the best DeeJay ever. He reputedly owned 25000 vinyl records. That's of the same order of magnitude as this guy's collection. And all completely legal.
Z
He mentions that he retags stuff that's not properly tagged.
you mean more like his copies of starcrost or 1619 badass band. anyway, why unseal those truly rare sealed records when many more unsealed and ripped copies exist?
The only thing I am curious about is how many of these songs does he listen to?
Sumit Dhar
Doug's project is admirable from a purely preservationist viewpoint if legally dubious.
The problem is all those DVDs are useless if the equipmant that can read them is fried by the EMP of an airburst nuke or simply destroyed utterly by a (nearby?) 'direct hit'.
Perhaps Doug should get (already have[access to]?) safes big enough and shielded enough to hold a complete computer system capable of reading, 'playing', and buring CD-A/MP3 audio CDs of these 'audio DVDs'.
Should the unthinkable happen, once proper AC power is restored, 'release the music'....
Of course, should the unthinkable happen, survival would be more important than listening to music from bygone eras in the shattered aftermath of civilization ravaged by the use of nuclear weapons....
Warning: Not scientific but proves a point:
900,000 songs at an estimated 3 minutes per song works out to be about 45,000 hours of music.
How does this fellow screen for quality? I have noticed a number of P2P mp3s are incorrect titles, sometimes intentionally distorted/broken, have skips, have a static 128k or 96k resolution, etc.
I guess what I am saying: The amount of garbage in this collection has got to be out of hand. There is no way one person will invest 45k hours into listening to all of this.
I like considering apocalypse scenarios. I think it comes with exposure to sysadmin :)
- What if you knew skynet was going to send back something to use not-yet-discovered buffer-overflows to compromise your system? How could you build a trusted computer in such a way that it could feed code to a second computer without ever being compromised itself.
- What if world tides rose by half a kilometer tomorrow and you had to preserve bits of life in concrete bubbles on the floor of the new ocean? How would you perpetuate yourself and rebuild a society?
This is all very interesting - but what on earth would you do about music? Much of the science and engineering world could be rediscovered faster than it was developed because you'd have faith that it was possible, or because you could
There are exceptions to this. For example - the techniques known to produce wootz steel *were* lost for hundreds of years until very recently in spite of everyone having a pretty good idea that it was possible.
But art is far more fragile.
Would it be possible to deduce what beethoven's sixth symphony sounded like simply because you had a copy of something that took on part of the composer's style and knew what tools they used? Of course not. Even if you knew the melody you'd struggle to reproduce much more than that. It's likely that society could build itself up to its current point four times over without rediscovering even equivalents to many of our finest artistic achievements.
During a rebuild phase we'd probably never pass through the societies that could produce Messiaen's Catholicism, Prokofiev's bleak subservience to Stalin's aesthetic demands (listen to some of his waltzes to get an idea of what I mean), jazz or theologically-backed counterpoint.
Certainly there *would* be other things... but there will be other things in time to come, regardless. Our race's artistic career is well underway and the loss of a significant portion of a culture would be a loss indeed.
[I'm posting anonymously because I'm not sure how I'll feel about these words in twelve months' time and fear I might find holes in it I have not yet seen. Also, the skynet thing is knowlingly pretentious - and although I do this as a mental exercise rather than because I'm crazy I'd prefer to keep the associations to a minimum]
1. Find the King of the Pirates.
2. Sue him for all 900,000 songs.
3. PROFIT!!!
What was the brand name of that damn sofa??
Through the magic of things like amazon.com, you may purchase quite a lot of CDs, including from obscure bands. There are literally thousands of music groups in the United States; there's no reason to purchase exclusively from the top 40, or even the top 200.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I got news for this "music man". It's called the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. They already have every published recording archived. ZZZzzzzzzzzzzz.....this guy is really a dork.
For sake of argument, if there was such devastation from a terrorist attack or a global disaster, HOW IN THE HELL would this guy's personal collection be the last remaining archive of all recorded music? WTH? He should buy a lottery ticket if he thinks he is that lucky.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
One aspect of our culture that's really interesting is our need to record, preserve and take/assign credit for EVERYTHING. I'm studying (a term used loosely) the early history of Western music, and it seems that that ethic evolved through the medieval period and was established by the time of the rennaissance.
I don't think it's necessarily good or bad, but by now this is such a part of us that we immediately think that something passing out of human knowledge is a tragedy. Maybe that's part of what's responsible for what one might call our success. (when you think about it that way, collectors don't necessarily "suck", they just have a certain strain of the urge to preserve. Those who get the records and immediately scratch them up and play them in public get more to the root of the music itself and its purpose, to be performed and to be observed).
So, not only would preserving rare records (or in SuperPirateMan's case, downloading like there's no tomorrow) be preserving the music itself, it would be preserving our culture's tradition of preserving stuff.
Funny in the range of multi-megabyte files, sure, but I did have an idea a few years back:
:)
Atari 2600 games are generally 2-4K. I figured it would be fun to write a random (or hell, sequential) game generator based on those constraints. There are a lot of things that need to go just right in order to even display an image on the screen from the good old 2600, so the overwhelming majority of them won't even boot in oh, say, an emulator.
Tweak said emulator to flag the rejects, run for a LONG time (there's a lot more filtering you could do here if you looked into the 2600 internals), see what you get.
Then spend the rest of your life trying one after the other. Someone did the math for me, it's positively frightening.
Oh well... maybe with a lot better heuristics...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I am figuring that all these songs he has collected are in mp3, so he does not have a complete copy of a single song let alone is he able to listen to all this music. By downloading an mp3 version of the album "Aja" he is doing his ears a disservice. --dys
Here's my problem with that goal... independent releases. I have excellent local rock and metal music on cassette that was never released on CD. Imagine all the independent or limited print music that is sitting in basements and attics across the country. Some of it crap, some of it a mystery that the artist was never signed to a major label.
But yes, as a CD collector myself, it's the journey, not the goal that matters. I have never sat and thought it would be great to own everything I might like to listen to. I'd rather happen upon a CD on sale at the store or for sale at the pawn or used CD shop.
So, if you figure 1 MB per minute of music for a standard 128 MP3, that means this guy needs 900 GB of harddrive and/or CD-R or DVD-R space currently. That actually would not be difficult or too expensive. But I wonder what his internet provider thinks of all the bandwidth he's soaking up?!
You a member of ___TH?
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
By the way, collecting IS a disease. However, probably not a very harmful one.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
I had no doubt that someone out there would have more than him. However, I still find the article a little shaky because it mentioned the guy did it in only 10 months. That's 12 gigs a day to download, tag, rename, and archive. Plus he has a full time job & family?
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
I would love to see one of his hard drive crashes! I wonder how long does it take fill up a hard drive with music only.
I stand corrected, it seems that he was talking about 2 specific examples that fall clearly into a grey area, and 1 isn't even related to copyright... his response follows unedited, and even included a story about reissuing old blues records (relevant to this discussion):
David,
Two incidents come to mind. When I was at Laney College I met a woman who
owned the last complete 35 mm copy of "Freaks". Anyone who wanted to show
the film had to use one of her copies and pay her a fee. She did quite well
until someone made a pirate copy from one of her copies. This was not an
issue of copyright but of control. I believe the original copyright had
expired.
Someone can copyright a new arrangement of a piece of music that is
otherwise in public domain. Or a new translation of a public domain book can
likewise be copyrighted.
In the past you could renew copyright several times and the work would
remain copyrighted until 32 years after the author's death. Now I think the
US has jacked that up to more than 70 years (120 years?). In any event the
US doesn't harmonize with the rest of the world. There was a recent story
about several well known books whose copyright in valid here but has expired
in Australia.
If you have the only surviving copy of something and the copyright ownership
is murky, you might be king dog. It depends on value as to whether someone
else will try and extablish copyright control. Without your copy they don't
have much.
Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records and Downhome Music issued records of
old blues signers that he'd gotten from his collection of 78s. He kept a
royalty fund in the event one of the singers ever surfaced and wanted to be
paid. All the record companies involved were long gone. I don't know that he
ever had to pay anyone a performance royalty.
There is a story about the singer Kate Smith who, during WWII, approached
Irving Berlin about a patriotic song. The two of them went through some
trunks where he had a number of projects he'd set aside. They came up with
"God Bless America", which Kate had to sing at every personal appearance she
made for the rest of her career. Berlin signed the copyright over to the Boy
Scouts. One of the recent extensions of copyright period had to do with the
Scouts continuing to collect royalties. Berlin, for his part, lived to be
over 100.
Dad
music lover since 1969
Well, he would have to spend the next 27 years listening to music he has already collected, and the rest of his life listening to the music that came out during said 27 years. At any rate it is foolish to collect all music just to have it. I will never ever want to listen to Englebert Humperdink, so why bother collecting his entire discography. I only have 120000 songs in my library and it feels overwhelming. I have been collecting full albums as well, and there is so much filler on most albums it is ridiculous.
Good point and well taken. It is just another facet of humans keeping a recorded history. This is after all one of the things that sets us apart from other species.
music lover since 1969
Is the same thing being done for the Arts, Literature, Engineering, Science, Math, and Histories?
Imagine, a virtual global "Louvre" on all things, that anyone can view, anywhere, anytime.
I guess it begins with a possible future of posible loss.
Interesting letter.
And I hope you appreciate having a strong relationship with your father. Not all of us enjoy that luxury.