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Ask Slashdot: How Do I Scrub Pirated Music From My Collection?
An anonymous reader writes "I tried out Google Music, and I liked it. Google made me swear that I won't upload any 'illegal' tracks, and apparently people fear Apple's iCloud turning into a honeypot for the RIAA. My music collection comprises about 90% 'legal' tracks now — legal meaning tracks that I paid for — but I still have some old MP3s kicking around from the original Napster. Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own. I wanted to find a tool to scan my music to identify files that may be flagged as having been pirated by these cloud services; I thought such a tool would be free and easy to find. After all, my intent is to search my own computer for pirated music and to delete it — something that the RIAA wants the government to force you to do. But endless re-phrasing on Google leads to nothing but instructions for how to obtain pirated music. Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
Scrap what you have and buy it all brand new. I'm sure that'll make everyone at the RIAA happy ;-)
Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
I'm an audiophile, I re-rip my collection to FLAC every week to make sure I keep everything pristine.
English is not this
I don't waste a lot of time during my life.
But when I do I re-rip my collection to FLAC.
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"...does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
No, Mr. Bond, the RIAA expects you to die.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'm an audiophile, I re-rip my collection to FLAC every week to make sure I keep everything pristine.
This only works if you have oxygen free monster cables supplying power to your computer.
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I think you may have missed the point... can we get a 'whoosh' mod for the cases where a poster must have had to duck to let the joke go over his head? I've got points to spare...
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrangewell don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
You should also ensure that the laser in your CD drive is correctly aligned so that the photons it emits are in phase with the originals used to make the CD master.
I'm an audiophile, I re-rip my collection to FLAC every week to make sure I keep everything pristine.
I used to do this as well, until I found the sound quality degraded over time because of weakening in the magnetix flux on the hard disk substrate. I've found flash drives to hold audio quality far better than magnetic media however notable picosecond pauses during playback are common as the player has to skip over bad blocks of flash. It does take a trained ear to hear them so to most Slashdot music cretins, the diminished sound quality will be undetectable.
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He probably wouldn't hear the whooosh anyway. They are frequently very high frequency, even ultrasonic.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Unfortunately, Linux still doesn't run on FLAC. I've written many letters to Linus and the people over at FLAC, but nobody seems interested in fixing the problem.