…so I tried finding MP3 sites on the net in order to download music that I already owned. My, what a miserable experience! I managed to find a thousand popups, what Britney Spears body double looks like naked, and opportunities to place my financial future in the hands of strangers who did not have my best interests at heart. I also found sites that claimed to offer the latest hits by Ms Spears and The Backstreet Boys (they have a “latest” hit that is less than two years old?) but, as I neither presently nor ever intend to own these songs I didn’t click those links. Odds are good I’d have experienced a second thousand popups, etc, and never actually gotten to the songs anyway.
Why do people do this? Especially on a dialup connection, the time you waste finding and downloading MP3s could be more effectively spent working at Dairy Queen so you could BUY the damned CD!
However, NOT ONE of the popups was for X10.com, so that was good.
[li]I think it’s assumed that you’re downloading MP3s for more of bootleg-type purposes than for having a copy of something you already own.[/li][li]Bootlegging music places you in the same category as people who download l33t w4r3z copies of pirated software.[/li][li]People who pirate software are obviously also looking for porn on the internet…and lots of it.[/li]
See? It all makes sense!
Dropzone, the mistake that you made was trying to search for mp3s on websites. People that trade/share mp3s do not do it that way primarily, because of the crap you ran into. What they do is use a special peer to peer client, like Napster (god rest its soul), Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, etc.
These are much more direct, though spammers have found a few ways to corrupt them, somewhat.
Because it’s not as easy. With Napster, all traffic went through a central server. These other programs build the network as the go along, connecting people to each other. There’s no central location to shut down.
napster had a centralized server and CAN be shut down. Clients like Gnutella bows before the gnutella god have no centralized server. Basicly its YOUR computer connecting directly to other computers. No centralized server… nothing to shut down.
Actually, that’s a big fallacy. The sites do have central servers; it’s the only way they can operate with the number of users they expect to have. Those servers will become targets – and there are other ways to stop the piracy.
The former would be nice. I’ve tried driving while playing LPs but it doesn’t seem to work. I could break down and buy a better cassette deck, but I thought I’d try this.
The latter is uninteresting because Simpsons is on three times a day in Chicago. That’s enough.
Yes, MP3 sites seem to exist only as bait to get you somewhere else. I suspect they actually don’t have what they offer.
Umm, I’m sorry if this sounds stupid but, why can’t you just make your own mp3’s? Since you already own the music, can’t you just use something like realjukebox or whatever to make an mp3? I expect the attack against napster was just to set a precedent so it will be easier to go after napster clones. I’m sure it will happen to any clone companies that get big enough.
I know that dropzone already answered this, but since I got a ton of stuff I already had bought before, I would like to answer this too.
Much of the music I had before was on 45, LP, cassette, and on CD’s my kids had totally wrecked. A couple of thing in particular I had already bought on 45, LP and cassette, and just couldn’t bring myself to buy a fourth time on CD.
I understand that there are high tech ways of recording LP (etc) to MP3, but puh-leeze! I’m not that techy, or rich.
OTOH, I probably am that techy, though not rich. But I don’t think it should take more than a cable from your amp to your sound card input, although that would probably give lousy results. I’ll have to think about it.
Dropzone is correct, that’s all it takes. Same process as creating your own AIFF files (or Macintosh sound files or Windows WAV files) except stored in an efficiently compressed format. The more obscure tunes I had, for which online MP3s could not be found (to replace the cassette tapes, vinyl albums, etc), I played into my sound-in jack on the ol’ PowerBook and “recorded” it in SoundEdit 16; edited out clicks 'n pops; converted to MP3 with N2MP3; and eventually added them to compilation CDs (~10 “albums” per CD in MP3 format, very handy!)