Nearly finished mp3’ing all of my humble pile of legally owned and purchased CDs at highest quality, burning them approx. 10 albums to the mp3 CD. Stared at the somewhat less humble stash of legally owned and purchased audio cassettes and the not-quite-so-humble cassette tapes made from legally owned and purchased vinyl albums from back when. (OK, also stared at the not-quite-so-legal pile that were taped from friends’ CDs and tapes).
Thought to myself: before I digitize these old analog recordings of yet older analog recordings that had pops and scratches on them even then, oughtn’t I to look around for crisp .mp3’s of music that is not readily available on CD anyhow? (and, well, if I really bought the cassette and someone else is making available a bootleg of mp3s of the CD, is that necessarily a wicked thing…)
Cranked up my little search engine and found some 219,000 webby sites, the first thousand or so of which seems to have a profound supply of downloadable or playable mp3 musics by artists I never heard of.
Anyone know of some choice caches of old moldy rock musics turned into nice mp3 as opposed to these wonderful promotional distributions of contemporary rock musicians? Ditto for classical performances?
You can download their program and it allows you to network with all their other users and download mp3s from all over.
I have found songs from 80s rock and classical music as well as a couple of not too likely tunes. So, it is highly likely you can find what you are looking for there.
All the computers are linked together through the napster program to let you search them.
There are like 700+ GB of mp3s, so there is a lot there.
Yes, Napster is the best search engine for mp3’s. I found out about it 3 days ago and have been addicted to it, finding music from Aphex Twin to Clutch to Lords of Acid to just about every damn band there ever was. Before I went out on saturday there was over 1000 gigs of music available. Legal? Maybe, maybe not, but still the place to go to find some obscure and mainstream stuff.
“People must think it must be fun to be a super genuis,
But they don’t realize how hard it is
to put up with all the idiots in the world.”
– Calvin and Hobbes
(__) /
Napster is convenient that I look for mp3’s of songs even if I already have them on CD. Why actually take the CD out of it’s case just to listen to one song? Too much work. A couple clicks and you’re playing the mp3.
Note to Mac users: Use N2MP3! Go into the settings and set it up to use variable-rate sampling, then slide the slider to best quality. It gives you the surprisingly small files with sampling rates that shoot up as high as necessary to handle the sound. Most of the files on Macster (Napster) were sampled at a bit rate of 128 or 160; N2MP3 will give you files not much larger with rates in the 220’s and higher as need be. http://www.n2mp3/com
Last I heard, Napster is under fire from the RIAA, so expect those sites to be dropping like flies any day now. Those who have been into mp3’s for a while probably remember the RIAA cracking down on web and ftp sites with mp3’s about 2-3 years ago. Now just TRY to find an illegal mp3 on the web. You’ll meet a brick wall of legal (read : crap) mp3’s and broken links to mp3’s that may have worked 3 years ago, but don’t anymore.
The mp3 trade has not dried up, though. It’s just moved on to harder-to-find and nearly impossible to police places. Your two best bets are IRC and Usenet.
For Usenet, try the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* hierarchy of groups. Try Mp3 Locator to search the hundreds of thousands of headers in these groups.
On IRC, try any of the large networks and do a “/list mp3” command, which filters out all channels that don’t have “mp3” in their names. Download this script which features the @locator add-on. Now just go into any one of these mp3 channels and type “@locator whateveryouwannasearchfor.”
If this is all Greek to you, and I suspect it is if you’ve only recently discovered mp3’s, go here for an intro to IRC and to download mIRC, the most popular IRC client out there.
I noticed this too this afternoon. Well, I attempted to get back on at approx. 10 p.m. PST and napster is back and working like a charm! I know they’ve been planning client upgrades, perhaps they’ve started? A rather inconvient time to do them, however.
And, puffington, I hardly think the mp3 community is what I’d call hard to find. Lycos recently added an mp3 search feature to their engine, and they’re a fairly mainstream site.
