tangent
Top Mall-Fi poster. The T in META42.
Formerly with Tangentsoft Parts Store
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2001
- Posts
- 5,969
- Likes
- 58
No, really!
The 2005 South-by-Southwest music festival happened a few months ago, and this year they're giving away a collection of ~750 high-quality MP3s for free. It's a "featured artists" kind of thing, so no doubt the idea is to get you to buy more of the music you like. ...and tempt you to pony up for the gate fees next year, I suppose.
The 2.6 GB collection is available through BitTorrent, so if you've configured your system to allow sharing, it gets going at a pretty good clip. I downloaded my copy in a few hours through my 1.5 Mbit/s connection.
EDIT: D'oh! Forgot to tell you where to get it! It's here.
I've gotten through about a third of it so far. I'm writing this review now because I downloaded it soon after it became available, so at this rate it'll be another four months if I wait until I finish listening to everything. I didn't want to put off telling you about this that long. If my opinions change, I'll post an update here.
This collection alone has justified my recent purchase of an iPod. Two reasons: One, I've had plenty of new music to listen to when I don't want to listen to anything I've got on it already. Two, the iPod's smart playlist and song rating features have made getting through this collection manageable. The smart playlist is set up to match songs that have "SXSW" in the Album field, and that are unrated. While listening, I give each song a rating, so anytime I start the playlist I only get new music. I give one star to the songs I really hate or those that I just know I'll never want to listen to again. For my second trip through the collection, I'll modify the smart playlist rule to only include the two-star songs, which are the ones I'm not sure about and which could get the "1" on a second listen. Once I've finished that, I'll delete all the one-star songs. (I'm putting it off until then because I'm curious if Sturgeons Law applies here, too: "90% of everything is crap.") This wouldn't be possible on a lesser player.
Now to the music. The selection of music pretty well matches with the distribution of music in the commercial market, except that pop of all sorts is almost completely ignored. (Thank Bob for that!) The collection is biased pretty heavily towards rock, and that runs the gamut from poppish stuff to speed metal. I haven't heard much modern country, but that pretty much falls into the "pop" category these days; there's a fair bit of bluegrass and some Western music, though. The other major categories are rap, Latin music (about half-and-half in Spanish), jazz, dance/house/electronica, and "singer/songwriter" type stuff. So far, I've also heard smatterings of reggae, novelty/comedy, J-pop, and "neo-classical". (Anyone know what else you'd call the likes of Frank Mills, or Ferrante and Ticher? "Neo-classical" is the best I can manage...)
There's something here for everybody. I think I'm on track to prove Sturgeon's Law yet again, but hopefully for the artists we don't all agree on the same 90%. If you've got the bandwidth, download this thing and start searching for your 10%. There's a lot of muck to wade through, but the gems should be payment enough for a music lover. And you can't beat the price!
The 2005 South-by-Southwest music festival happened a few months ago, and this year they're giving away a collection of ~750 high-quality MP3s for free. It's a "featured artists" kind of thing, so no doubt the idea is to get you to buy more of the music you like. ...and tempt you to pony up for the gate fees next year, I suppose.
The 2.6 GB collection is available through BitTorrent, so if you've configured your system to allow sharing, it gets going at a pretty good clip. I downloaded my copy in a few hours through my 1.5 Mbit/s connection.
EDIT: D'oh! Forgot to tell you where to get it! It's here.
I've gotten through about a third of it so far. I'm writing this review now because I downloaded it soon after it became available, so at this rate it'll be another four months if I wait until I finish listening to everything. I didn't want to put off telling you about this that long. If my opinions change, I'll post an update here.
This collection alone has justified my recent purchase of an iPod. Two reasons: One, I've had plenty of new music to listen to when I don't want to listen to anything I've got on it already. Two, the iPod's smart playlist and song rating features have made getting through this collection manageable. The smart playlist is set up to match songs that have "SXSW" in the Album field, and that are unrated. While listening, I give each song a rating, so anytime I start the playlist I only get new music. I give one star to the songs I really hate or those that I just know I'll never want to listen to again. For my second trip through the collection, I'll modify the smart playlist rule to only include the two-star songs, which are the ones I'm not sure about and which could get the "1" on a second listen. Once I've finished that, I'll delete all the one-star songs. (I'm putting it off until then because I'm curious if Sturgeons Law applies here, too: "90% of everything is crap.") This wouldn't be possible on a lesser player.
Now to the music. The selection of music pretty well matches with the distribution of music in the commercial market, except that pop of all sorts is almost completely ignored. (Thank Bob for that!) The collection is biased pretty heavily towards rock, and that runs the gamut from poppish stuff to speed metal. I haven't heard much modern country, but that pretty much falls into the "pop" category these days; there's a fair bit of bluegrass and some Western music, though. The other major categories are rap, Latin music (about half-and-half in Spanish), jazz, dance/house/electronica, and "singer/songwriter" type stuff. So far, I've also heard smatterings of reggae, novelty/comedy, J-pop, and "neo-classical". (Anyone know what else you'd call the likes of Frank Mills, or Ferrante and Ticher? "Neo-classical" is the best I can manage...)
There's something here for everybody. I think I'm on track to prove Sturgeon's Law yet again, but hopefully for the artists we don't all agree on the same 90%. If you've got the bandwidth, download this thing and start searching for your 10%. There's a lot of muck to wade through, but the gems should be payment enough for a music lover. And you can't beat the price!
