Free Music via Usenet
I’ve never gotten involved in downloading mp3s with Napster or Kazaa or any of the zillions of Gnutella peer to peer networks, probably more because I had only a modem connection until very recently than out of any moral compunction. Last night, however, I was reading newgroups with MT-NewsWatcher (this is a Mac OS X news reader, though there are a zillions of others for any platform) when I discovered all the alt.binaries.music groups. Intrigued, I explored … In the RadioHead (fansite) and Phish newsgroups I found thousands of posts that purported to be live concert files. They were broken up into many different parts (some as many as 80) and I thought I would have to download these individually and somehow put them back together to get the completed file, but found rathar that NewsWatcher neatly downloaded them and sewed them together all by itself. In about an hour I had watched a 5 minute RadioHead concert in full screen video and listened to 8 full length (some as long as 10 minutes!) Phish jams, though at a pretty lame bitrate. I do not worry too much about the legal ramifications here because Phish allows their fans to freely record their concerts, going so far as to set up areas for them to record in at shows. Recent news that Microsoft
has discovered Usenet may herald the end of Usenet as the last and so far well-kept secret of the geek (and spammer), so hurry up and learn how to use it before its assimilated by the Borg!
Comment posted on 8-8-2003
I remember usenet binary groups back in \’94. Usenet is fantastic. Archived, it is a fantastic resource for getting a question answered. Google bought a company called deja.com that has archived everything on it for years. It\’s now groups.google.com and if you look carefully you can find my own posts going back to \’94. I use the usenet archives daily to help me solve problems dealing with a variety of things from Java programming to auto repair.
My favorite place to get music is through the Java client FurthurNet because it\’s nice and free and legal. furthurnet.net is the link, check it out.
Comment posted on 8-8-2003
Yeah, google groups is a great resource. You can find me in there back to 1994 as well, although my name/email has changed depending on how cryptic I was being. I had never been able to take advantage of the file sharing potential of the system until I got broadband though.