Downloading Music

Few controversies in the musical industry spark more disagreements than downloading music by consumers and sampling of riffs by musicians.  

First off, we believe that all out file sharing of commercially released albums (and movies for that matter) is basically wrong.  People upload entire albums of commercially released music which others freely download.   Peer to peer utilities like the original Napster or Gnutella and BitTorrent allow unbridled distribution of intellectual property.  While music lovers justify this as ‘sticking it to the man’ or simple promotion of an artist through wider distribution – in truth, it is just stealing.  A song or two is sampling.  Downloading an entire album is stealing.  You know that. As bad as record companies are, ultimately it is the artists that suffer.  The man always gets his cut.

There is another avenue for music lovers and that is the sharing of live shows. At Sub Rosa we download legal live music from the Internet and engage in trading live shows with people all over the world.  Typically, these are live shows where taping is either approved or at least tolerated. We don't trade in commercially released music and we don't accept money for music. If you like an artist, we suggest you buy their records and go see their shows when they come through town.

The Download

There are hundreds of music FTP sites.  For us, it starts with the Grateful Dead.  Many who collect downloaded music hovers around the Dead. Hot Tuna, Jefferson Airplane, String Cheese Incident; all the Jerry Garcia and David Grisman projects; lots of bluegrass.  Bruce Hornsby. A little jazz.  Some jazzjamfunkfusion groove thangs. These live shows are stored in a loss-less compression scheme called .SHN [Shortened] or maybe the newer FLAC.  MP3’s are available but are discouraged.  They sound fine and only an audiophile could hear the difference.  It is in the archiving and repeated transfer of music where the MP3 falls down.  It turns out to be like a photocopy of a photocopy.  Remember, you are dealing with musical archivist here who want to preserve the fidelity of the music.  MP3 is not the way to preserve long term.  MP3 is fine for personal listening, but not for trading.

Shorten

Shorten® (.SHN) is an audio compression scheme that is used to compress audio (.WAV) files losslessly. This means that after you decompress a Shorten file, everything that was in the original .WAV is there. This is unlike MP3, in which the compression step throws away information that can never be recovered. Shorten was chosen as the etree.org standard because it was the only lossless audio compression that was open source.

For distribution and archiving purposes, the Shorten (.SHN) files themselves can also be burned onto a CDR as data. One big advantage to archiving Shorten files is that you'll never have to deal with digital audio extraction (DAE) from an audio disc, which can sometimes produce clicks and other undesired artifacts. You just need to uncompress the .SHN files (into .WAV files) and you are set to go. FLAC files are also popular. Also requires a decompression tool similar to this one below.

The mkw Audio Compression Tool (mkwACT) is a free Windows® program created for the easy and convenient conversion of WAV audio files to and from various lossless and lossy compressed formats, including Shorten (.SHN) but not FLAC.  mkwACT is the easiest utility available for decompressing Shorten files, and checking and creating MD5 signatures. For mkwACT, you just drop the file on the icon or in the window pane and you are cooking with gas. Here is the Macintosh utility to convert .SHN files to .WAV.

FTP

How you actually download these live shows is often via an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Client.   This is where you provide the internet address [not an http URL], possibly set up a queue that will download at a certain time [some sites only allow downloading in the middle of the night when server bandwidth is available]. We use SmartFTP.  It’s free and easy to use.   

FTP Sites

Once you get an FTP client set up, you can log onto sites like the ones listed below and download music.  Often times there are only 2 or 3 slots open and they always seem to be filled, but with the use of queues, you can camp on a FTP address and have the settings for the download preset.  Check out TuneTree for starters.

B&P

B&P stands for Blanks and Postage. This arrangement allows a new trader who has a small or non-existent collection to acquire shows. In return for sending blank discs with return postage, you can end up with excellent shows on CD. This is how I got started. You send 2-4 blank CDR’s - of high quality (like Mitsui, or even TDK but no generics or cheap CDR’s), in a pre paid bubble-pack mailer and you get discs back with music. 

You may have to politely ask, politely plead or nicely grovel to get someone to take time to spot you some music without a trade involved.  Here are the rules for a B&P that will make it go ever so smoothly. 

Good luck. Happy listening.