Chu Gai

Downloading Live Music...Legit!

The website, www.archive.org is, in my opinion, a wonderful site where many websites which no longer exist, may in fact be seen. A good thing when that google search turns up a defunct website. Well this organization also archive live music. According to this link, http://www.archive.org/iathreads/pos....php?id=13568, they've got over 10 terabytes of info from about 500 bands and more coming every day. For example, if you're a fan of the Dead, you can download various concerts. According to the Dead's policy the web archive can do this because they're a non-commercial hosting service. I'm assuming that whatever is on the site is legit so if you've got a zippy internet connection knock yourself out.

James_P_Clark

That is a pretty cool site but naturally the quality of recordings vary greatly. Most of the folks I know despise bootlegs based entirely on the fact that unless your talking about a soundboard recorded show, the quality is always lacking.

Personally I find that for my favorite bands I'm able to tolerate lesser recordings, to a degree at least. From that site you have listed I've grabbed a couple of shows from KC favorites The Rainmakers as well as some from the Samples and I see a Spoon show I'd like to grab as well.

One thing that's kind of nice is that they offer lossless compression schemes. Nice step up from the MP3 crud that seems to reign the net. It's a pretty cool site and if you're into boots you should check out the offerings and be sure to read the FAQ's to learn how to decompress the files and such. Oh yeah, it's handy to have an FTP client on hand to deal with the downloads.

jc

TedE

I tend to disagree. There's a whole mess of people out there who drop 2-3+ grand on recording gear just to tape shows and spread them around for free. A really well done AUD recording will sound better than most SBD pulls due to the "real" audience feel. That's purely subjective though. AUD+SBD mixes seldom come out bad unless the taper doesn't know what they are doing, but people who have those setups tend to know what they are doing. There is definitely less guesswork when it comes to the soundboard, but many bands don't allow board patches for fear of people trying to sell shows. I agree that it's a pain to download 1GB+ of data only to find that the recording is full of drop outs. For most popular bands the show ratings on archive.org tend to be a good indication of the quality of the show.

I'm just glad that there are people out there willing to put their time and money into recording shows and disseminating them. You tend to overlook some slight quality lapses when you can download a band's entire spring tour in a week or so

Christ Reynolds

tenacious d has a great deal of shows for download at archive.org, also visit www.sharingthegroove.org for a lot of shows, audio and video.

CJ

And then when I feel so stuffed I can't eat anymore, I just use the restroom! And then I CAN eat more!

MikeFR

Ya the "real" audience feel of some guy beside the recorder yelling or some chick screaming through most of the show.

Nothing worse than listening to a bootleg cranked up on your stereo only to have a sudden scream, at twice the volume of the band, blow out your ears

Chet_F

I've found some excellent recordings of Jack Johnson playing at FM stations such as KFOG & KCRW. I also have a great Big Head Todd & The Monsters 2-14-03 Austin Texas. So far I haven;t been able to download that many yet. Just waiting a few moe weeks for the cable modem . They now allow you to download 1 song at a time so it's easier to determine how the recording is. I agree about the crowd noise especially when some moron decides he's going to tell his buddy what he did last weekend...very distracting.

CF

\"If you’re lucky, people like something you do early and something you do just before you drop dead. That’s as many pats on the back as you should expect.\" - Warren Zevon 1993, R.I.P.

Rob Gardiner

My friends and I snuck a tape recorder into the stadium when Paul McCartney played Berkeley in 1990. On the resulting tape, all we could hear was ourselves singing along with all the songs.