At first, I just downloaded the good stuff. I would grab a show, listen to it, then go back and download another show. Then I figured to improve efficiency by eliminating the listening part and just snatching great handfuls of shows like a fat lady on Supermarket Spree. This stuffed up my computer, so I got the external HD, which is small, black, and prodigious in memory: I call him Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
My new strategy, then, was to just download everything: go to the pirate bay and click ‘yes, please’. Every soundboard, official release, taped rehearsal. Even 1984. (Nothing later than ’91, though: a line must be drawn.) It all went in Henry, and he was hungry for more, but, I thought, the well had run dry. Nothing left to collect.
And then I found out about .flac files. Help me.
P.S. Check out an example of the new hotness, this Matrix mix from Hunter Seamons of 5/4/77 at the Palladium (formerly the Academy of Music) on East 14th Street in Manhattan.
Sounds like a similar story to my own. Since I realized the beauty of lossless recordings my life hasn’t been the same, and my hard drive has been filling up that much faster, though there’s still plenty of space. I wish I had realized it sooner so I didn’t have so many shows in mid quality mp3, needing to be replaced with flac or alac (since I still like using itunes). My life changed that day. Friends don’t really get it; they don’t have to.
True dat. (Yes, I said “true dat”; I’m down with the emo kids.) Plus–and it might just be my usual tech-related ineptitude–the mp3’s could be grabbed in giant, year-long chunks. The flac’s come in one at a time, although I don’t suppose you could just grab a year at a time unless you had a bunch of hard drives lying around, which I certainly don’t.
I’m just commenting to pseudo-upvote the Henry Louis Gates, Jr joke.
That was fresh.
Disagree on the amateur matrixes though. Do not want, YMMV etc