How the pirates saved civilization

November 11, 2004 2:24 PM

Every Song Ever RecordedHis goal: to own a digital copy of every song ever made. His reason: to preserve them through the upcoming apocalyptic jihad. Just don't ask him to share. (via Macsurfer)
posted by joaquim (39 comments total)

Anyone got a torrent?

:-)
posted by zelphi at 2:26 PM on November 11, 2004

"When the world goes up in flames in this jihad against all things Western, music will be one of the first casualties."

Because, you know, they hate our music almost as much as they hate our freedom.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 2:35 PM on November 11, 2004

Okay, I finished reading it, and yeah, this guy is a complete nutcase.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 2:42 PM on November 11, 2004

I have some sympathy for his views on pirating music, and the effect of piracy on the labels. His views on the upcoming "jihad" mark him out as a complete fruitloop.
posted by salmacis at 2:45 PM on November 11, 2004

Hell yeah ! So RIAA, how dare you stop him from pursuing the holy quest of saving muzak from da terruristz ? To Jerusalem !!

Sillyness aside, he's probably downloading stuff for whatever purpose he has got, but little does he know that the quality of what he's getting isn't exactly even does he ? I guess expecting technical savy from a lawyer is like expecting his excuse is going to float in a court (even if he's not redistributing therefore he shouldn't go into much troubles)
posted by elpapacito at 2:46 PM on November 11, 2004

He's so busted, and i can not believe the interviewer didn't ask about electricity or access to his collection post-jihad? Is he going to donate it? He won't even share it. (no respectable institution would take it--it's almost all stolen.) Weird.

It reminded me of that big article about the people who massively share online, but they at least were giving and not just taking (i think it was posted here a while ago)
posted by amberglow at 2:51 PM on November 11, 2004

He can have a copy of every song ever made - he can buy them.

That is the 'deal' society has offered up.
posted by rough ashlar at 2:53 PM on November 11, 2004

There's always the off-chance that some nut will slip a nuke (or three) into major cites, creating massive chaos and a degradation of society.

Making that assumption, I agree with him that one of the first things to go will be cultural artifacts, being a "non-essential" part of civilization, so I can see where he's coming from.

Personally, I'd start with all the scientific knowledge before the cultural, but I guess there aren't Einstein torrents. ;)
posted by o2b at 2:54 PM on November 11, 2004

He's going to be preserving a whole bunch of godawful shit. Good luck on that.
posted by xmutex at 2:56 PM on November 11, 2004

DrJohnEvans, a rich nutcase. that's the best kind.
posted by Grod at 2:59 PM on November 11, 2004

I have a sneaking suspicion that the author made the whole thing up. MacNetv2 really doesn't have the best reputation.
posted by gyc at 2:59 PM on November 11, 2004

I wonder if he's saving _The Last Song_ by Elton John for, you know, his last song.
posted by m@ at 3:00 PM on November 11, 2004

gyc: nah it's not impossible, he surely sound a lot weird, but mostly harmless. Guess he may have a little obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder going on, but guess that's not ruining his life or his family equilibrium.

Plus, I agree that we really could use a massively distributed "Library of Congress"
posted by elpapacito at 3:07 PM on November 11, 2004

He is a leech... He doesn't share, I wouldn't let him download from me.

If he is using torrents and eDonkey I am sure he only has 900,000 of the most mainstream songs...
posted by LoopSouth at 3:09 PM on November 11, 2004

I guess I don't get it. My cousin rips every single CD he gets his hands on regardless of the content. His mp3 drive is stuffed full of utterly awful music. I'd guess this guy's shuffle play really and truly sucks.

And he's a jerk anyway, didn't he learn in kindergarten that sharing is caring? Doesn't he care?
posted by fenriq at 3:15 PM on November 11, 2004

Grod, not only that, he's a rich lawyer nutcase. Could be very scary, depending on what kind of law he practices...

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how can you even consider passing a 'guilty' verdict on my client when the art of getting out of a parking ticket is one of the last uncorrupted pillars of our great Western society?"
posted by DrJohnEvans at 3:18 PM on November 11, 2004

He's got a ways to go... There are over 5.5 million songs in All Music Guide's database alone, and that's not anywhere near comprehensive. (It's a good start, though.)

As bandwidth and storage become more plentiful, it won't be long before people start distributing their entire MP3 collections over BitTorrent. Or more likely, I wouldn't be surprised to see a WASTE-like private filesharing software start supporting file synchronization. The software would download all missing files from everyone else's share, and keep the collection in sync over time.

A global jukebox, with every song ever released, located on your own hard drive for safekeeping and updated constantly.

The next problem becomes finding the music you'll actually like...
posted by waxpancake at 3:28 PM on November 11, 2004

Aw, it just makes me sad when batshit crazy people like this are allowed to be around children, and sadder even when those children are their own.
posted by xmutex at 3:47 PM on November 11, 2004

That is the 'deal' society has offered up.

Fuck society.
posted by rushmc at 4:40 PM on November 11, 2004

There's some he'll need to get from me. And I don't share with wingnuts.
posted by jonmc at 5:11 PM on November 11, 2004

Will they still have Grand Mariner after the jihad apocalypse?
posted by CunningLinguist at 5:22 PM on November 11, 2004

For some reason I've turned skeptic. I didn't believe the Mormon peanut butter assassin, or the Economic hitman, or the guy who has constant sex with whatever women he wants to.... and now I don't believe in this guy either. Hoax.
posted by elwoodwiles at 5:52 PM on November 11, 2004

This smells very fishy. First of all how can someone say they collect music seriously then not list something like Soulseek?

Then there's the issue of quality control, which was suspiciously never addressed. Frame errors in mp3s are a huge factor in promiscuous downloading... and that's assuming simple transmission and encoding errors from trusted networks, not mailicious looping and weird constructs planted by RIAA-contracted agencies... both of which abound in the networks cited. Generally, every three months I run MP3Test and do a complete scan of all new acquisitions, auto deleting everything with more than 1% frame error and I think last year discarded over 40GB alone.

Then there's the Macishness of it all. The Mac is not, shall we say, blessed with many good jukebox options. iTunes chokes on anything over 40000 files. Not to mention its distressingly narrow range of supported formats. I know, I tried iTunes on my 100K multimedia collection and it just whimpered, rolled over, and died, much like the MS player and the Real Player. However, Media Center just kept on chugging, read in all the tags correctly, and even successfully spent around 400 hours of CPU time analyzing the entire collection, writing BMP and auto dB Replay Gain info into the ID3 tags. Given that this entailed processing around 800GB of data assorted into over a dozen different formats, and that Media Center completed this mammoth job without a single crash or complaint, I was impressed.
posted by meehawl at 5:57 PM on November 11, 2004

meehawl, he didn't say he was using iTunes. He's using Filemaker Pro to catalog his music.

That said, I'm suspicious of the story, too. He says he has 900,000 songs, that he's been collecting for 10 months, that he started out slow and is now up to 1000 songs per day. 1000x30x10 = 300,000 -- the numbers don't add up.
posted by joaquim at 6:16 PM on November 11, 2004

wow, meehawl knows his mp3s and maclimits. Wanna trade files? ;)
posted by dabitch at 6:20 PM on November 11, 2004

What about the songs that haven't been recorded yet?
posted by Quartermass at 6:21 PM on November 11, 2004

He's using Filemaker Pro to catalog his music

Ah, I really must learn to read *every line* of a story. But that one was just so damn long. My eyes just naturally skipped that tedious bit and went to.. eDonkey?!? Good god, you may as well scrape up your mp3s from the gutter.

Then again, this revelation casts further doubt on the story, or at least the efficacy of the project. With no hard link between the contents of the music file and the database record, does he audition each file? It sounds like as well as paying a programmer to write his tagging system (like, that's a project that hasn't been solved well dy a dozen different programs), he'd have to be paying several people to check out each file. If he is trusting filenames and pre-embedded tags then I'd estimate he's running at around 30% error.

And backing up to DVD? That's around 1200+ DVDs (4.5 GB each). I hope he's got someone working on a cataloging system for them as well, and checking them for bitrot and fungi...
posted by meehawl at 6:35 PM on November 11, 2004

Maybe he should just preserve the good songs.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 7:24 PM on November 11, 2004

This guy should really be collecting all the vinyl he can. After the nuclear wars, with there being no electricity and all that those DVDs will be useless. Maybe a hand-cranked turntable hooked up to a couple of tin cans will still work.
posted by psmealey at 7:26 PM on November 11, 2004

Are you trying to tell me he's trying to save that Jessica Simpson song that samples from John Cougar Mellencamp's Jack and Diane? What about Aqua's Barbie Girl? Will Smith's Willenium?
posted by Stan Chin at 7:30 PM on November 11, 2004

I'm on a similar quest for porn.
posted by jeblis at 7:48 PM on November 11, 2004

The Only Song, by Peter Blegvad

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

etc.

It's about 6 minutes long.
posted by kenko at 8:29 PM on November 11, 2004

everyone understands that America will not be top dog forever right?
posted by Satapher at 9:24 PM on November 11, 2004

what a n00b :P
posted by Onanist at 1:18 AM on November 12, 2004

What if everything was run through musicbrain's acoustic fingerprint tagger? I've had surprisingly good results (~70% identified automatically) with mp3s that were missing ID3 tags recently...
posted by gi_wrighty at 1:58 AM on November 12, 2004

This is bullshit, it's a geek fantasy piece. Look at the elements:

Wife is an underwear model...
...who explicitly still loves him despite him spending all his free time in front of a computer
900,000 MP3s
Dream setup of high-end Macs
Special room for said geekery, including buttery leather sofas, and ROPE LIGHTS??!!!

Plus he heads up a practice of 16 lawyers, and yet offers a rationale for free downloading that has the sophistication of a 12-year-old's usenet rant.

Like Elwoodwiles above, I'm calling this is a hoax, just like that male whore, the peanut butter morman guy, and that Bush "election." I don't believe any of it.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 3:40 AM on November 12, 2004

What about quality amateur artists? They are way better than most of the signed artists (IMHO)
posted by SpaceCadet at 4:04 AM on November 12, 2004

I am fairly confident this is complete bullshit.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 5:52 AM on November 12, 2004

Metafilter: I am fairly confident this is complete bullshit.
posted by jammer at 11:36 AM on November 12, 2004