Free music - SXSW 2007 artists

February 20, 2007 4:30 PM

Tons of bands playing at this year's SXSW. Not going or going and don't know what to check out? They've put up a torrent of 739 MP3s by 739 artists. The organization also has plans for an upcoming torrent of trailers for scheduled films. {via waxy}
posted by dobbs (39 comments total)

Um, that's over 37 hours worth of songs!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:38 PM on February 20, 2007

Yay!!!

I loved the 2005 & 2006 torrents. This is excellent.
posted by seanyboy at 4:51 PM on February 20, 2007

I knew they were wrong in university Economics when they told me "There is no free lunch!"!

I don't know how MP3s will feed me though. This is awesome still thanks!
posted by Komsomol at 5:02 PM on February 20, 2007

The prospect of adding a 739 song compilation to my music collection terrifies me to no end. And yet, I find myself compelled to download this torrent. Trying to fathom the organizational work to come, I feel as though I am staring into the grim and black heart of madness itself. My despair is palpable.

Neat! Thanks, dobbs
posted by tracert at 5:02 PM on February 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

I guess when I am excited about less than half of one percent of the musicians at a festival then I should probably go to a different festival.
posted by aubilenon at 5:15 PM on February 20, 2007

can anyone recommend a good torrent client for Tiger?
posted by popechunk at 5:15 PM on February 20, 2007

aubilenon, I'm surprised you know 99.5 percent of these artists well enough t dismiss them. Impressive!

popechunk, I can't comment on whether it's good or not, but I use Tomato Torrent. I've never been able to get any other BT client to work though so I'm probably not the best person to ask.
posted by dobbs at 5:22 PM on February 20, 2007

popechunk: BitTorrent?
posted by phaedon at 5:33 PM on February 20, 2007

popechunk, David Watanabe's new app, Xtorrent, is the easiest, awesomest, bestest EVAR client for OS X.
posted by cgc373 at 5:33 PM on February 20, 2007

popechunk: BitTyrant is also good--the creators claim to use some tricks to increase download speed.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 5:59 PM on February 20, 2007

It's really, really ironic for a city that showcases SXSW to not have any FM radio stations that play that format, at least when I lived there a few years ago. I suppose there might have been a college station that did, but I heard mostly talk at the bottom of the FM band.

Austin was where I solidified my resolve to get XM Radio. If I had just been driving through there I would have concluded Austin culture was nothing but Ted Nugent and Garth Brooks.
posted by rolypolyman at 6:02 PM on February 20, 2007

The OS X native bittorrent client is Transmission except for a few private trackers, long story…

Tomato Torrent is ancient worse than the official Mainline client, Azureus is a hog and is flush with VC cash trying to turn it into a HD YouTube (BitTyrant is just a modified Azureus), and Xtorrent is yet another commercial rip-off of OSS from David Watanabe. Seriously, it's just a broken, widely-banned, complicated version of Transmission. That costs money. Don't buy it. Watanabe's a jerk.
posted by blasdelf at 6:22 PM on February 20, 2007

Oh man, I'm drooling over 3.1 gigs of music, but my compy would be bursting to the seams upon download completion. Time to get a new hard drive (external?)? Delete some of my other music? Nevar!!111one! Get rid of all my college pdfs and word documents of poetry, writing, essays, research papers and old IM conversations? My gigantic corpus of anime style sketches that I labored on for minutes, sometimes even quarter hours at a time?

Augh, too many decisions! ASKME CAN HELP??!

Oooo...better yet, get my sister to download it since she has more space on her computer and let her be a sort of... err... music filter and send me the best stuff.

Mmmm... AH, ohohhah! Seems that you can download individual songs from the profiles of each artist. I can be my own filter.
posted by Mister Cheese at 6:31 PM on February 20, 2007

heh

very cool.....my nephew is playing bass with a band at one gig...plus two solo showcases....

damned kids....bastards better stay off my lawn
posted by timsteil at 7:17 PM on February 20, 2007

It's really, really ironic for a city that showcases SXSW to not have any FM radio stations that play that format ...

I'm not sure what that format is, but Austin has a few excellent radio stations in the form of KUT and KGSR. The latter tends to lean little more towards AAA, while the former is a bit more eclectic. The UT-Austin student radio station is KVRX.

All the stations have excellent SXSW coverage -- with live in-studios, interviews and the such -- and stream via the web.
posted by pfafflin at 7:26 PM on February 20, 2007

5 peers? It will take me weeks to download this thing.

What the crap, SXSW?
posted by rhapsodie at 7:50 PM on February 20, 2007

Not going and not caring. It's too loud and I'm too old. That and Austin will stink of hipster for weeks.
posted by DonnieSticks at 8:53 PM on February 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

If the mac implementation is half as good as the PC version, I'd recommend Azureus.
posted by fFish at 9:12 PM on February 20, 2007

Seriously, it's just a broken, widely-banned, complicated version of Transmission.

To be fair, it's widely-banned for the same reason that Transmission is, as far as I know.

(Transmission is my client of choice wherever it's not banned. Where it is banned, I just use mainline, even though it's ancient and not even a universal binary)
posted by sparkletone at 4:32 AM on February 21, 2007

5 peers? It will take me weeks to download this thing.

i got it overnight ... and i think it was probably downloaded in about 6 hours ... that was with azureus on xp

i'm going to try to listen to all of it over the next few weeks ... on my 21st song ... listening to bands these days seems odd ... even though there's a lot of different genres being covered here, so far, there's something kind of flat and samey about it ... i can't quite put my finger on it ... in some ways much of it seems conservative sounding

i do know that the best melody by far i've heard so far is aj croce's maybe i'm amazed ... which was written by paul mc cartney, so ...
posted by pyramid termite at 6:05 AM on February 21, 2007

That and Austin will stink of hipster for weeks.

Seconded. Thirded, even. For the next god-knows-how-long I'll need to hear about all the 'amazing' interactive presentations and 'fantastic; musical performances that are going on in my own town...all the while cursing every idiot that's clogging up MoPac.

That's not to mention how the lowly word 'wristband' is now a verboten word thanks to SXSW.

Bitter? Who, me?
posted by owenkun at 6:36 AM on February 21, 2007

thanks for the tip, mr. cheese! i am now cherry-picking.
posted by lapolla at 6:47 AM on February 21, 2007

This is cool - Anyone know if the torrents from 2005 and 2006 are being tracked anywhere?
posted by mzurer at 8:12 AM on February 21, 2007

Found 2006 here but nothing for 2005...
posted by mzurer at 8:19 AM on February 21, 2007

Here's '05.
posted by the sobsister at 8:22 AM on February 21, 2007

the sobsister, the link to the actual torrent file is dead on that page.
posted by mzurer at 8:38 AM on February 21, 2007

Sorry; I assumed that it, like the '06, was still good.
posted by the sobsister at 8:41 AM on February 21, 2007

tracert
aubilenon
dobbs

I am about 90% through 2005 after having downloaded the two massive zipfiles in March '05.

By my tastes, I have 65 faves (songs I can listen to more than once) and 44 outright rejects leaving hundreds in various subdirectories - ska, weird, dance, exotic, etc.

So for me, at least, it's uh... let's see, carry the one... 10%. And these are tunes I really like.

Just doin' the math.
posted by mmrtnt at 11:35 AM on February 21, 2007

mzurer I still have the original '05 zipfiles, if enough people are interested, I'll figure out how to turn them into a torrent. Assuming that's legal, of course ;)
posted by mmrtnt at 11:37 AM on February 21, 2007

The torrent's pretty much dead for me after dl a measly 44.1 mb. Ugh. :(
posted by dobbs at 8:15 PM on February 21, 2007

I left my torrent client up all night and got zero bytes. What a total bummer.

To complete my derailing of this thread, I used Transmission, because I think his Handbrake app is so awesome. I do not generally buy shareware, so XTorrent is not an option. Thanks to all who had suggestions.
posted by popechunk at 6:12 AM on February 22, 2007

I had no problem downloading both 2006 and 2007 overnight, but I do see that the tracker has been throwing errors.
posted by mzurer at 8:03 AM on February 22, 2007

The webmaster just emailed me and told me that the server had been down, and is now fixed. I'll fire up the tranny agin' and see what happens.
posted by popechunk at 8:42 AM on February 22, 2007

I haven't been able to get anything since last night - I have at this point about 80% of it, but nothing more. Anyone else having any luck?
posted by donnagirl at 1:13 PM on February 22, 2007

Can anyone put up a link to the earlier torrents?
posted by kjs3 at 2:03 PM on February 22, 2007

Duh...note to self, read all comments first...
posted by kjs3 at 2:10 PM on February 22, 2007

Anyone else having any luck?

12 hours into it I am at 1.22 GB of 3.06 GB.
posted by popechunk at 8:37 PM on February 22, 2007

I really doubt anyone's paying attention to this now, but, 2005 is still on the tracker, as a torrent of a couple of zip files. The main release is on isohunt, and I found the update torrent on Google.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:42 PM on March 4, 2007 [1 favorite]

sweet ... thanks pronoiac
posted by pyramid termite at 5:14 AM on March 6, 2007