£16,000 worth of music: part II
(This is the second of a two-parter. The first is two posts ago.)
So I promised to show you how to get hold of all the music you could ever need from the Internet, safely, quickly and for free. This is how. I can’t believe more people don’t do this and it pains me to see people buying overpriced CDs like there’s no tomorrow.
Overpriced DVDs as well, actually, and they’re far, far worse. In fact, you can obtain nearly everything you could ever need media-wise from the Internet, including
- Music
- Films- usually before they hit DVD or even screens
- Books (as plain text or PDFs. This is especially useful for expensive academic textbooks)
- Computer games. They’re a bit more difficult because you usually have to follow some simple steps to get round the copy protection but this is usually DEAD simple and explained in a readme.
- Comics (there’s a special file format and comic readers for use on your PC)
- Software. If you pay for Word or Office you are wasting your money
- TV series. I download the new episode of House about six hours after it’s first shown in America, in HD quality.
To do all this we’ll be using a peer-to-peer file sharing network called Bittorrent. Peer-to-peer just means you’re downloading from other people like you, not from a central server. That would make it too easy for the police to raid the central server. It’s not the same as peer-on-peer, which is seriously disturbing House of Lords porn.
Before we start, here are some of the things you’re probably worried about.
- Yes, it’s illegal. But you won’t get caught. The only prosecutions ever for this sort of thing have taken place in the States against US citizens downloading from inside the US. You are totally safe. There will be loads of warning before authorities in Europe start doing anything about it; they’ve been talking about it for years but it will be a good few years more in my opinion, if ever. No one in the UK has ever been prosecuted for downloading files.
- You are at NO RISK of viruses. Bittorrent is a safe network (unlike Limewire, Kazaa etc) populated mostly by people who care about what they’re posting. Unless you download loads of porn the files you download will definitely not come with trojan horses or the like. The software that you have to install to download media is also completely safe. It doesn’t install spyware or anything like that. It just sits there and dowloads weeks of music for you and then lets you know when it’s finished. Don’t be paranoid.
- Things are usually very high quality. None of these grainy videos taken from the back of cinemas. Well, you do get those, but they let you know (the acronym CAM will appears somewhere) and stolen preview DVDS (acronym SCR for screener) will show up a couple of weeks later. Music is usually dead high quality, espescially if you know where to look. I’ll tell you later.
- I’m going to let you work out the ethics on your own. The main question here is whether downloading music detracts from band earnings. Most of band earnings are from gigging anyway and you can make the case that piracy, by making music more freely available, makes it easier for new bands to make it and makes existing ones more well-known, so more people go to their gigs. As far as stealing from music companies is concerned, that’s fine. They’re been stealing from us by selling us £10 CDs which cost 25p to make and giving £3 to the band for years.
- Yes, it is free and no, you don’t have to sign up.
Right. So this is how we actually go about the business of piracy.
It all starts off at sites known as trackers which are basically online catalogues of material. The Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org/ ) will be your main source; it has nearly everything you could hope to want. Go on it NOW and search for your favourite group!
(Tick the Search Titles Only box. It really helps.)
Figure 1: Pirate Bay search results for Bob Dylan
You usually don’t download individual songs- you get whole albums at once, or discographies, which are useful as you can download everything from one artist in one click.
The numbers in the columns on the right describe seeds (SE: the number of people who have the complete file) and leechers (LE: the number of people downloading it). Click on SE to sort the list by number of seeds. HOW FAST YOUR DOWNLOADS GO IS ABOUT PROPORTIONAL TO THE NUMBER OF SEEDS. Anything with above 10 or so will work well, anything with above 100 will go blazingly fast. The higher the better.
Once you’ve found something nice (click on the name to get a list of what the file contains) click the small green arrow or the link that says “download torrent.” This downloads a small file to your computer. THIS DOES NOT DOWNLOAD THE ACTUAL MUSIC, just a file describing it.
To download the actual music we need some software that connects to the Bittorrent network and goes and gets the actual music from everyone else on the planet who has it. There are plenty of different “bittorrent clients” but by far the best is called uTorrent ( http://www.utorrent.com/ ). Go and download it and install it now. Yes, it’s completely free of spyware and it doesn’t fuck up your computer. You might have to approve your firewall when it asks if uTorrent can connect to the internet.
Once you’ve installed uTorrent, use it to open the small file you downloaded earlier. This tells uTorrent to start downloading it; it will appear in a list of Things uTorrent Is Downloading.
Figure 2: My uTorrent downloads at the moment
As you can see I’ve just downloaded six gigs of John Lee Hooker and 44 gigs of Top Gear. That’s all the Top Gear ever produced.
Sadly, pirating isn’t as fast as normal downloading. An album will usually take a few hours and a film a day or so, if you’ve got enough seeds as described earlier. Speeds vastly increase during the night because internet service providers slow down peer-to-peer networks during the day to stop them getting in the way of people getting home and reading The Sun Online. There’s a Speed graph in one of the tabs at the bottom of uTorrent.
The best strategy is to queue up 20 or so downloads and then leave uTorrent running ALL THE TIME; it shouldn’t slow your internet down too much. If it does, just leave it running overnight. Soon they’ll all start to finish and you’ll be flooded with exciting media!
When finished, store everything somewhere and add it to your mp3 software. You can configure uTorrent to stick everything it downloads in a certain place via options->preferences.
Other good sources apart from The Pirate Bay are mininova, isohunt and demonoid. Just google the first two; demonoid is invitation-only, because it has tons of cool stuff. It’s especially good for high-quality music. Ask me for an invitation. There’s a really interesting trial going on in Sweden, where TPB are based: they’re being sued for copyright infringment and they’re winning.
There you go! Now don’t just sit there. Go and download some metal!
