bit torrent downloading & killer music

Balthazarr said:
I've heard it's great if you have the tools.
All you need is a computer, and a bit torrent client like burst, or many others, which can be downloaded at no cost. Many sites are totally legit, i.e. not illegal to download. Most of it is recordings that were tapped right off the sound board during live concerts. freely traded, and most interesting, it is a "lossless" type of compression. Another interesting feature is that the more people that are trying to download, the faster it goes! I have found torrents of concerts I attended in the 70's! All sorts of stuff is there, have a look at dimeadozen.com

Russellc
 
Balthazarr said:
How is it with dial-up?
Depends. Bittorrent speeds are normally dictated by how much upload bandwidth you have available. The faster you can upload, the faster you can download, within your bandwidth. However, even with 56 k, which may average you around 5 kbs per sec (been a long time since I've been on dial-up, so pardon if my numbers are wrong), you cannot use the full upload speed. You see, the BT client needs some upload bandwidth to seek other peers, seeders, and to ask for the packets you still need to download. So, letting hte program use your full bandwidth to share will mean a much slower or even a stopped download for you.

A good, easy on the resources BT client is BitTornado. The nice thing about this program, other than not dragging your system down like some of the Java based clients can do, is that you can limit the upload bandwidth the program sees. So, you can, say, set it to allow 3 kbps up leaving the remainder to increase your own download speed.

Just remember, the courteous thing to do with these is to keep uploading even after you have the full live recording until your share ratio is at least 1.00. It helps make downloads faster for others and ensures that the torrent will remain alive (seeders and peers are still active).

- JP
 
Balthazarr said:
Downloading Art Blakey-Stuttgart '78 as I write.

Much easier to use than I thought.

Barely managed to get one tune then cutoff.

What do I use to open .flac
files?
 
FLAC files are encoded. You need a codec to decode them and convert to .wav or aiff files. I have a Mac and use xACT. With a dial-up, torrenting is pretty worthless.
 
I wouldn't say worthless. ONly 19 hrs to go...j/k.
Going much faster than I thought. About 2.5 hrs until I realized there were two dl going.
So I paused one.

Thanks for the link, Carl.
 
CarlV said:
So, you can, say, set it to allow 3 kbps up leaving the remainder to increase your own download speed.
That was just a suggestion for dial-up to allow the download speed to max out the bandwidth, once everything is downloaded in approxiamtely 10-12 hours (a guess for the typical 300 megs ~60 mins of audio takes in FLAC format), then remove the limit and let 'er rip. Just remember to have patience while downloading, so long as there are seeders, you'll get it eventually. With other bandwidths, such as DSL, Cable, etc, the number would be proportionally raised, just so long as there's a little bit of upload bandwidth free.

As to the questions of FLAC format, there's no need to convert to WAV, as CarlV pointed out, there are several players and plug-ins for even more to play these files. There's even a FLAC plug-in for Nero Burning ROM to directly burn the concert recordings to CD for listening onto your big system.

- JP
 
Balthazarr said:
I wouldn't say worthless. ONly 19 hrs to go...j/k.
Going much faster than I thought. About 2.5 hrs until I realized there were two dl going.
So I paused one.

Thanks for the link, Carl.
Yes it can take a while, some shows are on 2 or 3 cds. I dont use dialup, but i often have 4 or 5 downloads going at the same time, and it is sometimes fster that way. It is best to get on a torrent early enough so there are a lot of seeders. The more you can hook up to, the faster you go. If it cuts off, just restart it and it should start right where it left off. If you start to cruise sites of "questionable legality" I would use a client like adversarous or something like that, I have definately misspelled it. It blocks govt and music industry sites with a program called peer guardian. It also updates all protections every 24 hours.

Russellc
 
Balthazarr said:
I wouldn't say worthless. ONly 19 hrs to go...j/k.
Going much faster than I thought. About 2.5 hrs until I realized there were two dl going.
So I paused one.

Thanks for the link, Carl.
You also want one to open shorten files as well.

Russellc
 
Charivari said:
That was just a suggestion for dial-up to allow the download speed to max out the bandwidth, once everything is downloaded in approxiamtely 10-12 hours (a guess for the typical 300 megs ~60 mins of audio takes in FLAC format), then remove the limit and let 'er rip. Just remember to have patience while downloading, so long as there are seeders, you'll get it eventually. With other bandwidths, such as DSL, Cable, etc, the number would be proportionally raised, just so long as there's a little bit of upload bandwidth free.

As to the questions of FLAC format, there's no need to convert to WAV, as CarlV pointed out, there are several players and plug-ins for even more to play these files. There's even a FLAC plug-in for Nero Burning ROM to directly burn the concert recordings to CD for listening onto your big system.

- JP
Yes, for my money nero is the way to go, I always burn to cd or dvd, some of the shows are dvd and are huge!

Russellc
 
great stuff

I have been downloading with bittorrent and direct connect for years. It is the best way to get live recordings and it has turned me on to so many bands. Of the 4 concerts I hope to go to next month 3 of them I found out about through live recordings.
 
I'm trying to get that dbPowerAMP to work on the FLAC files, but when I click on the folder, the files won't show on the conversion/selection table opposite drive content.
I also get a popup asking to select the files.

It works ok with other files such as Winamp.
 
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I'm not sure what you are referring to. I use the right button menu and Windows Explorer. Select files, right click, convert... etc.
2 things I can think of:
1) You need to download the codec from this page

(you need to manually do each codec in the free version)

2) If you do not have the complete file, you do get a codec error message.

Carl
 
I just dl'd the FLAC codec so we'll see if that is the problem.

Before when I'd highlight the folder, the one containing the flac files would not appear on the right side to indicate selection for conversion.

Will report back.
 
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