Monday, June 30, 2008

Piracy and Disinformation

"I have a friend" who's downloading music through Bittorrent, Rapidshare and some other http free file hosting sites.

One of the CD's that were downloaded included an inaccurate version of the album, which led me to some thoughts about the authenticity of information you gather from pirated releases.

My friend really liked the album, and his favorite track was "Trail of Life", which he mistakenly thought as the name of the original track.
The mistake has been found later after a friend of his friend went to this band's concert, and retrieved the set list, which named the track "Trail of Fire".


This made both of my friends to go and check, using multiple data sources (the internet and a friend who has the original CD), what is the original name of the track.
Why not trust the set list? Because bands sometimes do not write the exact track names in their set list. Anyhow, the verification showed that the real track name is indeed the one that was written in the list.

Funny thing is, another friend of my friend's friend wrote about this concert in his blog, referencing to "Trail of Fire" as "Trail of Life". Is this a new way to find who is a pirate and who's not?

Moving on, my friend wanted to update his track name and ID3 tag, so he used MediaMonkey to access Amazon cd database and retrieve information about the cd. He was extremely surprised to see that there's another, 9th track which is included in the original release but not in the pirated one.

As it seems, there were two different releases, but one of them (probably) was not nuked properly, so there are two different versions - an accurate one and an inaccurate one, which is encoded in a better quality, but lacks the latest track.

Conclusions:
  1. Buy your CD's.
  2. If you're using pirated copies, verify your downloads with Amazon or other CD database like FreeDB or Gracenote's CDDB.
  3. Do not trust strangers.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

MySpace HiDef MP3 Download

I've got some bands I like that publish their music through MySpace, but I was quite frustrated to find out that the streaming music quality that is provided by the site is pretty low.

Then Ami showed me this site, that allows you to download the original mp3 files that the user uploaded to MySpace!.

Just click on audio, and put the URL of the user in the textbox.

I haven't tried to find out what's going on there, but I guess that the links are found in the original MySpace user page, or that someone reverse engineered MySpace's media player and revealed the URL of the original mp3's. Anyhow it's quite a shame for MySpace to put the original uploaded mp3's under their webroot, but I don't care much :)