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Bit Torrent and the return to vinyl

After the Imesh fiasco earlier this year, I was off looking for another place to download music. Superman had mentioned Bit Torrent a couple of times and I had heard of it through some other sources, so I decided to give it a try.

I went looking for a song... figured I'd throw up a softball and see what happened. Didn't find the song. Huh. Searched for another. Well, it found the whole album -- I just want the song. Searched for another... and another -- it's not finding any of them. I have about 40 songs I'm looking for currently -- It didn't find any of them.

I try my 'baseline' check: I put in the search term "50 cent". It comes up with more than 1000 hits. Hmmm... so that's how it is.

So I go looking for some pornography. Well, it finds those search terms just fine. So I pick out a file and start to download. Now, I'm not embellishing here -- it literally took 1 hour and 5 minutes for a 35meg file. It should have taken less than 10 minutes.

The client I used was called 'utorrent'. This was the worst download client I've ever seen. It was rich in detail where it didn't need to be and lacking information I was looking for. It gave me a very nice line graph of upload and download speed (very close to WinMX) but I never knew what I was uploading. It gave me all these great statistics on upload speed, seeds, alternates and a bunch of other things and only gave me download speed in kilobits-per-second.

I'll admit that I'm not the most intelligent person on the planet but this client was confusing. I've dealt with other download clients like Napster, Morpheus, Imesh, WinMx and BearShare -- I can say with clear conscience that this Bit Torrent client I was using was the worst.

I got to looking at my list and noticed that most of the songs on the list (if not all) I already have on vinyl. A couple of months ago I had 'downloaded' an album on vinyl and burned the MP3's to a CD for some acquaintances of mine (friends of Superman?).

Anyhow, the equipment was still set up to record to the computer so I searched through my collection for some choice cuts. I had not heard some of this music in... 10 years? It takes a while to record because you have to listen in real-time (gasp!). No downloading a 4 minutes song in a minute and a half.

People who are not of the age do not understand the warmth of an album. It's not hard for us hybrids to convert albums to CD but I just want to know why this isn't done more often. The latest-and-greatest stuff comes out all the time but we're looking for the oldest-and-obscure stuff. The stuff WE grew up with. Aahh... nobody cares.

We need a new musical era. It seemed to me growing up bands were coming out all the time that changed the musical landscape. I can't remember the last 'supergroup' to come out with an album. Where are they?

I'm easing very nicely into a curmudgeon. Look out Andy Rooney!

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