Buzzsonic.com

The Bit Torrent protocol has been well documented. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the whole of the corresponding costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources.

So, filesharing in the truest sense if you like, where downloaders also upload as they download (if you follow). The more bandwidth and upload stream you share the faster your download (in theory).

Going against that whole equal sharing thing comes a new ratio cheating program called appropriately, ‘Greedy Torrent’. The India based software author Alex NJ calls his app “the survival kit for a leech” . What the freeware program promises to do in a nutshell is boost your bittorrent upload ratio.

GreedyTorrent promises to help you survive on trackers that enforce a minimum 1:1 trading ratio, and can keep you from getting banned for not uploading. It modifies the conversation between your bittorrent client and the tracker, suppressing the actual upload amount.
via Zero Paid

Related Reading

How To Cheat BitTorrent Ratio By Spoofing (Raymond.cc)
RatioMaster (Moofdev.org)
Is BitTorrent Share Ratio Enforcement Really Necessary? (Zeropaid.com)

I was speed reading through my usual pile of daily RSS feeds and came across the Digital TV Weblog who directed me to the NBC TV website where their big network smash ‘Heroes’ has a series of comic books which are a part of the plot of that show and can be accessed and downloaded in PDF or Flash versions.

There’s 25 episodes so far, all available for free (the comics, not the shows).

via Digital TV Weblog

Related Links

Heroes Episodes 1-15 Replays (NBC TV)

I have three MySpace profiles, one for my latest music project, one to network my travel site and one which acts as an archive for my old bands music. My latest music profile (the 99th Floor Elevators) is the most active and has proved great for networking and making new contacts in that field.

I actually hate manually visiting MySpace daily so a neat ’shortcut’ is to install the unofficial MySpace Firefox toolbar which is unobtrusive enough and enables you to quickly toggle between profile pages, messages and the like. The toolbar auto hides when the MySpace page is closed. One thing the toolbar is lacking is the ability to log-in to multiple accounts, that would make it even handier.

Related Links
Download Unofficial MySpace Toolbar (Mozilla.org)
MySpace Toolbar Home (Freewebs.com)

There’s me rambling on about Firefox extensions in my last post then I stumble across this lunatic (with too much time on his hands?) who installed the top 100 Firefox extensions on his browser. Amazingly it still worked.

Firefox With 100 Extensions Installed @ Flickr

This one is really down to individual needs and every user is different but here’s what Add-Ons I’m running right now as part of my ‘ultimate’ browser set-up. Naturally my browser of choice is Firefox and has been for about three years.

First I dumped the default Firefox theme and installed Noia 2.0 Extreme which is a little more streamlined and sharper looking.

I read way too many RSS news feeds daily and if I’m not using my desktop reader of choice, FeedDemon (which has recently replaced RSS Bandit) Sage is a brilliant RSS feed reader and manager that tends to be less resources heavy than the desktop equivalents and sits in the sidebar of Firefox. Read the rest of this entry »

Its been a while since we featured any posts on musical mash-ups here. Since the last mention (the excellent Green Day mash) the word mash up has taken on a slightly different meaning. Now the term is more likely associated with the latest Google Maps Api mash up rather than the latest frankenstein pop remix flying out of some digital DJ’s laptop studio.

Latest renegade remixers to join the fray are the Brooklyn based DJ duo Sound Advice who have ironically (see DJ Dangermouse) chosen to weld the music from the ubiquitous Gnarls Barkley album ‘St Elsewhere’ to the vocals from deceased rapper Biggie Smalls biggest hits.
The result is Gnarls Biggie a hit and miss collection of eleven tracks (all available as MP3’s naturally). ‘Smilie Faces Hypnotize’, ‘Gimme The Online Loot’ and ‘The Last Nasty Boy’ are worth more than one spin but the simple A vs. B formula is not nearly as inspired as the more elaborate examples of the ‘art’ like DJ Dangermouse’s (half of Gnarls Barkley) groundbreaking Beatles vs Jay Z mash up the ‘Grey Album’ or the aformentioned Green Day (or Dean Gray) remix project.

The guys have already got themselves banned from MySpace (though another ‘fan page’ has already sprung up). The cease and desist is in the post.

Related Reading

Gnarls Barkley Mashed Up with B.I.G (Spin.com)
Green Day Mash Up Leads to Cease and Desist Order, Grey Tuesday Style Protest (MTV News)
Grey Album Poducer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It (MTV News)
Gnarls Barkley (Wikipedia)
Sound Advice Blog (Blogspot)
Party Ben (PartyBen.com)
Mark Vidler (GoHomeProductions)
Grey Tuesday:A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain (EFF.org)
Grey Tuesday-Free the Grey Album (GreyTuesday.org)

Here’s a neat piece of software that I discovered care of Gina Trapani’s excellent weekly tipsheet ‘Geek To Live’ at Lifehacker.

If you’re like me you probably have a stack of passwords and log-ins hidden away in secure .doc files, scraps of paper and the like. Alternatively you can keep a secure and searchable database to retrieve those hard to remember passwords without compromising security using the free, open source software application KeePass.

There’s a great ‘how-to’ at Lifehacker here, so I wont repeat it.

Related Reading

Strong Passwords: How To Create and Use Them (Microsoft.com)
Choosing Your Password (Yahoo Security Center)

The brilliant Green Day mash-up album we mentioned a few days ago has already had the plugged pulled by Warner Bros music officials apparently.

You can follow the subject at mashers hang out Get Your Bootleg On. Naturally the old download link is now dead but there’s a growing groundswell of support for the project just as there was for the famed (and similarily outlawed) DJ Dangermouse mashup, ‘The Grey Album’. You can, as of this minute grab the album here and read up further on the planned music activism set for December 13th.

Elsewhere this week we’ve stumbled across a Madonna mash-up project (‘the Immaculate Concoction’), one from Radiohead and a 50 Cent/Queen ‘co-lab’. Of course the artists themselves are blissfully unaware of all the DiY remix activity going on.

Related Links

Dean Grey Tuesday (Alt.fm)
RIAA Targets Mash-Ups (BoingBoing.com)
Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash up of Music and Politics (FirstTuesday.org)
Raiding The 20th Century, the History of the Cut-up (Musicalbear.com)
The Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse (BannedMusic.org)

We’re big fans of well done mash-ups here at Buzzsonic and one of the better done bootleg DJ mash-ups (or, unofficial remix/bastard pop to give it two of its many names) in the last eighteen months has easily been San Francisco DJ Party Bens ‘remodel’ of Green Days ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ (as Boulevard of Broken Songs) which seemlessly mixes up Green Day and Oasis and throws in a bit of Travis for good measure. There’s even a companion video mashup of the audio mashup here.

Now Australian mashers Team 9 have taken on the whole of Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ album with great effect.

‘American Edit’ grabs the album, shakes out all the crap bits and sprinkles the whole project liberally with cheeky samples from the likes of Johnny Cash, Queen, the KLF and Ashanti, amongst plenty more. Wholely applauded at the ‘bootleg barometer’ GYBO.
Stand out track for us is ‘Novacaine Rhapsody’ a brilliant mixup of ‘Give Me Novacaine’ and Queens ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, pure brilliance. Grab the album while you can here.

Get Your Mash On….

Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO)
NWA As Remixed Illegal Art (Buzzsonic)
Primal Scream Get The Mash-up Treatment (Buzzsonic)
Beatmixed (Beatmixed.com)

We covered early developments on the forthcoming legal P2P services, from Mashboxx and Snocap back in November of last year. Napster (MK 1) founder Shaun Fanning’s new legal P2P (ie:major label friendly) service Snocap had agreed a deal with the Universal Music Group to distribute the major labels content using the digital fingerprinting software being adapted from a Philips blueprint.

At the same time Sony/BMG had been in talks with Mashboxx boss, ex-Grokster and Blubster president, Wayne Rosso.

Snocaps talks with the EMI Group began almost six months ago and an official deal with the UK major was announced to the press yesterday.

David Munns, Chairman and CEO for EMI Music, North America said in a statement, “This deal with Snocap underscores EMI’s commitment to developing legitimate ways to deliver our music in more ways to more fans, including peer-to-peer distribution models that ensure creators are compensated for their works.”

He continued, “This sends a signal to music industry critics who claim we are technophobic. If anything, we are embracing technologies like Snocap, which allow the P2P community to share music legally. It’s a big step forward for fans, artists and copyright owners.”

Mashboxx, who are going to be using the Snocap technology for their own P2P service started signing up beta testers on their website today, for the yet to be seen music delivery service.

Snocap is a technology embedded in a P2P network to block sharing of unauthorized works, including unlicensed music and pornography and facilitate commercial transactions. Audio fingerprinting provides the digital ‘fingerprint’ of an audio recording by deriving unique features that can be used to identify the music by comparing it with reference fingerprints stored in a central database.

That fingerprinting tool could be integrated into the file-swapping software itself in several different ways. Once an identification is made, the download could be blocked, unless the computer user pays a fee, as if they were downloading a song from iTunes or another digital song store.

Mashboxx’s P2P app will use Fanning’s technology to reveal which shared songs are being monitored on behalf of Snocap’s label customers. Download a track that is, and Mashboxx’s software slips in a DRM-protected version that invites you to pay, to listen, to burn or whatever usage the copyright holder permits.

Background Reading

EMI Signs Up For ‘Authorised’ Online Music Sharing [Reuters]
Mashboxx Opens Beta Test Scheme [theRegister.com]
EMI Signs on With Snocap [Slyck.com]
Content Identification:Audio Fingerprinting [Philips Research]
Napster Founder in Major Label P2P Talks [Buzzsonic News]
EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue [Buzzsonic News]
Napster Guru Fanning Breaks Snocap Silence [Buzzsonic News]
Grokster [Wikipedia]
The Major Labels [PBS Frontline]
Wayne Rosso on File-Sharing Frontiers [TechNewsWorld.com]

As an indication of how widespread the phenomena of Podcasting is becoming, early adopters are springing up in the most unlikely places. Father Roderick Vonhogen, Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht in the Netherlands led Internet listeners on an intimate audio tour that allowed them to pay one last visit to Pope John Paul II before he was laid to rest earlier this month with his podcast show , “The Night the Pope Died” delivered in MP3 format and downloadable from his Catholic Insider website.

Catholic Insider and thousands of other podcasts can be found through directories like Podcast Alley , Podcasting News and Podcast.net while free software like iPodder, Doppler and iPodder X automatically downloads new shows as they become available. Listeners can transfer their podcasts to an Apple iPod or other portable MP3 player, and listen to them when and where they wish.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one in three U.S. adults who own an MP3 player have listened to a podcast, though the survey’s small sample size of respondents means that figure could be substantially lower, according to some critics. In all, 2,201 people were interviewed, including 208 owners of iPods or MP3 players.

Pew Internet researcher Mary Madden told the NewsFactor website. “Podcasting is clearly a growing online phenomenon,” she says. “It is part of the larger notion of the Internet being a democratizing medium. Anyone who has the basic tools, a basic grasp of technology, can do it. Podcasting is definintely mimicking blogging in a lot of ways,” Madden continues. “In a lot of cases, they are audio versions of someone’s personal rant for the day.”

Related Reading

Podcasting Catches On [Pew Internet PDF]
Six Million Podcasters and Counting [NewsFactor.com]
Podcasting In The Dark [Washington Times]
iPods and MP3 Players Storm the Market [Pew Internet]
Podcasting Tools [Podcasting-Tools.com]

We mentioned Podscope, the search engine for Podcasts last week. Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider behind the venture had promised a launch this month and sure enough they kept their promise.

Pretty neat it is too, a very basic front end with just a logo and search box. We did a search for ‘new wave’ looking for a possible MP3 blog that was micro-broadcasting old punk chestnuts from the 70s. Nine results came back. Next to each search result you get a + sign, click on that and a drop down reveals a couple of buttons to play a clip, a link to the podcast site and another link which opens the originating site in a framed page with the choice of playing back the show via Windows Media or Quick Time players. Theres also a link to the RSS feed URL so you can plug the feed straight into your podcast software of choice and a link to download the whole show. We thought it was pretty cool.

Related Links

Podcasting [Wikipedia.org]
iPodder [Sourceforge]
Podshow [Podshow.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
How to Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own [Engadget.com]

I know there has been a lot of hype about Firefox, its faster, its this, its that. Its actually not massively faster than Internet Explorer (IE) but its a damn site more secure. Here we’re still using both browsers , simply because its going to be a long time before web design becomes compatible with both browsers by default. Some web sites look absolutely cack in Firefox believe it or not whilst I bet 99% work just fine in IE. A lot of sites load slowly in Firefox too, simply because they were optimised with IE in mind.

Anyway, its not all hype. There’s a little additional search box on my Firefox that enables me to search Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IMDB, the fabulous Wikipedia and tons more without having to use a load of toolbars. Although I have it there on IE by default, the Google toolbar slows things down a tad.

One thing we have noticed on this site (taking in its previous incarnation as MusicbizNews24.com too) and one of our search directories, Floorelevators.net, a short while ago the browser % of our visitors was 80/10 (with 10% using other alternatives) in Internet Explorers favour. From this weeks figures on the server stats there has been a big swing with figures now 52/31% in favour of IE, with the remaining 17% of browsers split between Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror and Camino. If people have any doubts that IE could ever be over taken, look at what happened to the original Netscape browser.

Related Reading

Comparison Of Web Browsers [Wikipedia.org]
Are The Browser Wars Back? [Slate.MSN]
Browser Wars [Wikipedia.org]

P2P software pioneer Ian Clarke, creator of the Open Source P2P platforms Freenet and more recently Dijjer has this week quietly unveiled his latest project, Indy.

Speaking to P2PNet Clarke promised that Indy, “does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.” Indy uses collaborative filtering, a system similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.

“Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like.”

“We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked.”

According to Clarke, Indy is inspired by iRate, another collaborative music filtering set-up. As users rate music in iRate it automatically finds more free music that you’ll like by finding people with similar music tastes. Indy is said to have a much cleaner and simpler user interface and it is freely available for Windows OS initially with other platforms in development.

Submit Music to Indy

Related Links

iRate Radio [iRateRadio.com]
Freenet Creator Unveils Dijjer P2P [Buzzsonic News]
Dijjer [Dijjer.org]
The Free Network Project [Sourceforge]
Mobster [Sourceforge]
Collaborative Filtering Research Papers [JamesThornton.com]
Collaborative Filtering Comes To Independent Music Makers [MasterNewMedia.org]
The Music Business and the Big Flip [Shirky.com]
InDiscover [InDiscover.net]

Everyone who is anyone now seems to have a ‘Podcast’ or is name dropping some obscure micro broadcast show nowadays. Others are already looking at the possibilities of “broadcatching”, put simply, podcasts with video besides just compressed audio content delivery.

Broadcatching refers to the use of RSS feeds and BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing as an alternative to distributing multimedia content on the Internet. Podcasting meets Tivo said some wise spark, other people have already labelled it Vlogging, or the self explanatary ‘video blogging’.

Latest sofware app for Windows users is a beta version of ANT which was released last week. ANT is an video RSS aggregator and player that has been available for Mac for a while now and has already been incorporated into a hack with the Sony PSP.

ANT can playback any media format and will sync audio with iTunes for playback on any MP3 portable. You can subscribe to any ‘Podcast’ or RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures and ANT will automatically download any audio and video content. ANT is currently freeware and still in Beta for both Mac and PC.

Thanks to Scobleizer

Related Reading

Experimenting With BiTTorrent and RSS 2.0 [Blogs.Harvard.edu]
How To Create Your Own Podcast [About.com]
PSPcasting on Your Mac [Engadget]
Video Blogging [VideoBlogging.info]
Ready For Your Close-up? Here Come The Vlogs [MSNBC]
Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings [NY Times]
RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo [ScottRaymond.net]
BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution [eWeek.com]
BroadCatching Using RSS + BitTorrent to Automatically Download TV Shows [Engadget]

Seems nobody and nothing is sacred in the world of the bootleg remixer, the bastard pop purveyer or the mash-up DJ/remixer. Impeccable coincidence it seems in light of Steven Speilbergs forthcoming (June 29th in the US) Tom Cruise starred remake, but latest opus to get the once over is Jeff Wayne’s 1976 ‘rock musical concept album of the film’, ‘War Of The Worlds’, courtesy of one Grafyte (aka Alex C) Dundee student by day, DJ and Masher by night.

Thankfully he edited the whole thing down to less than half an hour and threw in a bunch of breaks and the like from Leftfield, Faithless, Led Zeppelin and the Prodigy to liven up the prog rock classic and make it into one of the best mash-up projects I’ve heard in many many months. A bit of a keeper and handled with great respect for the original it has to be said.

Download from here

Trailer for Steven Spielbergs remake of ‘War Of The Worlds’ here.

Related

War Of The Worlds Trailers [Apple.com]
The Complete War of the Worlds [WOTW.org]
Study Guide for H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898) [Washington State Uni.]
Get Your Bootleg On [GYBO.org]
Yet More Beatles Mash Up Mayhem [Buzzsonic News]
Music For the Bootleg Generation [Buzzsonic News]

We ran a report on the uber-fast Internet2 college broadband network back in November last year. At the time the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were said to be in tentative talks with the administrators of Internet2, hoping both to test next-generation video delivery projects and to monitor peer-to-peer piracy on the ultra high-speed network.

No great surprise that today the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed lawsuits against 405 students at 18 colleges in the U.S. , alleging that they are using the private-research network to trade pirated songs. According to the RIAA, students with access to Internet2 are increasingly using a file-sharing application called i2hub to “steal copyrighted songs and other works on a massive scale,” the organization said in a statement released yesterday.

“Students find i2hub especially appealing because they mistakenly believe their illegal file-sharing activities can’t be detected in the closed environment of the Internet2 network,” it continued.

To connect to this extremely fast network students need to download a free client from Direct Connect who’s website states, “Unlike other impersonal, server-driven file-sharing networks, Direct Connect offers a community-oriented, open, user-controlled network.”

Internet2 is part of the Abilene network and is essentially a vastly faster version of the Internet, a proving ground for high-bandwidth technologies. Speaking to Tech Republic last year Steve Corbato, the director of backbone network infrastructure for Internet2 said, “Abilene has become a necessity for research universities,and it’s not just about building a really fast network. University members rely on it to collaborate with colleagues and students around the world.”

The network used by Internet2 was launched in 1998 by a nonprofit consortium of 206 universities, 70 corporate partners (including IBM and Microsoft) and a number of government agencies, including the Library of Congress, to develop the next generation of Internet technologies.

The RIAA has sued more than 9,000 people for distributing songs using peer-to-peer software like Grokster and Morpheus in the past two years.

In a seperate action announced yesterday the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the world governing body for the international music industry said they were launching the biggest wave of legal actions against internet music file-sharers yet. New cases were launched against 963 individuals in 11 countries across Europe and Asia. Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, Iceland and Japan pursued illegal song-swappers for the first time

Related Links

RIAA Targets New Piracy Epidemic On Special High-Speed Campus Network [RIAA]
High-Speed US Net ‘Pirates’ Sued [BBC News]
RIAA Sues More Than 400 College Students Over Internet2 Downloads [MTV]
New Wave of Lawsuits to Hit ‘Illegal File Swappers’ [the Register]
Music File Sharers Face Biggest Round of Legal Actions Yet [IFPI]
Internet 2: 2004 And Beyond [Tech Republic]
MPAA Eyes Internet2 P2P Traffic [Buzzsonic News]

We’ve already mentioned the Beastles and the ‘Revolved’ Beatles remix mash-ups on these pages in recent weeks and now there’s another one worthy (or not) of your attention. Beatallica.

Although they’re not in the truest sense of the meaning, mash-up or ‘bastard pop’ as celebrated vigorously on the bootleggers ‘bible’, ‘Get Your Bootleg On’ (or GYBO to those in the know), Beatallica have the spirit of the art down to a tee. A sense of humour and an unlikely clashing of musical genres. Online rockzine Blabbermouth probably summed them up the best by saying that musically they were, “arrangements of Fab Four standards with wonderfully unsubtle references
to Metallica’s songs and a spot-on imitation of James Hetfield’s distinctive vocals…”

So probably more in common with parody like the Rutles and Dread Zeppelin than the genius of Loo and Placido but worthy of a mention here also for their usage of BitTorrent to distribute both their albums, ‘A Garage Dayz Night’ and ‘Beatallica’, not only in the ubiquitous MP3 format but in the lossless audio format Flac. Props all round and great fun to boot (no pun etc….).

Related Reading

Another Beatles Mash Up [MusicbizNews24.com]
Meet the Beastles [MusicbizNews24.com]
Music For the Bootleg Generation [MusicbizNews24.com]
Culture Deluxe [CultureDeluxe.com]

Big Beat ‘Godfathers’ the Chemical Brothers are the latest big names from the world of ‘Electronica’ to get booted and remixed on the eve of the release of their new album ‘Push The Button’.

The Prodigy have been given the same honour twice. Last November ‘Music For The Bootleg Generation’ an unofficial remix of the ten year old rave classic ‘Music For the Jilted Generation’ appeared on BitTorrent and mash-up websites. Their last album, ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ appeared on P2P networks, remixed, as ‘Always Outsiders, Never Outdone’ even before the release of the official album.

The Chemicals unofficial remix/mash-up album ‘Flip The Switch’ will be available for download tomorrow, with renegade reworkings from mash up scene hipsters like Cry.On.My.Console, Fake ID, Dunproofin, McSleazy, Big Bad Baz and others. The official album ‘Push The Button’ is released the same day.

Related Reading

Flip The Switch [ChemicalBrothersRemixed.com]
Chemical Brothers-Official Site [ChemicalBrothers.com]
Music for the Bootleg Generation [MusicbizNews24.com]
Boom Selection [BoomSelection.info]

The P2P underground is buzzing this week with further news on the imminent appearance of Exeem, the new file sharing app from the people behind the popular outlawed Bit Torrent site Suprnova.org. Suprnova.org, deemed a Universal BitTorrent source, was a web site which distributed descriptor files for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Many of these torrents described could potentially have been used for copyright infringement.

Although the Slovenian based site didn’t actually host any illegal files, but links to Torrents, the owners pulled the plug on the site December 19th 2004 after various legal threats from, in particular the MPAA after a protracted worldwide clampdown on movie file sharing from the film industry body and various copyright and legal bodies.

In an interview conducted by net radio station NovaStream.org yesterday (December 30th) spokesman Sloncek explained that eXeem is “like Kazaa and BitTorrent,” though unlike the Bit Torrent tracker sites Exeem is decentralized. The software is being developed by an anonymous (so far) company called Swarm Systems Inc., registered on the Caribbean islands of Saint Kitts and Nevis an ‘offshore ruse’ used to good effect more recently by the under fire Kazaa.

Cynics and critics have already expressed disappointment in the much hyped file sharing application with its proposed use of adware to finance development and the possibility of it being just another decentralised P2P network like Kazaa. There’s an early Beta test review here and latest screenshots here and you can download the Beta software for Exeem here.

Related Reading

Sloncek Announces Upcoming Arrival of eXeem [Slyck.com]
Is Suprnova Exeem For Real? [P2PNet.net]
Novastream Radio Sloncek Interview [Novastream.org]
Decentralizing Bit Torrent [Slashdot.org]
TorrentBits.org and Suprnova.org Go Dark [Slashdot.org]
Suprnova.org Wikipedia [Wikipedia.org]
BitTorrent Operator Bites Back at MPAA [InternetNews.com]
The Bit Torrent Effect [WiredMag.com]
BitTorrent Plus Kazaa Equals… Exeem? [ExtremeTech.com]
Interview with Sloncek of SuprNova [Slyck.com]
The BitTorrent P2P File-sharing System [the Register]

Boston, Mass. based spinner DJBC is the lastest Mash-up instigator to have a bash at the Beatles with his Beastles project. A mash-up of the Beastie Boys and the Beatles, unsurprisingly. There’s 9 tracks on the site and even downloadable cover art. Not sure if its on par with the much mentioned ‘trendsetting’ DJ Dangermouse ‘Grey Album’ Beatles mash-up but its a lot of fun and better than the Beatallica project.

Widespread publicity will probably mean a C&D somewhere along the line so grab the downloads while you can.

Related Links

Beastie Boys
The Beatles
Get Your Bootleg On [Gybo V3]
At Last the Mash-up Has Gone Mainstream [NewsDay.com]
Raiding the 20th Century, the History of the Cutup [MusicalBear.com]
Protest Music [Alternet.org]
BeatMixed [Beatmixed.com]
Boom Selection [BoomSelection.info]
Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash up of Music and Politics [FirstTuesday.org]

Everybody who knows a little about P2P file applications will be aware of BitTorrent, the fact that it has long been the most popular P2P measured by the amount of data transferred between users and that it was created three years ago in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen.

More importantly, BitTorrent uses a file sharing system known as ’swarming’ . It works by breaking a file into lots of little packets, distributing those packets around to computers that have downloaded the file, and randomly requesting those packets from whoever has them. Most notably, the system allows many people to download the same file without slowing down everyone else’s download effectively making more efficient useage of bandwidth.

Though BitTorrent is the P2P app gaining all the column inches in the worldwide press due to recent litigation from the MPAA the first peer-to-peer content delivery system to use the term “Swarming Downloads” was Swarmcast, invented by Justin Chapweske and bought by open source P2P developer OpenCola back in 2001.

Chapweske’s latest project from his Onion Networks outfit, SwarmStream –software algorithms that will let users stream video and audio data more rapidly– was unveiled this week . “If people are impressed by Bittorrent, they’re going to be absolutely blown away by swarmstreaming and how far we’ve taken swarming since its humble beginnings five years ago,” promises the software author.

This third generation swarming technology greatly enhances swarming by allowing streaming or progressive playback of media files. This means that users can watch videos while they are still being downloaded. “Swarming is mathematically provable as the fastest way to download data,” says Chapweske, founder and CEO of Onion Networks. “Whether it’s a web page, a pdf or a video file, computers are now going to be able to stream it.”

“The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they’re playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don’t have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.”

The technique of downloading a single file in pieces from multiple sources is also used in peer-to-peer systems
derived from Gnutella such as BearShare and LimeWire.

Related Reading

Data Swarms to Speed Net Streaming [NewScientist.com]
Swarmblog [Chapweske.com]
Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide [Dessent.net]
Has Hollywood Met its Napster? [Wired.com]
P2P Makes its Business Case [InternetNews.com]
Open Cola:Swarming Folders [OpenP2P.com]
OpenCola Creates Collaborative Computing Solutions for Content Communities [EContentMag.com]
Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent’s Lifetime [Pam2004.org] 12pg PDF

AudioFeast, a subscription radio service that offers downloadable radio shows for portable players–the first of its kind, the company said has raised $10 million in funding through venture capital firms Mayfield who led the investment round, and were joined by Worldview Technology Partners and previous company investors.

AudioFeast said the additional funds will be used to further advance its product and business development opportunities and enhance its sales efforts. AudioFeast is currently compatible with iRiver, Rio, iRock, Creative Labs, Dell and RCA MP3 players and is available via several subscription plans beginning at $2.99. AudioFeast also offers a free service with eight, 60-minute channels of popular music, news sports and entertainment and other programs.

“In deciding to invest in AudioFeast, we were especially impressed with the company’s strategy of being the premier portable Internet radio provider,” said Irwin Gross of Worldview Technology Partners. “There is a tremendous potential for AudioFeast’s service to grow with emerging MP3 market, and Worldview is committed to being part of this growing personalized entertainment space.”

The subscription based web radio service debuted at the DemoMobile conference in September. The service delivers over 400 channels of programming and acts like a sort of TiVO for radio, letting you capture and listen to favorite radio programming at leisure somewhat like Podcasting in essence in that you subscribe to the programmes you want, sync and plug in your compatible portable audio player and then listen while you’re on the move or at your PC.

Related Reading

Audiofeast Raises $10 Million in Funding [DesignTechnica]
Podcasting [Wikipedia.org]
Audiofeast [SlimDevices.com]
AudioFeast: Radio Streams for Digital Portables [MP3Newswire.net]
Almost Retro? It’s Radio for MP3 Players [CNet News]
AudioFeast Launches Internet Radio Service [NewsFactor.com]
Podcasting Directory [Podcasting.net]

A German television development company is planning to launch free viewing on the internet with the help of a revolutionary Web service that aims to give viewers access to any programme they want from almost anywhere in the world. Viewers will need little more than a television connected to a computer. The computer will be set up to upload a chosen television programme on to the internet, where other viewers will be able to download and broadcast it on their own sets almost instantaneously.

Cybersky hopes to do for live television programming what Napster and Kazaa did for music and movies. Television software engineer Guido Ciburski teamed up with Petra Bauersachs, his partner at their small TV technology company in the southern German town of Koblenz and has been developing the service for three years. At the end of January, the company, TC Unterhaltungselektronic, will unveil the service which will, says Ciburski, enable broadband users to distribute video programmes free, and exchange them with others on a platform similar to the peer-to-peer file sharing of Grokster and Kazaa.

Cybersky could shake up the television industry in the same way Kazaa and Grokster shook up the music and film industry. The legal departments of German broadcasters are already monitoring the software’s progress and legal analysts say Cybersky’s potential for trading licensed programming could open up another front line in the court battles that have dogged file-sharing software since the days of Napster.

In an interview with the Independent newspaper in the UK Mr. Ciburski refused to divulge how he developed the technology: “That would be giving away the vital secret,” he said. “All I can say is that without broadband it would have been difficult.” In practice, cyberspace should allow fans of programmes such as The Office to go on holiday in Hawaii and still get the show fed live into their hotel bedside laptop with only a five-to 10-second delay.

Mr Ciburski says he circumvented the overload problems that have affected video-streaming applications by developing software that relies on what is called “peer-to-peer networking” technology. He adds: “Instead of using our own servers to distribute programmes, we will be giving the job to the computers of Cybersky’s subscribers.”

After downloading Cybersky software, users, with the help of a TV card or Webcam, a DSL connection and a connector between their television and computer, will be able to upload the programming they are watching onto a sharing platform. It sounds like a cross between Tivo and BitTorrent and the prospect of anybody with a PC being able to redistribute “The Simpsons” and “Sex in the City” is going to give television executives nightmares, certainly in the light of recent MPAA activity.

Related Reading
P2P Television? [We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com]
Global TV Shakes up Industry [DW-World.de]
Coming to Your Home Soon: Free Television Shows via the Internet [the Independent]
Peoples Television [MSNBC]
CyberSky FAQ [TVToon.de]
P2P Internet Television or Bit Torrent Copycat? [Unmediated.org]
Atzio P2P Television [Atzio.com]
P2P+RSS Are the Future of TV Broadcasting [MasterNewMedia.org]
P2P TV [PortlandPhoenix.com]
Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News [Planetwork Journal]

Edmonds, Washington headquartered digital media company Netmusic.com today announced the acquisition of Los Angeles based independent music distributor and download platform Audio Lunchbox. The combination of both companies catalogs creates the largest online collection of independent music in the world — a licensed catalog of over one million tracks, incorporating 4000 plus labels.

Downloads from the Audio Lunchbox website are unrestricted by digital rights and geographical limitations making the catalog available worldwide in the popular MP3 format encoded at 192 kbps variable bit rate (VBR) and in the emerging open source compression codec Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis files (which have an .ogg extension) compress to a smaller size than MP3 files and are said to be of better quality though the format has limited support from current portable digital audio players.

“We are thrilled to join forces with Audio Lunchbox,” said NetMusic Entertainment CEO Glen Starchman. “The acquisition of Audio Lunchbox makes NetMusic the largest independent music community on the Internet.”

“We now have the firepower to achieve our vision of bringing great independent bands to the masses,” said Morgan Harris, CEO of Audio Lunchbox. “The deal gives Audio Lunchbox a tremendous boost. The acquisition is a win-win-win for the artists, our users and the Company.”

AudioLunchbox’s nearest rival is industry ‘veteran’ EMusic who have been offering unrestricted downloads since 1998 and boast a catalog of over 500 000 tracks.

Related Links

Indie Only Audio Lunchbox Serves Music With no DRM [MacWorld.com]
the Orchard Independent Distribution [theOrchard.com]
Ogg Vorbis Tutorial [AngryCoffee.com]
About EMusic [EMusic.com]