Edith Frost » audiogalaxy

Ahh haa!!

edith — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:59:24 +0000

Wil finally set up the record player! Listening to Hartman’s Heartbreakers. Western swing hokum. Sounds like rockabilly but it’s from 1936. #
Western Swing on 78 (run by an ol’ Audiogalaxy pal :-)
GAAHH!! Sudoku Monster is killing me. #

Au revoir to AG pals

edith — Tue, 18 Jun 2002 06:21:33 +0000

I’m running around on Audiogalaxy trying to gather e-mail addresses and new locations for all the people I’ve met in the past ~2 years, and all the genre-specific groups I’ve joined at one time or another. It’s pretty sad. The message boards over there are all boiling over with postings. Most people are cursing the RIAA and a lot of them are swearing they’ll never buy another CD again. I keep thinking… please don’t boycott the INDIE labels!! But it’s no use, people are just furious, and for good reason. It’s like someone coming in and taking away our TV remote… we want to be able to hear good music, and THEN choose what we’re going to buy, not the other way around! And most of all, we want access to music that is no longer in print. For me that’s the biggest problem of all. If you can’t buy something, and you’re not allowed to share anything but the "authorized" material, then 90% of everything that’s ever been recorded in the past hundred years is off-limits. That’s just a crime; there has to be a better way!!

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the ISM group. We’re all discussing the options, talking about where to go. We have new members knocking on the door and I don’t know what to do about it… I would hate to admit them, only to kick everybody out 2 days later! Anyway, I need to keep it open for the time being, until the fury dies down a little and people start moving off to wherever they’re going to go. How sad, how stupid.

We have a group theme song of sorts… "It’s A Gas" by Alfred E. Neuman. Good luck finding that on yer Kazaas or what have you! It’s from an old Mad Magazine record. There are a million obscure songs like that, that will be so hard to find on any of the filesharing services I know of. Just the fact that you can’t keep a wish-list of songs — you have to keep typing titles in over and over — it’s an insult, it’s like going back to the Stone Age!!

Audiogalaxy is done for

edith — Mon, 17 Jun 2002 15:39:32 +0000

Looks like Audiogalaxy is done for. My queue suddenly disappeared; every song on the whole site is now blocked! Except for the few things that are being specially hosted on AG’s own servers, which is nothing I really want. They’ve fixed it so musicians are going to have to "opt in" to get their songs shared on AG… which means my little group is kaput.

Might as well confess: for the past seven months I’ve been running a really cool group on Audiogalaxy, under my username charmap. I’ve kept my identity mostly anonymous up ’til now, because it didn’t matter who I was… my own music has nothing to do with the crap we’re trading in that group. Which is called Incredibly Strange Music, after the RE/search book/compilation of outsider and incorrect music. We got a little over a hundred members and we’re song-spammers — we trade rotten music with each other, and 99% of it is out of print. None of the artists we trade are going to be calling AG to give their permission. We can’t share music anymore, simple as that. Fucking RIAA assholes!!! I’m sorry… I know AG wasn’t going about things the right way, but I wish they could’ve made it work somehow. Why couldn’t it work the same way radio works? You can play anything you want on the radio, you don’t have to get permission first! And the musicians get paid, so why can’t the file-trading services figure out a way to do the same thing? Monitor what people are trading, and make payments to BMI and ASCAP for whatever got traded.

Argh. I got soooo much amazing stuff from my weird-music pals on AG. We had a lotta laughs. I’m in another group too, for antique Western Swing music, and it’s the same story… people are making MP3s from their old 78s to trade, and of course there’s no way we’re ever going to get somebody’s freakin’ permission for that.

Well, maybe it’s for the best anyhow. I have to get our apartment packed up, I have all kinds of things I could be doing other than listening to terrible old novelty songs and shit. Whatever it takes to pry my hands off this computer! But still, waaaaahhhhh…

A lot of people are migrating to Filetopia. But there’s no Mac client for it. So I dunno… I think I’m just going to wait and see. I’ll keep an eye on the techie websites and see what happens in the world of P2P. It really is sad, that there can’t be a way for us to do this legitimately and legally. Really harshes my mellow.

Audiogalaxy lawsuit

edith — Sun, 26 May 2002 08:59:44 +0000

Just heard about the RIAA’s lawsuit against Audiogalaxy. I figured it was only a matter of time. :-(

Meanings of W.E.I.R.D.

edith — Wed, 20 Feb 2002 18:04:20 +0000

Note: This is a journal entry — it was written on paper or on my computer, then transferred to my website, maybe years later.

You know my Incredibly Strange Music group on Audiogalaxy? I had to remove (expel) a member just now for the first time. And it’s a shame because he was one of the original members when I first started the group in December. Well, he was a pain in the ass then and he’s been a pain in the ass all along, despite repeated warnings and threats to eject him. His infractions were almost too numerous to mention: he would flood the message board with egocentric posts. He would insult me on the message board and insult anyone who also felt he was being a pain. Worst of all he kept sending crappy commercial music. Not 100% bad shit, maybe 66% was questionable and 33% was good. That’s why it sucks that it had to come to this, because I will miss the 33% good shit he posted. What an idiot.

Ryan Hembrey’s back from his month-long European tour with Manishevitz. Him and Adam Vida are coming over on Monday for a band meeting, to discuss how we’re going to work out the money arrangements and everything for the tour. Come to think of it I guess I should ask Jim if he wants to come too! Don’t want to exclude the only other Chicago bandmember.