I use a newsreader program called Newsleecher, which of course you can get a trial from newsleecher.com. From there you can fetch all the groups and sort by the number of headers. The more headers there are, the more postings there are, and likely more active the newsgroup is.

in any case, a couple good places to start for music:

alt.binaries.sounds.mp3
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd

Bumping this back up since I'm in a discussion about this with some people here at school...

I get the whole illegal downloading thing like napster...I've never used P2P network--couldn't begin to even tell you where to find them or what not. But a colleague at school was explaining to me how a person could get around the P2Ps by downloading songs from websites after an internet search?

Is this the same sort of thing as using P2P? What is the legality of this?

I don't think so, my daughter does it somehow through, I think YaHoo. I don't know how she finds them but she does or did before she went to college, not sure is she still is.

I myself have been eating budding meats and getting free downloads from www.puretracks.com

I sometimes use Google to find music in other people's open directories. Go to Google.com and cut & paste this into the search window:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "aerosmith"

Change the last word to whatever you're looking for.

Legal? In a word: no.

quote:

Originally posted by Salmon Dave:

quote:

Originally posted by jimmypop:
Newsgroups... everything is there if you care enough to look for it. No sharing, no slow connections.

So, which newsgroups should we be looking at? There are so many groups, I don't even know where to start.

alt.binaries.howard-stern

quote:

Originally posted by Since69:
I sometimes use Google to find music in other people's open directories. Go to Google.com and cut & paste this into the search window:

-inurlhtm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "aerosmith"

Change the last word to whatever you're looking for.

Legal? In a word: no.

That's what I think they were talking about. I'm curious as to if the RIAA has been going after people doing this or just the P2P stuff.

I just discovered a blog that posts albums for download...with the hope that after you download it, you'll support the artist by buying their work.

I've been tempted to download some stuff I've found on people's sites, but I'm too paranoid that I'll get busted for it.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmypop:

quote:

Originally posted by Blueshound:
Changing course just a bit here. Do you think that by enduring lesser songs on a full CD, you might appreciate the better songs more?

Absolutely not. For the same reason that buying a multipack of dvds always includes one that no one would ever pay for. There is also speculation that DirecTV/cable could be forced to allow people to only pay for the channels they want. Think about that for a second... all those channels that only exist because of bundled subscriptions disappear. I mean really, who's going to pay for the E! network?

I think for a lot of reasons we are becoming an "a la carte" society.

"A la carte" cable programming seems like a great idea until you start looking at how it would affect your overall cable/DTV bill. In most cases the bill will actually go up and in many cases dramatically even if you choose to only buy half the channels you are getting now. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this forum, but lets just say the economics of cable programming and cable/DTV pricing arent as simple as most people think they are.

The cd pricing issue is a whole other matter entirely. I worked for a short time at a cd molding plant where cd's are manufactured from start to finish. An average-sized contract order for cd's including molding, printing, jewel-case, insert and packaging came out to less than 50 cents per finished unit.

There's a reason the RIAA and the record industry are fighting a losing battle to the death against digital file sharing and that reason is simple GREED. With cd's they control all aspects of the industry from locking up bands in iron-clad contracts that are entirely one-sided all the way through the recording process and the entire distribution process. In short, a few large media companies control the end-price the user has to pay at the store and digital file ditribution in essence ends that stranglehold they used to have.