This time last year I was lost somewhere deep in Audiogalaxy. I have had a gander at SoulSeek (which looks like it may have been shutdown) but really there is no comparison. AG was the mutha of mp3 fileshares. Napster, pah, rubbish! How did they get away with it?
Of course what made AG so special was that it logged centrally what you had available for sharing on your hard drive, so if you were offline your colleagues had the opportunity to earmark what they wanted, and when you came back online the mp3s were then made available to them. SoulSeek does have a similar arrangement but the amount of files available is far less and importantly the way of selecting them more rudimentary. For example a search on Sun Ra on AG would bring up 20 full pages (40 tracks per page) of tracks, such a search on SoulSeek brings up a long list, but alot of it is just tracks with the word "Sun" in them. Like "Sunset" by Kenny Barron and "Sundance" by Chick Corea.
The joy of Audiogalaxy was that it spread like a whisper. I told all my friends in hushed tones what I was up to, wink nod "don't tell a soul", as if I was slipping them a fiver. I told my best mate Sacha Dieu in this manner (quite ridiculous because he's a complete luddite), he just laughed at me gently for being a sad freak, but must have stowed it away in that bit of his brain marked "of possible interest to people who own computers". Anyway Sach was in town, and who did he bump into at the Bus-stop but the Aphex Twin. Sach (and me, and me!) and The Twin have a particularly nerdy friend in common, so they got chatting. It turns out the Twin has been caning Audiogalaxy, he's got gigabites of downloads. Sach tells the Twin that he has a mate who's at it too, and that his mate (that's me, are you following this?) is wondering how long they're going to get away with it? And the Twin says something like "No Comment" (twinkle in his eye). You've got to admire the lad's political suss.
Of course when "Druqks" came about the reason Aphex cited for it's release was that he had left his mp3 player on a Trans-Atlantic flight, and was anxious to beat the bootleggers. I have an improbable vision in my mind of some dishonest airhostess with a murky background in orbital raves pumping the Twin's unreleased tunes round the global fireshare and FTP networks. Perhaps there is a correlation between the vaste amount of music which can be fitted on an mp3 player and that commercially released triple-pack slab. Did you download an mp3 ripped off "Druqks"? If so you too are a part of this sorry story.
So anyway, yes Audiogalaxy, RIP and all that. I started this with the intention of telling you about my Hip-Hop downloads, and was going to instruct you to buy 6 Great Mid-Period Hip-Hop LPs. But I'll have to do that another time now.
P.S. If you're a lawyer, all of the above was an exercise in creative writing.
Posted by Woebot at February 5, 2003 12:16 PM