Music, part 1

This is the first of a series of posts on great music sites out there on the Internet. The first site we'll visit is much, much bigger than just music, but in keeping with our theme that's what I'm concentrating on. Why should you care? Read on.

It's called the Internet Archive, and you find its main homepage here. Its motto is "Universal access to human knowledge." It is basically a storage site for free digital media, including music, pictures, movies, websites [redundant, I know], and software. This is one of my all-time favorite sites. You really need to spend some time here just poking around. In addition to tons of free movies [including this cool WW2 propaganda piece right here], you'll also find an entire live music archive. Thus our focus today.

The live music archive [here] is an enormous collection of free concerts of hundreds of bands. Here's the website's own description:

"Welcome to the Live Music Archive. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution."

What this means is that fans have taped tons of shows and posted them onto this website. You can identify a band and then search through the archive to find specific concerts and songs. And it's 100% free. They've got a ton of bands that you can see listed here. And once you find a band, you can search through the listings by date, date the concert was added and the average rating of the concert. You can listen to it for free as streaming content, or you can download it and add it to your music collection [even to the old Ipod]. Amazing.

Let's try an example together. Say you loved the 90's and one off your favorite bands was Toad the Wet Sprocket. You go to the artist page, which allows you to see all of the artists who are listed, and you select the Toad the Wet Sprocket page. You see that it contains 85 taped shows, which isn't bad for a band that hasn't been touring too much lately. Once there you can search to find the most recent recording or even the one that is the highest rated concert by other users [that would be this one, the 5-4-1995 show recorded at the Sony Studios in NY, NY. Now you can listen to the show as its streamed, or you can choose to download it to your computer to have forever. You can also choose to download the entire show or select individual songs to grab.

One of my favorite options is to search for shows based on the location, which in our case is of of course Charlottesville. There are around 170 shows that were taped here in Cville, mostly at the Pavillon and Starr Hill.

Of course the sound quality on these is about what you'd expect-it's live music, after all- but it's still pretty amazing. And it's free! And for the legal eagles, all of the bands have agreed to do this, so there's no Napster-starved cop coming after you and your hard drive.

Check it out and let me know what you think...