Conscious Manifestations

From Slashdot:

"Harvey Danger, a Seattle based rock band, has released their newest album Little by little for free mp3 download. They are doing this partially as an Internet publicity experiment, and partially as a stand against the Music Industry's attack on filesharing. From their website, 'In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as "illegal" file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little..., available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We're not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we're putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.' I suggest you check it out."

I think this is the wave of the future for musicians - the ones worth listening to will gain recognition not for the big marketing budget behind them but for the quality of their music. Through the Free(dom) Software and Open Source movements, we are all learning new and open ways to make a living. Bravo Harvey Danger!

The latest from Free the Sounds:

"OK, this one is going to be brief. I have decided that the best way to do this site and leverage what is out there on the web already is to use archive.org as a space for storing the sounds and this site as a space for collaboration.

Thus, when the new site is released in September 2005, it will have all the info necessary to let users publish their sounds and songs on archive.org and use this site to collaborate and reach out to other musicians.

All of this will be documented in length here. Thanks for the continued patience... soon come."

Soon come, indeed.

Below is a list of links to the music that I have made available here on this site. These works are licensced under the Creative Commons Public Domain license. This means that no rights are reserved.

Enjoy! And come back for more...

From FreetheSounds.org:

"The new server is up and running strong! I have installed a fresh Drupal 4.6.2 install and am currently configuring it to the max for user options galore, categories, personal blogs, syndication, user customization and much more. This will take a few days - you've hung in this long so please be patient just a little while longer.

In addition, a new version of Broadcast Machine has been released and it appears to work flawlessly on the server. I am now setting this up as well so that we can all share torrents for files larger than 3 MB (Under 3 MB can be shared through this part of the site). In addition, once this is up and running, I will be looking into getting a script written that will automatically submit the torrents from this site to Archive.org, in order that they be readily accesible for fast downloads.

I am working lots on all of this, and the result should be up by the end of July, beginning of August.

We will have a sweet and simple, super light-weight theme that improves the navigation and the loading time.

For now, please bookmark this site and come back at the beginning of August!

Look forward to collaborating with you all soon..."

Visit Free the Sounds

Well... I have not managed to get either BlogTorrent or Broadcast Machine to work properly on Free the Sounds. This has made me think a lot about how to best manage the sounds on this site.

I have looked around and found a hosting company that will help me out on this project with a really great price for a relatively large storage capacity and bandwidth.

Thus I have decided to host the sounds on the server with the site, and to also offer the option to upload a torrent file for those who are able to do this. Thus, we will have the best of both worlds on the site!

These changes are currently in the making and the site should be up and running within a week with a whole new version of Drupal, a new look and feel (very slick, lightweight and fast loading) and on a totally new server with mega space.

Don't lose faith - this project is very near being fully operational, so please add Free the Sounds to your bookmarks and come back soon to share and download sounds.

Thanks for your continued patience. :)

The folks over at Participatory Culture are working on some really cool stuff. They are developing an application called Broadcast Machine that leverages BitTorrent to allow people to publish video streams online resulting in a TV-like viewing experience for the end user. Best of all, it is open source.

From the Broadcast Machine website:

"Broadcast Machine is software you install on your website to easily publish video files. It gives you the option of using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs, even when you are posting high quality video to thousands of people. Broadcast Machine is free, open source software, and is designed for easy installation. It features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. Broadcast Machine also creates a browsable archive of videos on your website. But the real purpose of the software is to be the perfect publishing tool for our video player that will be released in July-- Broadcast Machine creates channels that, when viewed in the player, give people a TV-like viewing experience."

Installation is very simple and involves no databases - just files. The development version is currently at Preview Release 10, and supports Creative Commons licenses.

There is a demo on the site.

Go Participatory Culture and Downhill Battle!