Thought I'd add a minor distraction to the SXSW fervor.
Saw a link on Fark today that mentioned Joe Satriani's new album available as streaming content.
The comments were peppered with a few good links to free music-
Harvey Danger
Lorenzo's Music
Free Solo Guitar (wow! solo accoustic motherlode!)
BHTM also has some songs available online- great show at the Filmore in February! Woot!
Carbon Leaf opened for BHTM last year- good stuff.

/just sayin'

Don't forget the Archive.org Live Music Archive.

After four months of listening to the entire compilation when I had time, here are my picks that seem worth looking into. With so much sounding alike, I was quickly jaded and tended to choose anything eclectic or obscure.

Thanks for posting the link; hoping for and looking forward to next year's compilation. Phew, I can finally listen to something ELSE.

Definitely agree on the ladytron recommendation - I heard this played on KITS whilst I've been in the bay area, and I bought the album (Witching Hour). Brilliant, IMO, can't wait to get some more of their stuff

They're playing in SF in October, going to try and make that one...

Hugo

The hectic pace of musical innovation continues.

SXSW2007.torrent.

Peter

Thanks Peter! You have just chosen my playlist for the next three months.

And I haven't even loaded SXSW 2005 or 2006 onto my empeg yet. The thought of tagging ALL those individual songs is overwhelming (even though I only saved half of the original ~1000 each). And SXSW revealed that my music organization system is far too limiting to contain its (pockets of) vastness.

Actually, I'm unable to start the torrent. One file contains double quotes, which neither BitTorrent nor Windows XP will allow. Has anyone found a way around this? Thanks CX_Kidtronik-"Big_Girl_Skinny_Girl".mp3

Use a BitTorrent client that allows you to rename files. Azureus allows this via the open torrent screen, by right clicking the file in the lower window showing the torrent contents once you add the torrent to the open section in the top. Change Destination lets you move a file to another directory, and also rename it.

It seems that Azureas already renamed it for me-
CX_Kidtronik-'Big_Girl_Skinny_Girl'.mp3
I had no issues with the download. Now to shovel it onto the empeg!

I wonder how the rename/delete will effect the file being shared back out. I guess it's all block-level data, so each client can interpret the file name as it chooses.

Ah hah - Azureus Bit Tyrant - from http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu/

It is pretty good at maximising your download speed. From the FAQ -

Q: Isn't BitTyrant just another leeching client?

No. BitTyrant does not change the amount of data uploaded, just which peers receive that data. Specifically, peers which upload more to you get more of your bandwidth. When all peers use the BitTyrant client as released, performance improves for the entire swarm. The details of this are explained further below. In our paper, we consider situations in which peers use clients which attempt to both maximize performance and conserve upload contribution, but BitTyrant, as released, attempts only to maximize performance.

Q: How is BitTyrant different from existing BitTorrent clients?

BitTorrent differs from existing clients in its selection of which peers to unchoke and send rates to unchoked peers. Suppose your upload capacity is 50 KBps. If you’ve unchoked 5 peers, existing clients will send each peer 10 KBps, independent of the rate each is sending to you. In contrast, BitTyrant will rank all peers by their receive / sent ratios, preferentially unchoking those peers with high ratios. For example, a peer sending data to you at 20 KBps and receiving data from you at 10 KBps will have a ratio of 2, and would be unchoked before unchoking someone uploading at 10 KBps (ratio 1). Further, BitTyrant dynamically adjusts its send rate, giving more data to peers that can and do upload quickly and reducing send rates to others.

Sweet! I just finished listening to the 2005 collection last week (I started it at the beginning of the drive on my move up to Portland in early January), and I listened to the 2006 collection last summer.

Anyone else get this? Foobar won't play them either, shouldn't corrupted files be found by the hashing of torrents?

Thanks for the tip, that saved my ears some pain (I'm still on "Br" listening alphabetically).

I wonder how well the Torrent hash protects file integrity. My system is suffering from ocasional errors potentially from CPU over heat. Downloading the torrent was frought with error. When it finally finished, about 10% of the tracks are incomplete. I wonder how much bad data I was sending back out. Thankfully I've deleted my outgoing copy of the torrent, bought a replacement CPU, and will redownload it in order to share.

After four months of listening, over half the songs didn't get immediately deleted. However, my attached list of songs worth looking into is quite short. Guess I wasn't paying much attention while listening to this so I overlooked some quality pieces.

Maybe this list will help those with similar tastes to hone in on some quality independant music.

And, if you're interested, I sorted the surviving 2.01 gig of music not only by supergenre/genre/subgenre, but also by tempo and tonality. The six combinations of three tempos and two tonalities decently represent six different moods. They help break up the heavily populated genres (rock, pop, folk) so you can only listen to what you're in the mood for.

The attached directory list could be a decent file moving script with a little search/replace or SED work.

Anything not on the list was deleted mere moments after it started playing because it really didn't agree with me.

I didn't start as thoroughly as you, but just did some random listening, and picked out what i wanted to listen to some more.
Here's my short list.

Hey i see you got cruiserweight in there too, you might like the dutch band bambix:
http://www.bambix.org/

It's kind of a less overproduced, much less mainstream, more adult version of cruiserweight

Quote:
Rock \ Punk \ Cruiserweight-Burst_the_Bubble - Tight 2000's "kiddie" (overproduced, mainstream) punk, but with girl vocals.

For some reason it's not on the official SXSW2008 site this time, but it seems kosher (for one thing, you can again download the individual MP3s from sxsw.com): http://hewgill.com/sxsw/

Peter

Thanks Peter - didn't realise it was up yet, as I only looked at the SXSW site. On my way to 3 more gigs of music happiness

(okay, maybe about 2, plus some dross I will need to delete, but hey)

Thanks for posting that link!

Unfortunately, Comcast is severely choking torrent traffic and I'm left without a download possibility.

Hey Robotic - try this link http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-bypass-comcast-bittorrent-throttling-071021/

I had to move over to encrypted bittorrent as my ISP does very annoying throttling too.

Thanks, Rory!
I'll look into that.

That did the trick!
It's actually fun to use Azureus again.

For ages I was using BitTyrant, but new Azureus Vuze is pretty good.

Wow, he beat me too it. Usually takes me 3 months to get through the compilation.