Now this is really cool. There really is something for everything in there.
You would think that living in Austin I would have been able to find this, but most of the SXSW marketing seems to skip us
The only downside to that when they encoded, they skipped the v2 tags and didn't put the artists website in there so it takes some digging to get a CD.
Great idea though.

I can't believe the client make that much of a difference but I was using burst and get 1 kbps then I installed bittornado and am getting 550 kbps.

Some clients lie about how much they are uploading and this will help them get the file faster. These clients also get banned by trackers or users that see you using these (bad) clients. Other clients don't update the tracker early into the torrent. This causes the tracker to ignore you since it doesn't know you have any of the file yet.

I always self update the tracker on any torrent I've just started after I have about a meg.

I pulled the BitTorrent 4.0 to use. After setting the max upload insainly high for a while I noticed that only about 12-13KB/s was going out while maybe 100KB/s was coming in. Revising the max upload to match the observed rate out. My incoming zoomed to just shy of 380KB/s.

If my estimation is correct, that's right at the 4Mb/s download speed of my cable service.

I left it running about 20 hours after the download was complete and wound up with a 229% share ratio.

BTW. Andy, Thanks for the tip about properly setting the upload rate.

I don't quite get how preallocating a sparse file helps. I see two reasons to preallocate: to suck up that space in the filesystem so you know you can get it when you need it, and to lessen fragmentation on the file. Preallocating a sparse file helps neither of these conditions. I'm sure it's quicker than writing zeros across 800MB, but if you're going to do that, why not just use the incremental method they list, which would generate sparse files anyway?

I finally finished listening to this entire collection. Kept about 400 songs totalling about 1.5 gig. I've attached a file listing the ~45 artists who I think are worth looking into.

Hey, that's 45 more artists who's CDs I may buy. It was a refreshing way to find new music without having to watch MTV or wade through commercials on radio. I'll be sure to (somehow) let the artists know I found them via the torrent, hoping they continue to support MP3 samples.

Phew, THAT'S where my last month and a half went. Listening to the eclectic mix every night and the same 925 song playlist on my empeg every day. I really have to stop these massive "listening binges": 1.5 years reviewing my CD collection in 02-03, 6 months of straight techno in 04, 1.5 months in SXSW, etc, etc.

Hey! You've dropped the Kaiser Chiefs: Two of them were barmen in my lunchtime local and they played at my accountant's wedding - I bet he couldn't afford them now!
Mind you, I'd have done the same, I haven't heard anything that I've vaguely related to of theirs.
I'll try your list, because I was rather struggling to know where to start: Thanks.

WooHoo!
Wow- what a great reason to finally dive into bittorrent stuff!
Thanks-

I actually kept the Kaiser Chiefs track ("I Predict a Riot") filed under Rock / Pop / Indie. It's a fun track and catchy as can be. It will grow on me over time and I'll probably try to find their CD. Thanks for reminding me about them.

Listening to this comp has made me realize that my supergenre/genre/subgenre structure is really weak. Some day I'll take the pie out of the sky and create the "attribute tagging" system I keep dreaming of.

It's that time again.

SXSW 2006 torrents. 952 obscure, and not-so-obscure, American, and not-so-American, bands and their showcase songs.

Peter

...but I haven't finished listening to last year's lot yet...

...and I am still seeding it too..

Hahahaha - okay - on with the torrent. Let's bump up another couple of gigs

Thanks! I was just thinking it was about time to look for this year's!

-jk

I heard it mentioned on the radio this morning and was thinking about wether there'd be a new torrent..... and there it is!

PERFECT timing since I got my 300 gig drive! Now I won't have to "Hm... Program Files... I bet I can trim a few meg from there" to free up space. Seriously, I was working on ones of megs of free space.

This one is giving me a hard time. After about 8 hours with this Torrent open, my machine freezes. The same symptom happened in both the latest BitTorrent and BitTornado. Running WinXP SP2 fully patched with only one port (6881 or something) open on my Linksys router.

When my machine was on Win98, this same version of BitTornado ran for days with no problem. It also ran under WIn2k, though on a different machine on a different ISP / network medium (cable).

Besides XP, I'm using a newer Linksys router than before. I wonder if this is DoS as a side effect of malicious scanning or something. I'll enable logging on the router, somehow.

And, for the first time, I'm getting "failed hash check" messages. Lots of them. 1/3rd of all downloads are failed. Maybe that's the cause, maybe it's a bad seeder, I don't know.

Any ideas? Thanks all.


Also, SXSW part 2 gave over 50% hash errors, so I tried to delete it and start over. But the machine still thinks there's some downloaded; even after deleting the .torrent and the download directory. No settings files in Program Files that I can see. Would it track status in the registry? And if so, why did the most recent freeze of part 1 reset my share stats? Odd odd odd.....

I'd suspect that you've got some memory going bad. Have you noticed instability with other things? Try leaving memtest86+ running all night and see if you get anything. Other than that, you could try azureus, it's my bittorent client of choice these days, though I'd don't particularly like it.

Matthew

No problems here on Azureas/WinME.
My rates could be better if I tracked down the port forwarding issues with my router, but two nights was all it took to get both files.

...and as someone else already said- I haven't yet finished grinding through the last batch of music from SXSW!

I didn't like Azureus either. It just seems like a total resource hog. I've been using µTorrent for the past 3-4 months and couldn't be more pleased!

Thanks for the tips, but I think I just "heard" my problem. Torrenting, reading forums, and I hear CLICK, as if my hard drive just spun down. Well, upon reboot, it didn't spin back up, so it must have shut off and turned back on very quickly.

This is a known issue in my setup. Maybe my power supply is too weak to drive three IDE hard drives. Trick is, this hasn't happened in the 3 months since I've installed XP with three HDDs.

Is BT, on any client, causing so much disk activity that it requires more extra power than I can provide?

I should just take that third drive out, after moving the rats nest of data off of it.....

Yup, it is. It's nice for keeping everything organized and letting you set things globally for all your torrents, but I just don't bittorent enough. Really I should move all my bittorenting off the powerbook and onto the server which stays up all the time anyways.

Matthew

Interestingly on uTorrent's site I found out why my Azureus not only ran slowly, but completely hung my machine on occasion, and blocked my Internet connectivity.

Linksys routers (mine is a WRT54GS) do some annoying things with keeping connections alive up to 5 days - BitTorrent rapidly fills that space.

So I reflashed with HyperWRT and running the startup scripts recommended on uTorrent helped a bit (also giving me a wireless output power boost for my troubles )

But then I found another piece of advice regarding XP2 connection limitations. LvLKing (I think - linked from the same FAQ as before) offers a patch which eases these limitations, and didn't appear to have any evil code attached (disclaimer: don't rely on my word, check yourself if you want your box to be safe)

I think I have just been jinxed. After spending two hours cleaning snow out of my driveway I come inside to some loud shirping sound. Well it turns out to be a 120G HDD in my shuttle. So I spent the rest of the day reinstalling windows on a new 250G SATA drive what a pain.

Thanks for the tips guys. Yeah, uploading to 12 people at 3kbps each is probably pretty annoying for the hard drives. I'll only run these for short periods until I get that old drive off line. It's not that old (you know me too well): a new 300gb, a year old 80 gb, and a 3 year old 60 gb. All WD, all 7200rpm, all IDE. Darn weak power supplies.

Hey, a band from my town were playing there too: The gathering

I didn't know, but recognized them when i heard the song.