Lost in Music (audiogalaxy.com in general)

Member Name: Diaz

Product:	audiogalaxy.com in general
Date:	14/08/01 (237 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Music Sweet Music

Disadvantages: Slows up your connection, possible security risk

Audiogalaxy saved my life. Well maybe it’s pushing the point a bit but hey. You see I love music, “music was my first love and it will be my last music of the future and music of the past, To live without my music would be impossible do, In this world of troubles my music pulls me through” (there I go quoting dodgy John Miles lyrics from the 70’s doing my credibility no good at all), however being a family type I have more important things to spend money on like food, clothes and electricity bills. The only time I ever got to spend money on CD’s was my birthday and then I ended up blowing it on something dodgy and regretting it until my next birthday only to do it all around again. Well now it’s my birthday every day!! My sanity and normality have been restored and I can get pretty much any music I want. Woohooo.

Audiogalaxy is, I suppose, a Napster clone. The idea is very similar, you simply download a nifty piece of software called the Satellite and it allows you to share MP3 files with other people, whilst you are online. Of course you can share other file types but they would need to be disguised as MP3’s using software like Wrapster. There are upsides to this, you can download whatever you want, the downside of course is other people download from you, that’s what sharing is all about, didn’t your mother tell you about it. Of course this amount of traffic can severely limit your bandwidth so for those of you with slow connections it could be very limiting, but for those of us with nice office PC’s with superfast net connections it’s great. God I love working at a university.

What does the website offer?? Well aside from the fact you can download almost any MP3 for nothing the site itself is pretty good. There are featured artists in every conceivable category which are changed on a weekly basis and the category which is shown on the front page changes with every v
isit, the nice thing about this is if you head for the front page you get exposed to artists you might never have found before. The trouble I have had with the site is you end up like a kid in a sweet shop, wanting everything. Unfortunately it is very easy to get completely swamped by what is available it’s very easy to burn out and just not know what to download.

Following the links to the highlighted artists you get a pretty good chunk of music journalism about the band and links to their highlighted song. Now of course with sites like this there is the question of copyright and to their credit Audiogalaxy have taken measures to control certain artists back catalogues. The way this is achieved is by groups being hosted artists, I’m uncertain if they pay for this privilege or just threaten to sue, but it gives the artist a nice photo and a description of the band on the search listings. It also means that only a limited number of songs are available to download, there are ways around this but more of that later.

Other features of the site are Communities and Groups, since I’m not particularly community minded I haven’t investigated this too deeply but basically it’s a way for fans of bands and music genres to chat, a basic forum. These pop up under song and band listings where people have made comments about certain tracks or artists. This isn’t a bad idea and gives you an idea of an artist before you download. The group section allows you to make contact with other users, you can also search for other users and view their profile, I personally haven’t created a profile of likes and dislikes but it doesn’t stop people from contacting you.

There are also various links throughout the site to the download site for the Satellite, this software is very easy to use and sits in you tray quite happily chugging away. I think the current version comes bundled with Gator a form filling applica
tion which also acts as spyware, I’m uncertain if the Satellite acts as spyware too; if anyone knows anything about this I’d appreciate feedback. So be careful what you install.

To give you an idea of the kind of categories available, by the power of cut and paste I present to you a very edited list of musical genres.

Modern Rock, Rock, Heavy Metal, Punk Rock, Experimental, Electronica, Jazz, Blues, Country, Folk, Oldies, Pop, Hip Hop, R&B, Reggae, World, New Age, Classical, Film Scores, Instrumental, Comedy / Spoken Word, Novelty, Contemporary Christian, Seasonal, Show Tunes and Children's

A quick look under the first of those categories reveals even more (I told you the first list was severely edited, it was originally four pages of text, thank heavens you didn’t need to read that)

Modern Rock;
Alternative Rock, Adult Alternative, Brit Pop, Grunge, Rock en Espanol, Experimental Rock, Indie Rock, Chamber Pop, Indie Folk, Indie Garage, Indie Pop, Jangle Pop, Lo Fi, New Psychedelia, Noise Rock, Post Rock, Space Rock, Jam Rock, New Wave, Goth Rock, Synth Pop, Post Punk and Power Pop

As you can imagine the site cater for anyone regardless of how good, bad or downright obscure your musical taste is. For instance I recently wrote a particularly fine op about the now defunct Ben Folds Five (shameless pluggery abounds) in which I mentioned one of the member now played with a group called the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Personally I’d never heard of them before, it was just tidbit of info I’d picked up when I researched the op. Someone made a comment about that and said that my op was the first and last time the Squirrel Nut Zippers would get a mention on this forum (ahem) so I decided to look them up on Audiogalaxy and sure enough there they were, 10 pages of songs, 728 entries. This of course isn’t a reflection of how prolific they are it just means there are a lot of duplicate songs t
here.

Also I’d like to point out the variety of what you can download in the list. For instance Children’s, not everyone’s cup of tea but I am a Dad so humour me, I’ve downloaded loads of stuff to keep the kids quiet from Disney songs to the Tweenies. Then there is Comedy, loads of amusing sketches on the site. Finally and most importantly for me there are books, some of the MP3 files are abridged and some aren’t but I now have a complete reading of the Hobbit for the kids, Lord of the Rings for me, Harry Potter, Ann Rice, Douglas Adams, well the list is pretty extensive but you get the idea.

So how do you use Audiogalaxy?

I tend to use a music site, either CDUniverse.com or CD101.com to locate an album I want and then use the track listings there to search for song titles. You can of course go to the artists page and track up and down but I find searching for the song title itself is much more efficient and it gives more accessible tracks. Clicking a satellite icon next to it and hey presto can download each track. Next to that icon there is a power bar the colour and number of bars on this helps you to figure out how available the track is. In other words will it download right away or is the owner of the track offline. I’ve mentioned before that certain artists have their work blocked; searching for tracks directly bypasses blocks Audiogalaxy has set up so in effect it’s a loophole.

The only downside to Audiogalaxy is it’s users, the people who create the MP3s themselves, I suppose that’s selfish of me to say that but that’s just me. There are lots of MP3s out there of variable quality and tracks that have not been labeled properly so whenever you download a track it’s best to preview it before committing it to CD. The most common errors I’ve come across are live tracks instead of album recordings. But there are tracks copied off the radio, with
jingles in the middle, there are tracks that just stop halfway through for no reason and tracks that start halfway through for nor reason, and there are tracks that claim to be what they are not.

Of course the way tracks are labeled is why it is easy to bypass the Audiogalaxy artist blocking system, for instance Moby has his tracks blocked but if you look for “Play track one” instead of Moby you’ll get the goods. The same can be said for a lot of artists, the more popular the artist the larger the number of rogue tracks there are kicking about.

There are also a huge amount of rarities available on the site too, particularly when it comes to live performances though that really is anorak territory. If you do want to track down the rarities it’s best to know what you are looking for and include that in your search, the word live always helps. If you are still coming up short then consult with the fans, they are usually accommodating.

Another downside I haven’t mentioned is the sites stability, it isn’t uncommon for a large download rate to knock the site offline this can happen for seconds or for long periods of time. It usually coincides with major artist releases, for instance when REM released Reveal this year the site was particularly bad.

I wont get into the legal implications of such a site and its pretty clear to see where I stand on the subject but all in all (this is my way of drawing this op to a close before I ramble on any more) Audiogalaxy is a superb site for downloading music and for exposing yourself (ooeer) to new music.

If any users out there want any help locating tracks I’d be happy to help, drop me a line.

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