I can't help myself. I love burning music off of the Internet. However, it does get me into trouble sometimes.
A couple of years back for example, I loaded my computer up with so much spyware downloading stuff off of peer to peer sites like Limewire and Bearshare (remember them?) that I managed to fry my hard drive and had to buy myself a brand new computer.
So you'd think I would have learned my lesson, right? Au contraire, grasshopper.
Since that unfortunate incident, I've tried to be more careful. I've limited my downloading to things that friends send me, and to mostly trustworthy sources like Megaupload and Rapidshare.
I also want to set something straight right from the get-go here. I don't "steal" commercially available music. In fact, I actually prefer CDs to MP3 files and the like. A perfect case in point was Radiohead's In Rainbows. Like everybody else, I took advantage of the download option when it was offered (I paid five dollars for it).
But this was only because it wasn't being offered on CD at the time. When the album finally was released on CD, I bought it the day it came out. And you know what? It sounded so much better than the MP3 version, it was almost like hearing it for the very first time.
This is why I prefer CDs to MP3s. I do know that the so-called "lossless" formats like FLAC and MP5 can equal CD quality. But when you are downloading music the standard for now is MP3, and until that changes I doubt very much that I'll be changing my mind.
But anyway, I digress...
The type of music I like to download is that which is commercially unavailable, or what we used to refer to back in the day as bootlegs. If, like me, you are a hardcore Springsteen fan for example, you know that his best live stuff has never been officially released and that there are numerous great radio broadcasts and soundboard recordings from his legendary tours in the seventies and eighties out there that are ripe for the picking.
Winterland '78 or Nassau 1980, anyone? Hey, I can't help it if Springsteen's management or the record company refuses to put these out — even though they are amazing shows, and there are great recordings of them available out there with the click of a mouse.
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Article comments
1 - Mat Brewster
You got the bug from Quality Boots? I've never had a problem with them and I've gotten a lot of cool stuff.
2 - scott
Are you generally going the torrenting route or straight downloads?
3 - El Bicho
maybe it's not music but something else you are downloading and watching
4 - Glen Boyd
I'm pretty sure Quality Boots was the source and I don't do torrents anymore (used to, though). And no, I don't download porn -- those damn sites are a fricking spyware nightmare. If I could download a beer I might consider that though.
-Glen
5 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
I do know that the so-called "lossless" formats like FLAC and MP5 can equal CD quality.
Mp5?? Huh?! Even if there was such a format & not the Heckler & Koch 9mm sub-machine gun, an Mp5 would still be a "lossy" file compression. FLAC IS CD quality because it is a "container" for audio files like RAR is (mostly) a "container" for text or picture files. There is no information lost when you compress .wav files to FLAC, APE or WMA 9.2.
Anyways, How in the Hell did you get a "bug" from Quality Boots?!
6 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
If I could download a beer I might consider that though.
F*ck Yeah!! I would love to be able to download some appetizers as well... You got the url for that?!
7 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
*Btw*... Even if you were to listen to the FLAC file directly instead of converting them back to wave, they would stream anywhere from(I believe)700Kbps to 900+ Kbps so you probably wouldn't hear much of a difference unless you knew how the original was recorded & if you were playing it on a high end system.
8 - Glen Boyd
I'm not quite the tech-geek that you are Brian (more of a straight music geek), so if I misquoted the term MP5 you'll just have to forgive me. My portable music player is an MP5 player that unlike iPods and what not can also play flacs -- so thats where I came up with it.
Anyway, the story with Quality Boots is that before you get to the megaupload link, it directs you through this other site which I am 99.9% sure is where I picked up the junk that took up residence in my computer. Usually I'm much more careful, but I really had a jones for that Pink Floyd show.
Anyway, I can't figure out where else I would have got it, since the only other places I really frequent are Blogcritics, music sites, news sites, and job sites. At least until they invent downloadable beer anyway...
-Glen
9 - Tom Johnson
Yes, guys, I've seen a few of these bootleg sites that redirect (probably unknowingly) to malicious sites. If Firefox doesn't catch it, Avast! does.
Glen, you've got to have Firefox, Spybot Search & Destroy with TeaTimer enabled, and antivirus to keep from catching anything. Missing any of those will surely lead to disaster. This is my combo and it's worked for ages. It may slow things down a tad, but I've never gotten any infections.
10 - Glen Boyd
Tom,
I have both Firefox and Spybot S&D and did at the time of the malware attack as well. Whatever this was, I got it using Firefox as my browser and Spybot couldn't get rid of it. Everything is fine now, but I'm just going to be a lot more careful where I go to get music from now on.
The redirect from Quality Boots was almost certainly where I got this, and it was really nasty stuff -- it more or less disabled Windows Live One Care, slowed my email down to a crawl, and seemed to really like doing its pop-up dance when I was writing or editing with BC's editing tools. From now on, I'm just sticking to the megaupload links I get through trusted friends.
-Glen
11 - MarkSaleski
i got a lovely virus on new years day. took a large part of the day to get rid of the thing. spybot s&d, and malware bytes finally did the job.
for some reason, i had decided that my norton was up to date on this laptop. not only was it not up to date, it wasn't even installed! duh!
at first i thought the virus was a browswer hijacker, because you couldn't go to sites like symantec. as it turns out, it was a much lower level thing, intercepting tcp/ip packets and redirecting them if they were going somewhere 'undesirable'...like symantec.
i swear, people who write this stuff should be publicly flogged.
12 - Tom Johnson
Glen, did you have TeaTimer enabled? If not, that may be why you got it. TeaTimer is like the padlock on the gate to your gate. Without it, you still have a gate, but it's easy for the kids in the neighborhood to get through and pee in your pool.
It's just a little checkbox at the beginning of the install, very easy to overlook and confusing to figure out what it does if you aren't familiar with it. There's obviously some other way to enable it, but I'm not sure where it is in the S&D console. (Spybot S&D itself doesn't do anything except when you actually run it. It just cleans up messes that are already there. TeaTimer prevents messes.)
13 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
If you ever wanna surf the net & get rapidshare or megaupload links without getting the bugs from the redirects then you should use NoScript. It's an add-on for Firefox that allows you to control what scripts are loaded for every website that you visit. Plus, it fights "clickjacking". If you stop the scripts from being loaded then malware,ads,viruses & all those other bugs are pretty much extinct. I've been running Firefox with NoScript, Ad Block Plus & Avira Antivirus(free) for about a year now and I haven't had any issues whatsoever....