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Music Media

The Music Man 555

Posted by CmdrTaco from the two-scoops-of-ocd dept.
HellSpam writes "MacNETv2 interviewed a man who is claiming the title of "King of the Pirates". The man has over 900,000 songs, a collection that rivals even the iTunes music store(!). From the article:"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.""
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The Music Man More

The Music Man

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  • Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:14PM (#10821840)
    "...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."

    I thought there was a slight issue there.

    I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.

    And, also from the article, he apparently is doing this because he is on a quest to preserve all of the music of Western civilization in the event that a (presumably Panislamic) terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in, say, downtown Chicago, precipitating a complete and devastating collapse of the economies of the US and the West, changing the face of the currently free nations in the world forever (and losing all of our music along with it).

    Why or how, exactly, one individual person with consumer-grade storage and computing equipment operating out of a residence is the absolute best way to do this is not covered.

    • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Funny)

      by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:17PM (#10821872) Journal
      "...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."

      He can't have his cake and eat it too. He'll have to settle for "King of the Brainwashed Consumer Zombies" or "King of RIAA Lawsuits"

      • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Informative)

        by jmcmunn ( 307798 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:52PM (#10822264)
        Actually, read the article. he does not consider himself a pirate at all, and makes no claim to the title. Here's the quote from the article.

        "There are people that know about what I am doing and believe in it. I just want to be an historian, a gatekeeper. Anything but a pirate. I don't consider myself a pirate."

        • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Mr. No Skills ( 591753 ) <lskywalker AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:13PM (#10822488) Journal
          He'll be OK then until he gives content to someone else. He probably should "donate" his collection to a public library somehow to get some protection and legitamacy to being a historian.

          While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task. Much recorded music is not relased in a fashion that he's going to know about it (think about a band selling homemade CDs from a stage). But, if he gets some legitamacy he might be able to get lots of people to donate recordings to him.

          Brings up another interesting question: what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation? Seems to me they have a responsibility to this since they're reaping all the profits from us.
          • "what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?"

            Of course they're backing everything up. Just wait 10-20 years when they re-release it all on whatever media or digital format we're using at that time. Then they'll reap even more profits from us.

          • what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?

            Perhaps they use Linus' method: "real men don't do backups - they post their code to the Internet, and let others mirror it".

            No, really, the RIAA could be doing exactly that. This would explain why they haven't done what seems blindingly obvious to us - switch from CD distribution to network channels. As long as they distribute CDs at inflated prices, the P2P networks will thrive, thereby maintaining their backups

            • This is an interesting thought that they want a copy of everything available but there are a few flaws to that idea.

              First the most obvious is quality. Let's suppose that Diana Krall's greatest hits and I can only find it at 96Kbps. That's gonna suck. From a quality standpoint the question would be why? They'd have to spend money to remaster it etc.

              Secondly is that not everyone with a collection is online all the time or sharing at all of the times. Would the RIAA appeal to the FCC to "intervere" with our

          • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:45PM (#10822810)
            Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Funny)

            by SnapShot ( 171582 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @03:02PM (#10822974)
            It isn't an impossible task, he's just going about it the wrong way. Most MP3's are 3MB or so, right? Why not write a program that randomly generates files in the 2 to 5MB range, throws out the ones that aren't valid MP3, and puts the rest in his library. Not only would you get every song ever recorded but you would get every variation of every song ever recorded (at least in that range). Even better, he would own the copyright on every new song that will ever be generated from this point forward.

            It's really pretty simple; here's a code fragment:

            for(int i = 0; i < Math.pow(2, 5242880), ++i) {
            File f = generateRandomFile(i);
            if(isValidMP3(f)) {
            saveToLibrary(f))
            }
            }
            No need to thank me, I'm just trying to do a service for the future generations and save this guy the headache of all those lawsuits...
          • While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task.

            It's not really a worthy goal. If you read the article, you see he's worried about terrorists destroying all the music in the world. If we have a nuclear holocaust, what makes him think his fileserver will be spared? If he's downloading it, that means other people already have it. So there's a distributed archive of all that music already, and a distributed archive is the only kind you can expect to survive the end of life as we know it.

    • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:4, Funny)

      by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:19PM (#10821912)
      It's a simple typgraphical error. They misspelled '0wn'.

    • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Interesting)

      by P-Nuts ( 592605 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:22PM (#10821937)
      I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.

      Well, it has been the practice of the RIAA only to go after the people sharing their music with others. Also from the article: "I don't think there has been a single song pirated from my collection."

      So it appears he isn't King of the Pirates, but King of the Freeloaders. (Not that I condone either.)

      • So I guess he doesn't (Score:4, Funny)

        by Stone316 ( 629009 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:39PM (#10822117) Journal
        have a bittorrent setup?

        damn..

      • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Interesting)

        by wankledot ( 712148 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:41PM (#10822141)
        I've never really thought about it, but it's funny to think that "pirate" is being used for people that share what they have willingly with others. The pirates being sued are the ones giving it away, not the ones taking it.
        • The thing is, it's not 'his' to give away. Now, if he had purchased all 900,000 songs, that would be a different story. He'd merely be a gullible, formerly rich person, instead of a /. hero.

        • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Insightful)

          by bugbread ( 599172 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:03PM (#10822372)
          It is odd, but if you think in terms of conventional media, it's pretty accurate. For example, if a guy in China makes bootlegged Holywood DVDs, we call him a "pirate", but we generally don't call the person who bought the DVDs "pirates". I'm not addressing if it's wrong or right, I'd just never noticed until now that with physical objects, the producer is normally called a "pirate", the item a "pirated item", and the purchaser a "purchaser of pirated goods", but with data, both the producer and receiver are called "pirates".
      • Well, it has been the practice of the RIAA only to go after the people sharing their music with others.

        That doesn't really mean anything. The law is pretty clear that downloading is infringing, and the courts have uniformly agreed whenever the issue has come before them.

      • he is obviously sharing with others (Score:5, Informative)

        by etaluclac ( 818307 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:12PM (#10822466)
        Since he claims to get a lot of music off of Bittorrent, this guy is definitely giving it to others to get a decent download speed--and at 900000 songs, plenty of others have acquired other music thanks to his "hobby."

        That's the nature of the protocol--you can't take without giving back. Even if somehow downloading but not sharing the music were legal, he'd still be breaking the law.

      • The RIAA goes after folks "distributing" their copyrighted works because that what triggers the copy protection laws in the U.S. Basically U.S. laws were designed around stopping organized crime for making and selling counterfeit copies of popular albums, books, etc. The laws assumed that expensive equipment was needed to make these copies, and that a sophisticated system of underground marketing was needed to get the copies into legitimate channels. Because of this the penalties for distributing copyrig


    • I decided to look at the article

      Before posting a reply? I think this is a /. first!
    • Wow! With all this, how does he find time for AOL chat?

    • Re:Disconnect and motivation (Score:5, Funny)

      by liquidsin ( 398151 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:04PM (#10822377) Homepage
      He's got the best reasoning ever. How could any patriotic American jury convict this man of a crime if he's doing it to keep the terrorists from destroying the American culture and economy?! He's a good patriot! The RIAA has plugged away at their lawsuits through bad publicity like "RIAA sues grandmother and 12 yr old girl" but would they be so stupid as to sue this guy and invite headlines like "Recording Industry helps terrorists destroy American culture"?

  • Can't be done. (Score:3, Funny)

    by zerguy ( 831069 ) <nobody@nowhUMLAUTere.gov minus punct> on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:15PM (#10821847)
    What is this guy smoking, wanting to own a copy of every song ever recorded? This clearly cannot be done. What if I record a song on my hard drive, then take it out and smash the hard drive to peices? Oops, this guy fails.

  • Journey? (Score:5, Funny)

    by dr_dank ( 472072 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:15PM (#10821851) Homepage Journal
    Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.

    Don't worry, I'm sure he's got Journey in there too.

    • Re:Journey? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:37PM (#10822102)
      Somewhere on a p2p network.

      Typing beside you, here in the dark Feeling your mouse click with mine Softly you IM, you're so sincere How could our love be so blind We sailed on together We drifted apart And here you are on my screen.

      So now I come to you, with open ports Nothing to hide, believe what I say So here I am with open ports Hoping you'll see what your share means to me Open ports

      • Re:Journey? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by VivianC ( 206472 )
        Prince,

        You rock! That has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen here. Sadly, most mods will be too young to see the humor. Rock on!

  • And the irony is (Score:5, Funny)

    by debian4life ( 701155 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:15PM (#10821852)
    He will probably never have to deal with the RIAA ever.
    • Depends. They don't seem to go after leeches. But if his folder is shared, look out.

      Shouldn't his wife be talking him out of this? I mean, they're obviously well-off (read the set-up), it would really suck for that all to be sued into oblivion, and they have kids to mind.

  • The hard part... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:15PM (#10821855)
    The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.

  • I'd do it also (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Soporific ( 595477 )
    If I could afford the hard drive space. Then it wouldn't be an issue, but they fill up fast. I suspect quite a few people around here have the same problem.

    ~S

    • If I could afford the hard drive space.

      The drives are relatively cheap. Assuming that the 4.5 TB figures given earlier are accurate, and that IDE drives can be had for about $0.50/GB, that's only $2500. Triple that for two offsite backups, and it's still only $7500 -- which I believe is still cheaper than the average settlement in the RIAA lawsuits :)

      DVD-Rs are even cheaper, with 4.5 GB DVD-R available at my local Frys for $0.29 each. Though if my purpose is archival, I'd think the IDE hard disks

  • Wonder if .. (Score:2, Informative)

    by torpor ( 458 )
    .. he's got all of ours ... [ampfea.org]

  • Storage for that would be... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:17PM (#10821871) Homepage Journal
    From my estimation (and relatively limited library, it seems): 2400 songs = 10 GB

    So 900,000 songs would come out to be approximately 3,750 GB... or 3.75 TB of music.

    We're not worthy...we're not worthy...
    • Depends on the bit rate and average song length. I've got about 10,000 songs all ripped from my own CDs using Variable Bit Rate with 100% quality (whatever that means!) and it takes up about 62 GBytes of disk. So high quality would take closer to 5.6 TBytes. But I'm sure most of the stuff this guy has free^H^H^H^Hdownloaded is of a lower bitrate... in which case this guy is not really preserving all recorded music, he is just preserving a lossy copy of a lot of music. I also sincerely doubt that this guy ha

  • Grand Mariner (Score:5, Funny)

    by NitsujTPU ( 19263 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:17PM (#10821876)
    Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den.

    Grand Mariner? That must be a pirate's drink, eh Matey?

    Occasionally we land-lubbers will drink Grand Marnier though.
    • Hear the rhyme of the ancient mariner,
      See his eye as he downloads one of three
      Mesmerises one of the Kazaa guests
      Stay here and listen to the nightmares of MP3!

  • Article Text (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:17PM (#10821882)
    From Google Cache ( http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3 A%2F%2Fwww.macnet2.com%2Fmore.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_ 0&btnG=Google+Search&meta= ):

    The Music Man - King Of The Pirates Has A Goal - Own It All!

    "I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination."

    What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of ever song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask "why?"...

    When I pulled into the driveway of the King of the Pirates, an upper middle class neighborhood of stylish homes and SUV's, Infiniti's, and more Mini-Coopers than necessary, I was surprised by the normalcy of it all. His home was nothing short of spectacular, his wife a mid-30's ex-underwear model (honest!), and his two kids well groomed, apparently intelligent, and very wired. (As in technology-wise, not ADD) This is not the home I would have thought would be the enclave of someone out to pirate the hell out of the music industry. This was going to be very interesting...

    Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den. He was absolutely thrilled to finally be able to talk to someone who was actually interested in what he was doing. Seems that 'the wife' as he calls her, was bored to tears hearing about his latest collections, or the latest Bit Torrent site he found; a treasure trove of hard to find music all ripped at 256-bits. The wife wants to know why he doesn't play more golf, like his friends. "Golf is the most boring game in the world, what I am doing is much more fun."

    His Pirate Room - A MacGeek's Heaven on Earth

    Doug has devoted one of the extra bedrooms (he has 7 of them) into what could only be described as The War Room. He owns three Power Mac G5's, and just added two iMac G5's. Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.

    He has two cable modems and one DSL. One cable modem is "for the family", the other dedicated to his quest. The DSL line is a backup and is sometimes used when he had discovered a new site that offers a slew of new torrents he wants to mine. The wife, and the kids are all connected to the Internet through an Airport network, with multiple Airport Express base stations scattered among the house.

    All the Macs in his command and control room have JBL Creature speaker systems, some white, some blue, and a burgundy one that I have never seen before. The entire room is lit with indirect 'rope' lights, giving the room a feel of living in the Star Trek universe. There are a couple of rich soft brown leather chairs and one long, very plush, baby-butt soft leather sofa that just screams comfort. I took a seat on the sofa and never felt more pampered or more comfortable. I made a mental note that once our pets' pass on this was going to be the sofa in MY house. For all I cared this interview could go for days, once ensconced in this incredible piece of furniture I didn't want to leave...ever.

    The Wife bought us a pot of coffee (Jamaican Blue Mountain), two cups, and cream and a small bowl of 'equal'. With the coffee was a plate of fresh (fresh!) Dunkin Donuts Cinnamon Sticks. The interaction between The Wife and Doug showed that these two were a happy couple. The seemed to really like each other, and that, my friends, is more rare than you might think.

    Once I got through ogling the various M

    • Interesting! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BLKMGK ( 34057 )
      He seems to think our way of life is doomed and that we're fighting WWIII but midway through the interview he's talking about how it's going to be a decade before everyone has "gone digital". So do we or don't we have a bright future where the world "goes digital" and we all hum along together?
    • Typical, 900,0000 songs, thousands in computer hardware and speakers with 2" drivers.

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by numbware ( 691928 )
    ... Slashdotted already? The error page is nice though:

    "Problem!?"

    It's just so detailed and descriptive.
  • ...to do things just to see if you can, sometimes it goes to far. Especially when it reaches the point of risking life, limb, sanity or finanaces.

    Come on dude, there must be some slightly more valuable way to spend your time.

  • Why yes I do actually. Its my turn to read the article and tell the other lazy slash basards what it says. What am I supposed to tell them about an error message that just says Problem!?

  • c'mon, Why say something and then quote the same something again?

    But in an answer to "Can he own every song ever recorded?" Um Sure, why not?... sheesh

  • Semantics (Score:2, Redundant)

    by LinuxInDallas ( 73952 )
    He will not own every song, even if he DOES have a copy of every song in existence.

  • iTunes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 )
    Is he using iTunes to manage all his songs?

  • He must be working carefully (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eltoyoboyo ( 750015 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:19PM (#10821907) Journal
    To avoid those nasty RIAA sniffers. He probably is not sharing back. Of course the article is already DOA so I could not say for sure. As long as he is not leaving Madonna or Usher albums on his share directory, he probably has been existing below the radar. Whether or not you believe what he is doing is aboveboard, you have to admire his tenacity. I wonder if he has listened to all 900,000 to see if they all are high quality and they don't have someone shouting "Eat me" dubbed right in the middle of the song.

    • Hard to say. Here's the math (Score:4, Interesting)

      by xant ( 99438 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:18PM (#10822538) Homepage
      900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.

  • I wonder how many songs are dups? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vision33r ( 829872 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:19PM (#10821911)
    Ever seen the same song with different file sizes, bit-rate, and versions? He's gonna have tons of dups..

  • That has to be... (Score:5, Funny)

    by modifried ( 605582 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:21PM (#10821918) Homepage
    .. the most confusing slashdotted page I've seen. The article page says, in it's entirety:
    "Problem!?"

    With both the question mark and exclamation mark, I get to wondering. Is it asking me if there is a problem? Is it telling me there's a problem? Or is this some sort of statement based on quantum theory, and is both asking and telling me there is a problem at the same time?

  • The RIAA could make a lot of money here.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by charlieb0y ( 801344 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:23PM (#10821949) Homepage
    At $250,000 penalty (I THINK that's the max) per song, the RIAA could make 225 BILLION off this guy alone! I bet they lose that much per year because of him...........

    • Re:The RIAA could make a lot of money here.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:48PM (#10822214)
      Actually, this illustrates why the RIAA statistics about how much money they're losing is wrong.

      I suspect a lot of people do this: Download because they can. They're pack rats and they're in it for the thrill of the hunt. There's no way they actually listent to all the music, and no way they'd ever buy the equivalent to everything they've downloaded.

      So the 1 download = $1 lost revenue is completely bogus. But we knew that.

  • Smells like bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pope ( 17780 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:23PM (#10821951)
    I read this a few days ago. Quite frankly, not only is his reasoning completely ridiculous, but his methods are also totally suspect. I'm sure his ISPs haven't noticed anything peculiar about 100% downloading, all the time?

    Pending a secondary source, I call BS on this one.

    • Re:Smells like bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pknoll ( 215959 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:32PM (#10822690)
      Aye, the Bullometer(TM) went off on this for me, too. From the article text:

      Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.

      To house 9000 songs at average bitrates (as an earlier poster pointed out) he'd need a shade over 4TB of storage. That's 16 250GB drives, which to almost anyone is more than "several".

      If this guy was real and as rich as he's made out to be, why wouldn't he have just bought an Xserve with an Xserve RAID?

      • Re:Smells like bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)

        by cyril3 ( 522783 )
        He didn't say it was online did he? He did say that he burned it all to DVD regularly.

        why wouldn't he have just bought an Xserve with an Xserve RAID

        He is going to but its like drugs, the need just creeps up on you. First i's a bigger internal drive, then all your ide channels are full and you get an industrial strength DVD burner but you can't keep up and you need something NOW and the man shows you an external usb 300GB drive and you are in heaven. But the first one is never enough.

        and the man is goin

  • Sure... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:25PM (#10821974) Homepage Journal
    it's the journey not the destination...

    Because the prison bus ride is definitely more scenic than the prison yard, right?

    • New computer: $799
    • Broadband connection: $59
    • Lawyer for the RIAA lawsuit: $5,000
    • Fines and prison term: 5 years, plus 130 million dollars.
    • Getting mentioned on Slashdot as King of the Pirates: Priceless.

    Some things, money can't buy. But if you want to get busted for copyright infringement on a shoestring budget, only Slashdot will do.

  • Math doesn't add up (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 ( 812236 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:26PM (#10821981) Journal
    900,000(songs) / 1000(songs/day) = 900 days > 10 months

    note that he "started slowly", which i assume means less than 1000 songs / day

    the math does not add up for me. anyone can fix the anomaly?

  • And just who decided he was King? (Score:5, Funny)

    by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:28PM (#10821998) Homepage
    Did some tart in a lake give him a sword? Help, help! I'm being oppressed!

    • With Apologies to W. S. Gilbert (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      KING:
      Oh, better far to live and die
      Under the brave black flag I fly,
      Than play a sanctimonious part
      With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
      Away to the iPod world go you,
      Where downloads all are fine to do;
      But I'll be true to the song I sing,
      And live and die a Pirate King.

      For I am a Pirate King!

      And it is, it is a glorious thing
      To be a Pirate King!

      For I am a Pirate King!

      ALL: You are!

      Hurrah for the Pirate King!

      KING:
      And it is, it is a glorious thing
      To be a Pirate King.

      ALL:
      It is!
      Hurrah for the Pirate King!
      Hur
  • "it's the journey not the destination."

    That's right, because the RIAA wants your destination [tampa.fl.us] to be like no other...

    Damien

  • The RIAA will be raking in the $ (Score:3, Funny)

    by BashDot ( 756483 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:29PM (#10822018)
    900,000 songs * $125,000 per song = (wait for it)

    a $112.5 BILLION dollar fine

  • Makes me cry (Score:2, Insightful)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 )
    Google text-only cache of the article [64.233.167.104]

    From the article, this guy (or his wife) is apparently well-off (or in debt). Either way, he seems to be spending a lot of time because he's worried that "whether or not [we] know it" we are in fact "in the middle of World War 3" right now.

    So not only is this guy incredibly ill-informed regarding current political events, he thinks the best use of his money and time is to spend it collecting all possible recorded music.

    If he was really concerned about the state of th

  • The world's worst leech0r (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aim Here ( 765712 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:34PM (#10822071)
    What's this guy's soulseek/emule IDs? He's going straight to the top of my ban-list for not sharing!

    Non-sharers are killing piracy! Help stamp it out!
  • I hate to tell him that a single nuke, airburst high enough, would generate an EMP that could erase all he's working to accomplish. He'd be better off burning the music to CD or DVD.

  • I used to play that game too (Score:3, Insightful)

    by revery ( 456516 ) * <<ten.2cac> <ta> <selrahc>> on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:37PM (#10822099) Homepage
    But I quit.

    There's no End Game.
  • 900,000, at approximatly 3 minutes 30 seconds per song, comes to almost 6 years of music, played 24 hours a day. I'd be more than happy if my playlist only repeated every month.

  • Backups? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by seniorcoder ( 586717 )
    According to a previous poster, 900,000 songs * 3MB per song = 2.7TB of storage required.

    What media does he use for backups?
    I estimate something like 570 blank DVDs for one backup. I would hate to think how long it would take to take a backup.

    Then again, what does he use for primary storage? That's a whole load of hard disk space.
    Without paying for copyright infringement lawsuits, just the cost of the disk space is already outside the hardware budget approved by my wife. Expensive hobby.

  • A Letter to Mr. King of the Pirates (Score:5, Funny)

    by akiy ( 56302 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:51PM (#10822246) Homepage
    Dear Mr King of the Pirates,

    We happen to own a lot of songs that are not in your collection. We would love to send a couple of people over to provide you with the songs that you are missing. Can you please send us your home address and what you look like? We'll be right over.

    Sincerely,
    The Recording Industry Association of America

  • Speaking as a person who possesses a lot of music: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 5n3ak3rp1mp ( 305814 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:06PM (#10822400) Homepage
    The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:

    Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year)
    BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900
    Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004

    etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).

    Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.

    I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.

  • BitTorrent != Sharing ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by russx2 ( 572301 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:08PM (#10822418)
    Ok, so this guy claims he only downloads and never, ever shares his music (and hence he's not a pirate). And yet he claims to get a lot of his music from torrents... Unless he's satisfied with very slow download speeds (and being a complete leech!) I think I'm seeing a flaw here.

  • King? I don't think so ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by really? ( 199452 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:31PM (#10822671)
    This guy is WAY behind. About two and a half years ago I used to have access to a "box" belonging to a guy in Korea ... he was pulling in an avarage of 150 albums a day and had been doing so for a while. He already had close to 700.000 songs at that time ...

  • STYX (Score:4, Funny)

    by kevcol ( 3467 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @03:02PM (#10822975) Homepage
    There is a horrible song by Styx called "Too Much Time On My Hands"

    I wonder if he has that?

  • Well... (Score:3, Funny)

    by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @03:13PM (#10823072)
    Ya gotta have goals. I suppose this guy aspires to be either the owner of the world's largest music collection or the first man publicly and savagely raped by the RIAA legal team.

    Either way, he can still spell his namd "L-o-s-e-r"

    ATTN: King of Music:
    Dude...all day downloading music? Isn't there something better to do with all that time?

    Let's do a quick calculation---900,000 songs. 3.5 minutes each on average. 3.15 million minutes of music. That's 52,500 hours or almost 6 years.

    You could get 3 masters degrees; become a doctor or lawyer; travel around the world; or even troll every slashdot post. But you choose to sit at your computer doing nothing but downloading music?

    You're sick, man. Can I browse your collection?

  • Dimnishing marginal returns (Score:3, Insightful)

    by greyfeld ( 521548 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @04:03PM (#10823567) Journal
    The problem with collecting music in digital format is really a lack of availability. Once you have downloaded all of the Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Shania Twain songs available you are left to search for much rarer objects of desire.

    It probably wasn't too hard to fill several large hard drives with this drivel, but when you begin to look into other realms of music including jazz, classical, old C&W and even punk rock you hit a dead end with services like Kazaa and iTunes.

    In fact, I spend much more time converting my old LP's into CD and MP3 using Soundforge 7 (yes, I own a legal copy) than I do looking online because there just isn't that much out there of real value.

    If this guy was really interested in preserving music for the rest of us, he'd be out at garage sales every weekend and converting all of the Ventures surf music to MP3 for us. There is so much music out there that is not digitized that the mark he is going to make in his lifetime is like the scratches on my Eddie Cleanhead Vinson "Kidney Stew" CD converted from LP.

    Oh, and these sound so much better than the label's crappy offerings once you've removed the clicks, hiss and scratches. If you've got an old record collection, get to converting. You'll be glad you did.

  • John Peel (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Monday November 15, 2004 @05:27PM (#10824492) Journal
    I think John Peel (now sadly deceased, a couple of weeks ago) has had him beat long ago - and legitimately too. And not just top-40 stuff - John Peel was a great force in bringing many new artists into the public consiousness.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/index.sht ml [bbc.co.uk]

    John Peel had many BUILDINGS filled with CDs and vinyl records and other media.

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