seth’s ITP site

Back to my roots. I looked up an old familiar site that I haven’t visited for years: Nugs.net. Though it sounds like an online networking hub for non-violent pacifistic criminals, it is a wonderful resource for sharing recordings of live concerts. These concerts are mostly from the same genre, for lack of a better term, the jam scene. There was once a time when countless live concerts from a ridiculously wide range of musicians could be easily and freely be up and down loaded. It was a truly progressive socialist approach to sharing music. Nugs was like napster, but cooler. It was an underground site that supported sharing digital documentation of live concerts from an underground scene.

This was too good to be true. I’m pretty sure the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan threatened to sue… or someone else who’d been lucky enough to make it big in the industry. So Nugs became a streaming site for a while. One could still select and listen to any volume from its vast musical library, but the information was not to be kept. Funny, I remember thinking at the time. What’s the big deal about having access to something all the time vs. owning the information? It was made clear that a variety of companies would sell you specific concerts if only you clicked on their link. Ick!

It seems to me that greed and tech savvy lawyers have plunged this beautiful phenomenon out of it’s natural state. But there’s a bright side, I found. Thought most of the concerts weren’t available for download, some of them were. In fact, there was about one concert per band that once shared many. With a few exceptions, everyone had something up to offer. I always argue that this forum is great advertisement, — especially for bands that make most of their livelihood from touring on the road. Besides, I plugged into their streaming “radio” for a little while and caught a great clip of “Stella Blue” by the Grateful Dead, and the String Cheese Incident’s cover of the jazz classic “Birdland”. Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t have the freedom to choose from the concerts, my hard drive is dangerously full anyway. I just wish I could stream it in my car or on the subway… oh well; I’ll have to settle for good music at home.

http://itp.nyu.edu/~sa1310/ppmaudioblog3.mp3

wow! I finally figured out how to make an aif into an mp3 with audacity, and … nothing
to say the least, this is pretty discouraging. Anyone have any advice? I’m going to try to move my blog to my itp site… we’ll see if that helps. I think I get it, I’m just missing some silly step.