23 August 2001
Last year: Because naturally, the Feast of Liz must involve a Feast. Otherwise, it would just be the Holiday of Liz, and that's just silly.
I am totally addicted to AudioGalaxy. My sole complaint is that they don't have a Mac client - but it doesn't actually matter too much.
How it works is, you download the very small client onto your computer. At least on the PC, it takes up very little space, uses very little memory, and lives as a tiny icon in the taskbar. You give it some minimal information - the directory (or directories) that you're willing to share with the rest of the world, and the directory that you want your downloads copied to. Then you can close the client's window and ignore it, if you want.
To download stuff, you go to the website and browse around. When you see something you want to download, you click on the little satellite icon, and that file is put into a list. As soon as the client and the website make a connection with each other, the file gets downloaded to wherever you told the client to put files.
In practical terms, that means that if I leave the client running on my work machine at night, I can go home and surf the website, and pick things to download - and they will be downloaded to my work machine. Which is nice in a way, because my work connection is much faster than my home connection.
I also found out just how much of a strain my office's internet connection is under. I confess - I went a little crazy, and I marked around 55 songs to be downloaded. I checked the client periodically through the day (it tells you what it's currently downloading and how much it's downloaded so far) and between about 9 in the morning, when I'd gotten it installed, and 4 in the afternoon, when I left for the day, it had collected about 25 of them.
When I logged into the website around 8 last night - the website also tells you what's been downloaded and what's in your shared directory - they were done. All of them. The last thirty songs (collected after business hours) took half the time of the first twenty-five (collected during business hours). Heh. So, naturally, I poked around and had it download another thirty songs.
(And, lest you want to start raving about copyright protections - AudioGalaxy maintains a database of copyrighted songs; there are a lot of songs over there with a little "X" icon instead of a download button. Also, if I like an artist a lot, I'll probably want to buy the CDs anyway.)
I now have 87 songs - nearly 400 megs of MP3s - sitting in my shared music directory, most of it completely new to me. It's going to take me half the morning to copy them to Zip disk and move them over to my Mac so I can actually listen to them... (Boy do I wish I had a working soundcard in my work computer.)
And while I'm working on that, I'll probably go back over to the AudioGalaxy site and queue up another stack o' songs.
Word of the Day:
whelm - to turn (as a dish or vessel) upside down usually to cover something, to cover or engulf completely with usually disastrous effect; overwhelm; to pass or go over something so as to bury or submerge it
Currently Reading:
- Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Current Projects:
- drawing
- Hall stuff
- garden