Slacy’s Blog

Here’s a link to an unofficial SXSW 2008 mp3 torrent. Happy listening!

My friend Rich pointed me at daytrotter.com, and it looks like they have a really nice collection of live recordings by a bunch of interesting artists. All the files are available for download on their site, so using some trickery, I created a txt file of all the mp3 URLs so that you can use the same old wget trick to download them all. Watch out, there’s 869 files in there, so I’d expect over 4GB of music…

I’ve grown impatient waiting for 2008.sxsw.com to release their torrent of mp3 files. I’m wondering if they’re going to do it at all.

So, I decided to just suck down the whole site and scrape out all the URLs to all the mp3 files and download them. It was very straightforward.

First, scrape the site by doing something like this:

wget -nd -nH -r –no-parent -nc http://2008.sxsw.com/music/showcases/alpha/0.html

Then, do something like:

grep mp3_download *.html

(Yes, they were silly enough to use a CSS class for all their mp3 download links named ‘mp3_download’.)

Then, you’ll have a file with a bunch of raw HTML links. Pull that into something like emacs and do some replace-regexp commands to trim it to just the URLs themselves. (There are 740 of them). I then took the resulting list of mp3s, split it into 2 files, and am running two copies of wget in parallel to suck them all down. Here’s a copy of the list of all 740 mp3 files.

Send me an e-mail to my private account if you’d like me to hook you up with a .tar.bz2 of all 740 files. I wonder if they’ll release that .torrent soon?

UPDATE: The download completed overnight, and the resultant files are about 3.4GB.

First, Cognitive Daily had an interesting post about how people associate sound & color. Their goal was to see if certain musical pieces evoke a (random) color.

Then, I heard about soundofcolor.com. (Note: flash & music) Their goal was to create music that evoked a certain color.

Compare & contrast?

She totally rocks, in a kind of “campfire songs for adults” kind of way. Check her out on eMusic, or watch some videos on youtube:

Kimya Dawson on YouTube

I saw that Pitchfork released their staff’s picks for the top 25 albums of the year. The problem is, I have no idea who these people are, and which ones are interesting. So I sucked the whole thing in, and counted up which albums were most referenced in the list. Here’s the composite top-25 albums from the staff’s picks. The second number is the count of times that album appeared in someone’s top-25 list. Note: There were 36 contributing staff members.

1. 26 LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
2. 24 M.I.A.: Kala
3. 21 Radiohead: In Rainbows
4. 18 Panda Bear: Person Pitch
5. 17 Burial: Untrue
6. 15 Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam
7. 15 Jay-Z: American Gangster
8. 14 Battles: Mirrored
9. 14 Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
10. 12 Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala
11. 12 The Field: From Here We Go Sublime
12. 11 Kanye West: Graduation
13. 11 Lil Wayne: Da Drought 3
14. 10 Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
15. 9 Deerhunter: Cryptograms / Fluorescent Grey EP
16. 8 Dirty Projectors: Rise Above
17. 8 Feist: The Reminder
18. 8 The National: Boxer
19. 7 Caribou: Andorra
20. 7 Dinosaur Jr.: Beyond
21. 7 No Age: Weirdo Rippers
22. 7 Sally Shapiro: Disco Romance
23. 7 Simian Mobile Disco: Attack Decay Sustain Release
24. 7 Various Artists: After Dark
25. 7 Wu-Tang Clan: 8 Diagrams

I mentioned the “Crazy 80’s” mix back in 2005, and I wanted to mention it again today because its one of the few “I found it on the web” music downloads that I keep coming back to, and actually listen to on a fairly regular basis.

You know that feeling when you’re at work and feeling like you need something to perk you up a bit? Well, Crazy 80’s is the solution to that problem, and it’ll give you a dose of Journey at the same time. Go download it from ytcracker’s website NOW…