Slacy’s Blog

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

This is very sad news. The blog SXSW Baby is reporting that there will be no official SXSW music torrent this year. Well, thankfully, I’ve got all the music locally. I’m not sure why they would put all the files on their server, and not provide a .torrent of it all. Everyone is just going to download all the songs one by one and they’ll have to pay for the bandwidth themselves.

Like I said before, send me an e-mail if you want a piece of the action.

P.S. I can make a torrent of the daytrotter stuff as well…

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.