#audiogalaxy

[g4s-stati0n-sn4x]

Piracy, file sharing, & free music sites and shit I made into blinkies because I'm autistic

[neurosismancer]

So, let me put on my Internet Old Person hat and tell you kids about the the way we committed music piracy in the long long ago of 2001, and the fragility of those music collections in those days.

You might know Napster. You might know Limewire. But there was a music piracy tool in between those. A little remembered program called AudioGalaxy, and it worked a little like Napster and a little like BitTorrent. The exact details of how it worked are immaterial, but one thing it did was when you searched for an artist, the songs were sorted, in essence, by popularity (e.g. how many people had that specific song file shared.)

Now, I can’t understand why this was a thing, but there was a strange phenomenon in the early days of file sharing and music piracy where people would share songs with the wrong artist name or song title. Certain bands and artists got a lot of stuff attributed to them that they never recorded. “Weird” Al Yankovic may be the most infamous victim of this, with nearly every novelty song and song parody released attributed to him regardless of quality or subject matter.

The confluence of these two phenomena are how I discovered one of my favorite bands of all time.

So, in my late teens, I found a new favorite band. A quickly little one-hit wonder known as DEVO. Y’know, the band that dd “Whip It.” They had the funny red hats that looked like flowerpots. Those guys.

Anyway, I had become obsessed with this band to the point of autistic hyperfixation, and I wanted to hear everything they’d ever put out. At that point, they’d released nine studio albums, a couple live albums, and two collections of early demos, and I wanted them all. So I would find myself crawling in the bottom pages of the AudioGalaxy search results looking for those obscure tracks—b-sides, songs on soundtracks and compilations, the occasional bootleg, They’d pop up between songs that were obviously not by DEVO, and much like our poor friend Alfred Yankovic, any sort of vaguely quirky 80s song got assigned to DEVO.

That was how I found it. A song called, simply, “Detachable Penis.”

Now, I had never heard of such as song, but I knew on the face of it, it wasn’t a DEVO song.

But with a title like that, I knew I had to find out just what in the name of fuck a song called “Detachable Penis” sounded like.

It sounded, dear reader, like this:

(CWs: blurry images of a dildo, the word penis, spoken word poetry)

And I immediately went to Google, because this song somehow tickled an itch in my brain, and I had to go and find out the real band that recorded this song, because how the hell else was I going to get every song I could of theirs I could get my grubby little hands on. The band was called King Missile, and I was hooked.

I’d like to see any music discovery algorithm beat that.

I eventually acquired their entire major discography along with a few EPs and B-Sides. I eventually burned those to a CD, which I could listen to with my MP3 CD Player.

And I realize, upon writing that, for you youth “MP3 CD Player” is a noun phrase that needs explaining. See, while the iPod had been released at that point, and similar devices were also on the market, they were all prohibitively expensive. The economical way to listen to pirated music files was to burn them to CD, but some CD players had software that allows you to burn those song as as _data_. Suddenly, you could have a single CD with 700 megabytes of MP3 files—room for an artist’s entire discography, if not multiple artists.

Since I was download a whole lot of MP3s with my high speed DSL connection, I was taking up an awful lot of space on my hard drive that needed to be offloaded somehow. CD-Rs and an MP3 CD Player were the optimal solution. And it worked…

…until it didn’t.

In the summer of 2002, my parents took me on a vacation to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It was in the latter city where someone got into our rental car and swiped my MP3 CD player and a binder of CDs—both pressed CDs I’d acquired and CD-Rs of illicitly acquired MP3s, along them a CD-R I’d burned containing the nearly complete King Missile discography.

Songs I had only on that one CD-R.

It took me a decade—ten fucking years—before I’d recovered all the music that was on that disc.

This is the sort of discovery and the sort of loss that kids will never experience again in this day of Spotify and the all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand we have now.

[enberlight]

Who Remembers: AudioGalaxy

Back at the start of the Millennium, I was on a very different Blue Site.

It was technically a music indexing service, evolved from FTP, for peer to peer music transfers and streaming. That P2P feature was what got it in trouble after Napster fell because, well, copyrights. And the RIAA threw a fit and within a month, bam, basically no more music in the summer of '02.

It took longer to die, though. Because there was more to it than music transfers. At least, for some of us. Sure, we landed there because of the lure of finding anime soundtracks back when you couldn't import them.

But there were also the Message Boards. Technically for music discussion but the one where I made my home? RP central. 18 years later I'm still in touch with some of the friends I made there. Heck, I married one of them! It's where I really got into creative writing.

Technically it was the Gundam Wing board but... yeah we were a genre and crossover MESS. Vampires, space pirates, werewolves, demon hunters, angel-demon-human-shinigami hybrids, fae, draconians, and at least a few catgirls. And occassionally Treize Kushrenada but he stuck mostly to the Actual Gundam RP threads.

Anyway. Felt nostalgic. Anyone else here from the original blue garbage fire?

Heck, anyone else here a refugee from G'Wimb? Kitz Kijo / Calmyhra / Ladyhawke Eve says Hi. She married RP hubby SilentStorm for real, btw :3

I rather miss some of the old shenanigans, but I won't name names.

[omegaplus]

# 3,026

Pig Destroyer Terrifyer (2005)

Which was it? Was it Alternative Press, Audiogalaxy, or Relapse? Which was it who featured Pig Destroyer and sent everyone scrambling for them? I know I wasn’t the only one. Relapse Records announced Prowler In The Yard as the greatest thing of 2001. They were right. It won Pig Destroyer a new payload of fans and throughout their career never once stumbled or lost momentum. By then, they refined their craft to where they should’ve been. I went right to None Of The Above In Centereach (r.i.p.) and grabbed 38 Counts Of Battery / Explosions In Ward 6 (2000), and Prowler In The Yard (2001). Oh, and Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity (1999), too, while there. Yeah, it was an exhausting night. Glad to find out I was still alive.

Terrifyer came after and it was simply no contest. Here’s 21 tracks over 32 minutes of J.R. Hayes, Brian Harvey, and Scott Hull practically killing everything in sight and devouring it whole. It all starts quietly in which everyone gets a running head start, before out of nowhere Hayes’ vocals shreds your ears clean off and then the real fun begins. There’s zero moments of rest or even a chance to breathe. In their world of ultra-fast grindcore, metal, and thrash, everyone’s a moving target and it’s nothing short of run-for-your-lives-and-get-the-fuck-out. “Thumbsucker” reminds you to really stay on your toes as J.R. Hayes comes from all sides and by then everyone’s already killed. Marquee cuts in “Gravedancer”, “Towering Flesh”, and the closing self-titled track all spread themselves out as structural, feasible beings.

This unreal hell lasts a lot longer if you have the Japanese or vinyl re-issues which give you “Dress In Gasoline”, “The Cutting Room”, “Blurface”, and “Doomspell” as bonus tracks. But most versions feature “Natasha”, a crushing 37-minute collage made of various environments, souls, ambience, and other sessions of hungry, pulverizing, slow-grinding metal, all swirled into one epic being. Various vinyl editions of 100 clear, 500 grey swirl, 400 white, 200 milky-clear with splatter, 100 half-red half-black with white splatter, 300 blood red, 500 white / blood red merge, 200 white bone, and 1,000 21st anniversary beer with white splatter have all been pressed.

[pcgatos]

Recordando Audiogalaxy...

[1ntodarkness]

#お得ブラザーズ #おトクブラザーズ にいつさんのツイートでの商品レビューが結構好きなので登場してくれて嬉しい☺️ #agdx #audiogalaxy #ag https://www.instagram.com/p/B7yAdIrjTT2/?igshid=uhxt89avx9l5

[1ntodarkness]

大人がジャンケンしてるのを側から見てるとシュール😆 #agdx #ag #オーディオギャラクシー #audiogalaxy (Z会御茶ノ水教室) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7xwOHqjqx4/?igshid=l7zoad6pl7me

[nagacchi1]

安心と信頼の #南波志帆 さん。今夜のライブも完璧でした。帰り際、 #audiogalaxy 関連の方に偶然お会いしました @nanbashiho (HARLEM) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByxPuX6jDjW1I7_68ncxNZ6zyZjefe3IEljxnU0/?igshid=uft8lhj70ymr