Hey, how 'bout I toss out some cd titles for the JC members to download/purchase? Then maybe we can get some carefully crafted reviews up here, at which point I can at long last shout, "now we're cookin'!"
1. Pain "Midgets With Guns"
2. The Anniversary "Designing a Nervous Breakdown"
3. They Might Be Giants "Miscellaneous T"
4. Pinback "Blue Screen Life"
5. At The Drive-in "Relationship of Command"
I do have actual feature-length stuff cooking, one of which is music-related. However, my motherboard died on me last night and took a hard drive with it, so there'll be a bit of a delay while I get back together.
The problem I currently have talking about music is that I have been listening to the most FLAMING bands on planet earth lately (in terms of their names and some of their lyrics). How do I speak at length about how good I think "New Found Glory"'s latest CD is? Without someone saying, "Watch out, Toucan Sam -- someone else is gunning for your job as poster boy for the box of Fruit Loops!"? Emo music as a whole suffers from two things:
1) Terrible band names
2) The apparently-obligatory inclusion of one or two lyrical lines per song that turn what is a nice-enough diddy into the mewlings of an acne-pitted, arsebop loser. I'll provide examples in a bit.
That being said, I can at least attempt to try to grab some songs from the bands mentioned in your post. Pinback (the band, not Ben) sounds like a good place to start.
Before I ask the question I'm gonna ask I should say -- with the recent "MP3" tax added to music CDs, I don't feel particularly skittish talking about that medium on bulletin boards. You can't read the interactive fiction Usenet groups for three years and not have heard every argument and counter-argument to the MP3 (and, more, copyright in general) thing. That being said, I also happen to have a problem with any cartel that would love it if all computer programmers were thrown in jail. However, as this is a rather light-hearted BBS to post upon I'll chuck all that out the window and just ask this:
While attempting to search for some bands listed above, to see if they do anything for me, I realized that Kazaa is dead to me due to the fact that it won't work with spyware. If I recall correctly, Kazaa is also uninstalling Ad Aware as well, which is just so downright laughable you have to... er, laugh. Anyway, what are you guys using these days? Limewire has the worst connection speeds on the planet. Direct Connect is nice, but the hub I go to has a max of 500 users and it's always full. When Morpheus got the boot off the Kazaa network there for the horror of not having spyware in their install, I presumed that they were dead. But I dunno. And though I have 384MB of RAM in my PC, I am still about three gigs short of the necessary amount for eDonkey.
These perceptions may be totally inaccurate. I seek knowledge and understanding, so let me know if I'm wrong on any of this. Anyway... where to go for a taste of Pinback the Band Not Ben? (And others.)
I was using Grokster until I uninstalled the spyware it came with and it stopped working. Now I'm back to Morpheus, which is far from ideal but I'm not going to go out and try out 20 different programs.
Its a fully-functional version of Kazaa, with all the spyware hacked out.
Whats especially amusing here, is that the company that owns Kazaa is suing the guy who hacked out the spyware, saying that he is infringing on their copywritten software.
Uh... hello? Anyone home? Isnt that the reason that Kazaa EXISTS? To steal copywritten stuff!?
I'm still using Audiogalaxy; while there's plenty I don't like about it, it seems to have the most stuff and the blocking is pretty easy to circumvent. I scrapped Kazaa after it toyed with my system ... other than that I've messed around with BearShare but it's not that handy unless you're looking for the most obvious stuff (lots of Metallica, not much of, say, Unsane).
While reading "Slashdot" & posting a snotty comment regarding the DMCA, injecting marine-killing heroin into my veins, and punching a Thylacine in the face, I grabbed some content that I thought... was an MP3.
But it's not. It's instead called an "MPC" -- which leads me to my following question: what the hell is this supposed to be? When I throw them into some Winamp, it comes up as a thirty-plus minute track. But no music plays. Did I just get duped or is there a program out there that will actually plan an "MPC"?
(The band in question is A-ha, for what it's worth.)