Comments on: trade mp3s

Question: trade mp3s

stupidsexyFlanders — Tue, 10 May 2005 10:13:20 -0800

Has anyone ever heard of a thing like a CD swap, but for HDDs, with the goal of sharing digitized music in extremely large quantities?

By: agropyron

agropyron — Tue, 10 May 2005 10:44:11 -0800

It seems kind of cumbersome when you can share digitized music in extremely large quantities over the internet...

If you want to efficiently and securely share or access collections of files (presumably legal files) among a group of trusted people, WASTE is a great tool.

By: koenie

koenie — Tue, 10 May 2005 11:30:55 -0800

It seems kind of cumbersome when you can share digitized music in extremely large quantities over the internet...
Well, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard drives speeding down the highway.

By: Jack Karaoke

Jack Karaoke — Tue, 10 May 2005 12:23:23 -0800

I was considering an NYC DVD swap, or LAN party, at one point. Never heard of anything similar actually happening though.

By: angry modem

angry modem — Tue, 10 May 2005 13:03:18 -0800

I think a DVD swap is a better idea.

But a bunch of people congregating and forming an ad-hoc wifi network to share files with eachother sounds neat too.

By: Kwantsar

Kwantsar — Tue, 10 May 2005 13:43:27 -0800

My friends and I do just what you suggest.

By: stupidsexyFlanders

stupidsexyFlanders — Tue, 10 May 2005 13:53:44 -0800

kwantsar: email me?

By: stupidsexyFlanders

stupidsexyFlanders — Tue, 10 May 2005 13:57:07 -0800

And btw, I'm thinking of a lot of music, like 100GB. DVD, even WASTE would not be as efficient as swapping HDDs.

By: Zed_Lopez

Zed_Lopez — Tue, 10 May 2005 14:39:00 -0800

See Wired article from 2002 (I remembered this Boing Boing post.) It's been going on.

By: Mach5

Mach5 — Tue, 10 May 2005 14:52:35 -0800

is there a metafilter waste server? should we start one?

By: Civil_Disobedient

Civil_Disobedient — Tue, 10 May 2005 16:14:46 -0800

Yes, it's done often. Usually between small groups where everyone knows everyone else. Because of the man, and all.

/sitting on about 5 terabytes of movies and another 3 terabytes of music

is there a metafilter waste server? should we start one?

There is, but because of the beta-ness of WASTE, it hasn't taken off like, say, a small torrent tracker might.

By: graventy

graventy — Tue, 10 May 2005 16:50:22 -0800

My uncle just sent me a computer with 200GB of MP3s. I was impressed, to say the least. :)

By: mosch

mosch — Tue, 10 May 2005 18:42:35 -0800

I've never done an HD swap, but i've done massive long-running rsyncs before.

By: blasdelf

blasdelf — Wed, 11 May 2005 01:21:40 -0800

We need to do this to augment the MeFi Mix CD swap, like right now. It would probably work best with DVD-Rs, though hard drives would be pretty cool too. Everyone's got a spare or two.

Doing it over the internet would remove the mystery and laborious preparation involved, selecting good music that you don't think other people would have. It could be structured like the pre-existing swap, with each person sending an mailer to five other people.

Maybe each person send a DVD mailer to the next person in the chain, constantly recieving and passing it on to the next person. This could keep going infinetly, and you could do it with more than just music. It would work just as well for hard drives too.

If it was done with hard drives, maybe they could be contained in USB2 or Firewire enclosures for less wear and tear.

[This is good]

By: blasdelf

blasdelf — Wed, 11 May 2005 01:50:16 -0800

For a DVD/HDD Swap a system could be set up to track the travel of individually numbered packages so that they could be forwarded to those who had not yet recieved them.

If we want to be really bold in our efforts, such a site could catalog desciptions of the contents of the HDD/DVD do that people could sign up to be next in line. If a particular item gets popular, it could be duplicated for easier dissemination.

It might be better to keep the whole operation small though...