Gordon Woolf's Blog

The nastier side of Torrent

I finally got round to trying the Torrent system, and could not resist doing a torrent search on myself. With quotes around my name I got several entries, most on a site called Docstor, and for articles written years ago, such as one titled "Is there really a PageMaker 7?"

I was able to add a comment to the pages where some of the articles were listed, pointing out that the articles were old, out of date and that I had no objection to their use provided a link to my website was included -- and that more up-to-date articles, also free for use in non-profit situations, could be found on that website. It had the desired result. Some time later, downloads were listed as zero.

My views on torrent availability are mixed and not helped by finding that a surprising number of sites seem to offer free downloads of copyright material, but then offer faster downloads if one pays a fee. The person who created the material will not be receiving any of that fee so, at the very least, I feel that such pay-for-speed services should be boycotted.

Certainly many musicians, singers etc have been dudded by record companies, to the extent that the most rewarding way for many to make music is to record their own material and sell copies at concerts, plus a few to independent retailers who will hold stock so that the artist can advertise on flyers, websites etc and at concerts and other performances about where their records can be bought. There are good record companies around but they tend to be the smaller ones.

To a substantial extent the same goes for software. There are a small number of businesses that represent small software businesses, providing a means of registration and downloads and for the collection of money.

And after saying all that, I have to admit that I downloaded the Torrent version of a CD that was recorded by a singer I know, or knew, because I last heard her live 40 years ago, but who was recently in Melbourne as one of the overseas guests of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

I needed the recording to persuade my partner to also come to the concert as while she likes some jazz she is more at home with country music. Listening to a singer who uses her voice more as a musical instrument than for words was not done by choice, but she did enjoy it, and I hope by the time you read this, she will have enjoyed the concert. (update: she did).

I hope too to have been able to buy a copy of the record (update: I did) as I'd much prefer to listen to a legal recording of someone I know and whose coffee I drank at her home many times after gigs when I was in her backing band.

Future in Internet Radio

Most of my media experience has been with newspapers and magazines, but there have been a couple of short periods of involvement with radio, once with the ABC and then with community radio. That may explain why I was intrigued with the idea of internet radio and had been listening to the internet feeds of a few radio stations. Unfortunately that ties the listener to the computer unless you go for extensive wiring or set the volume excessively loud. It is thus not surprising that my latest toy is an internet radio. What is an internet radio? This one looks like any other "kitchen radio", somewhat bigger than a bedside clock radio, mainly so it can have a better quality speaker, though still just one; it picks up its signal not from normal broadcasting but from your own wireless router. That means it connects to radio stations for their digital online services but directly to their web address via the router/modem without needing a computer. I'd been looking at what was on the market, but felt that the prices of from $299 up was too expensive for less electronics than in a $15 alarm clock. Then I saw that Aldi were offering one at $149. Still expensive but below my current mental limit for something I might play with and then discard.  I've since discovered that the current awareness of what these things are is so low that Woolworths were having a cleraance of Sagem models at some DSE and Tandy stores. It did not take long to get it going, with only a couple of "switch off and start again" detours. I was concerned that the manual says the date and time which show when switched on will not survive the power being turned off. Would the other settings hold? Answer: yes they do, switch off the radio, unplug from the transformer/power supply plug, reconnect, turn on and it automatically reconnected to my router (I'm using WEP) and to the station that was playing before. So I can shift it from room to room and turn it off at the socket, which I'd need to if it is the bedroom as the backlit blue screen is as bright as Lunar Park (well, almost, definitely bright enough to keep us awake). The other thing I miss is even a basic tone control. My office is somewhat reflective (lots of windows and vertical blinds, no curtains) so I'd like to knock the top off a little — but it seems this is a fault not only of the Aldi radio but of most models, and of internet radio on the PC too unless you go deep into software settings. Incidently it is clearly branded "Pure" despite the model number of AV-BT1506 indicating it may have been contracted out by Pure for the Aldi order. Pure's current internet radio as seen on their sites is more advanced but also more expensive. The radio comes with an access code to the Frontier web site which works well as the radio picked up my new account listing there within a few seconds, and you can use folders to separate listings into genre or whatever. Apparently Frontier make the chips used in many brands of internet radios. There are around 7000 radio stations available from the two-line LCD display but it can be a lot easier to set up your own list of favourite stations on the Frontier web site and then allocate the best of those to the eight presets. One of the first accidental finds was Australian Showcase on a station called CMR Nashville that seems to be based somewhere in Europe. (I'd prefer jazz but this is my wife's favourite kind of music and showing her that she can get the music she likes while the ABC was at this time obsessed with the football Grand Finals by simply pressing a couple of buttons was easily justifying the expense). Since then I've found that CBC (the Canadian ABC equivalent) seemed obsessed with the US elections despite having one of their own, from the BBC London station that the jewish bakery/deli that my dad used to take me for a salt beef beigel on a Sunday morning when I was about 10 is still in business (alongside the more recent Bangladeshi curry houses), and that it is a novelty for most Londoners to be getting water meters. So, what will be the future for internet radio? There seem to be signs that they may become much more portable. A battery operated version the size of the old transistor radios would be more portable around the home and garden even if restricted to the coverage of the user's wireless router/modem. And outlets for headphones and audio in general should become universal. Perhaps they can be combined with MP3 players of the iPod kind.  Tomorrow's internet radio may not be like the ones we have today but with many thousands of radio feeds already available and with dozens being added each week, my guess is that they'll become much more common. Even in the past few weeks the number and quality of ads on a couple of stations listed among my favourites have shown a healthy increase, so the financial return to stations may also become better even against current trends. There are already network ad inserters offering ads on up to 600 stations but the best returns for advertisers are likely to be for those ads which are relevent to the listeners either by interest or region. The other problem to overcome is the relationship in the music forms of internet radio between income from ads and the payments out to music rights owners. Currently there is a reprieve from high rates originally proposed for US law.