This remnant will be replaced soon. The FAQ is back, with a new design!
Can
I trade for live Phish over the net?
This used to be a pipe dream, so much that this page hosted the
math showing how it would be impossible - but now it's entirely
possible, and increasingly popular. Phish even distributes entire
shows in digital quality online (via LivePhish.com)
and a community of users discusses that process (e.g. on LivePhish.org).
See also Gnutella (for
distributed sharing of files), LimeWire
(a specific Gnutella client), Bit
Torrent (for distirbuted distribution). These days, you can
download music from Amazon, AOL Music, Artist Diret, BestBuy, CenterSpan's
Scour, Click Radio, Emusic, Epic's MPEG4 Music, Full Audio's MusicNOW,
Instavid, LiquidAudio's BurnItFirst, Listen.com's Rhapsody, MP3.com,
MusicNet, Netscape Music, Pressplay, RealOne MusicPass, Philly Soul
Classics, RioPort, SamGoody, Spinner, Streamwaves's Higherwaves,
TowerRecords, and more, not to mention LivePhish.com.
(BTW, all those are legal.)
- Just a few years ago, it was a dream of Phish traders to be
able to send full-bandwidth audio files over the net. Now, with
high-speed internet access, fast computers, and affordable large-capacity
hard disk storage, the dream has, finally, become a reality.
There have always been two major problems facing traders who wanted
to send Phish shows over the internet file size and sound quality.
Full-bandwidth, CD-quality audio files take up about ten megabytes
for every minute of stereo sound. A full CD of digital audio takes
up almost 800 MegaBytes! Even by todays standards, this is a very
large amount of data to send over the internet. To some extent,
this problem of file size can be solved by digital compression.
Usually, the tradeoff for reduced file size is loss of sound quality.
This loss of quality ranges from mild to drastic, depending upon
the kind of audio data compression used to encode the compressed
audio file. As a result, the traders who are swapping shows on
the internet have basically split into two groups those that are
willing to suffer some loss of audio quality in order to collect
a lot of shows, and those who would like to maintain the full
integrity of the original sound recordings at the cost of (much)
more time transmitting the files. There are many options available
to both groups, as you will see.
Without a doubt, Mp3 is the file-type of the year for 1999. In
a very short time, Mp3 has gone from being a kind of mystical
and unknown term (because the tools for creating them were limited),
to being a "bad" term (as record companies and recording industry
groups tried to ban the format to curtail illegal bootlegging
of music on the internet), to being a running candidate for consumers'
music format of choice. Mp3 is a highly compressed sound format.
By eliminating frequencies from the original sound file that most
people will not hear anyway, audio files can be reduced to almost
1/10th their file size without much audible loss in quality. Many
Phish traders have know about Mp3 compression and watched it develop
with rapt attention for years. Whole archives of Phish Mp3 files
have sprung up on the 'net, with entire runs of shows available
for free for the downloading. One of the largest collections can
be found online at http://sugarmegs.org,
which has a multitude of "mirror" sites that are loaded with an
ever-increasing variety of shows. Whereas Mp3 file sizes are still
huge, the file sizes are much more accessible to a large audience
than are full-bandwidth audio files. A full set of Phish would
typically take up 800MB uncompressed. The same file compressed
with Mp3 technology will take up less than 80MB. The difference
is staggering. When you consider that most of these shows are
posted as separate tracks which typically take up many fewer megabytes
than a whole set, that phat Reba jam you always wanted becomes
that much closer to the grasp of your 14.4 modem! In fact, Phish.com
made the rare studio version of "Strange Design" available on
their website this year in the Mp3 format, and to celebrate Halloweenof
1999, the Phish organization made the entire Halloween1990
show availableover the internet (for a fee) via a partnership
with emusic.com! Mp3 players and encoders are available for every
major platform. More information on Mp3 utilities can be found
on the main page of sugarmegs.org.
If downloading file sizes of over one megabyte scares you, there
are lots of phan sites out there with shows in RealAudio format.
By downloading the free RealAudio player from real.com, you can
get Phish shows and even 'round-the-clock broadcasts of Phish
streamed to your computer speakers like radio. The sound quality
is not nearly that of a DAT or a CD, but it's better than A.M.
radio, and the file sizes of the compressed audio are MUCH smaller
than files with any level of Mp3 compression. An 800MB set of
Phish compressed for playback over a 28.8 modem will typicall
only be around 9 megs!!! Higher speed internet connections enable
you to recieve higher-quality realaudio transmissions when they
are available. With realaudio, virtually anyone with a computer
and a sound card and an internet connection can serve or listen
to Phish over the net.
An alternative to RealAudio is Microsoft's Windows Media player,
which is available for free from microsoft.com. You will need
to have this installed in order to listen to streaming shows hosted
on sugarmegs.org.
Another alternative to RealAudio is Apple Computer's Quicktime.
Most computers sold these days ship with Quicktime installed.
You can download the latest version of Quicktime from http//www.apple.com/quicktime/download.
Quicktime is available for Windows and for Macintosh, as well
as for Java. The compression algorithm used by Quicktime for music
is called the QDMC (Quicktime Digital Music CoDec), developed
by QSound. The CoDec delivers
The digital trading community has never really taken any of these
forms of audio distribution on the 'net very seriously for building
collections for trading. Serious digital traders respect the love
that the large number of tapers risking millions of dollars worth
of digital audio decks and expensive microphones at strange venues
every tour put into getting each and every show preserved on tape
for us. They care about preserving these shows at the full digital
quality at which they were recorded. Up until recently, there
was no feasible way to trade shows on the 'net in all of their
digital glory and beauty. But armed with a high-speed connection
to the internet, a fast computer with digital i/o, and a freeware
utility called Shorten, all of this is changing rapidly. A very,
very kind group of people out there on the 'net have set up a
network of high-speed servers that they are calling an "electric
tree" (look up Tape Trees elsewhere in this FAQ). The Shorten
utility compresses .wav files to as little at one half the size
of full-bandwidth with NO data loss whatsoever. When you consider
that even if you save only twenty per cent of the file size your
are saving over a hundred megs on a CD full of Phish, this becomes
a significant figure. The Electric Tree delivers Shortened audio
files over the internet for free. Once the Shortened .shn files
are on your hard drive, you can expand them with the Shorten utility
and burn them to CD-R, and/or tape them to DAT or cassette. If
you have the Windows version of Shorten, you can even keep and
play the compressed files. Shorten is available for Windows, Macintosh,
and Linux, at least. You can get an abundance of information on
this form of trading shows by paying a visit to http//www.etree.org.
They have a healthy list of standards and how-to's posted on their
website, as well as sign-ups for their mailing lists.
(-- Glen Moses <glenesis@glenesis.8m.com> 11/15/99)
- In the past tape trading over the net was highly inconvienent
due to the large file sizes associated with raw PCM (Compact disc,
DAT, AIFF, WAV, ect...) data. The compression methods available
left much to be desired as they were lossy. This means that the
compression programs took out information, baised on an algorhythm,
that the progam believed was less important. Often the data is
removed from the very high and low fequencies. This results in
a wavering or swishhh sound (Re your Phishy is swishy) Bad.
In the recent months I have started using a progam called Shorten
(.shn) from Softsound. Shorten is a lossless (It doesn't remove
any data) form of compression, like Zip. It looks for repeating
patterns in the data and uses a code to represent them in a, well....shortened
manner. The resulting files are still pretty large, about 400-450mb
for a 650mb CD or 3/4 original size, but it's a hell of alot better
that raw PCM. All one needs to do is down load them, uncompress
to WAV, and burn a disc. Modem users will sitll find this a true
pain as getting a full show wiould take around 50 hours of constant
downloading, but networked users, such as students, will be overjoyed.
There are several servers deadicated to Phish shows in .shn. These
are called "etree's", for electronic tape trees. there are also
mailing lists where those wonderfull site operators post the contents
of their drives. Like taping at a show, there are a good deal
of "manners" that go allong with using these sites. One of the
most basic is that, if you are using a modem, you E-mail the site
op. and ask their permission to get a show. This is due to the
fact that modems take up a connection that chould otherwise be
given to a networked user(s) who could get 8 shows befor the modem
grabbed one. I'm on a network and have , from some sites, been
able to get shows at a sustained rate of 120kbps. The best wat
to learn more about these sites is to get on a mailing list.
(-- Josh "Stagger Lee" Evans <jevans@bates.edu>
4/19/99)
- Yes the files are still pretty big but due to a great little
compression standard set now ditigal music comes in MP3's. MP3
compress ditigal music over 1/9 of its orignal size, so now a
show is about an average of 150 - 160 megs, yea that is damn big
now, but also speeds that a whole lot of people connect to the
internet now are vastly improving Cable Modems, ADSL, ISDN. All
of this makes a whole show take about an hour to download, and
the quality of tapes that you can produce afterwards is awesome.
(-- Joe Lawson <joe@questgate.net> 12/15/98)
-
See also:
Thanks also to Matt Kelly <matt@coolbeans.com>.
OLD CONTENT / OUTDATED :
From: Lee J. Silverman (ljs@cs.brown.edu, now at lee@www.phish.net)
Question: Why can't we digitize Phish concerts and make them available
online over the net?
The simple answer is that the resulting file would be much to large
to deal with. To see this, let's do a little arithmetic:
Let's talk about a short Phish show - 3/4 of a 90 minute tape for
set one and 5/6 of a tape for set two. That's 68 minutes on the
first tape and 75 minutes on the second, for a total of 143 minutes.
143 minutes times 60 sec/min is 8580 seconds. If we're going to
do this right, we want at least CD quality sound - 44,100 samples
per second. DAT samples at 48K, but let's say that we don't care
about the miniscule improvements that that would make. 8580 seconds
* 44,100 samples/sec = 378378000 samples.
We want this to be in stereo, so we have to multiply by 2 channels:
378378000 * 2 channels = 756756000 samples. Each sample is 16 bits,
or two bytes: 756756000 samples * 2 bytes/samples = 1513512000 bytes
AIFF non-lossy compression will reduce the file size 3x : 1513512000
bytes * 1/3 size AIFF = 504504000 bytes = 493 megs. OK. Now, let's
assume that you happen to have 500 Megs of hard drive space laying
around to use for this. Someone posted that they had a REALLY fast
ethernet connection, and they can download 1.2 megs in 5 seconds.
For now, let's assume that that's a reasonable figure. 1.2 megs
in 5 secs is 0.24 megs per second, or 4 seconds/meg. 492 megs *
4 secs/meg = 1970 seconds = 32.8 minutes download time. However,
if you can get 240K per second downloads over the internet to a
computer outside your school or company, mail me and tell me who
installed your network! The fastest transfer rate you're likely
to get over the internet, late at night on a friday when reasonable
people are out having fun, is probably 65,000 bytes per second,
so the download will take about two hours. That's if you have a
pretty fast ethernet connection, and assuming that nothing goes
wrong for that entire hour, and you have 500 megs of free disk space.
Let's say that the file comes in four parts, one for each side
of each tape. Each part will be about 125 Megs. That means that
you need a computer with 125 megs of RAM to load the file into memory
so you can play it without the interuptions that hard drive access
will give you. I think these limitations narrow the usefulness of
this system of tape distribution substantially; there may be two
dozen people on the net who have the resources to make use of such
a scheme.
In the final analysis, most of the numbers in this post are about
an order of magntiude larger than you'd expect a computer or network
to be able to handle at this point. However, the numbers associated
with computers have increased several orders of magnitude in the
past 10 years, and I think it's safe to say that those numbers will
keep going up in the future. I expect to see online versions of
Phish concerts within 5 years.
Jill Miller (5-20-96) thought Real Audio was the answer, and Eddie
Dinel pointed out (5-28-96) that "there's already a site on the
net providing cd-quality sound (though it's lossy compressed....)
at www.iuma.com (the internet underground music archives). But Keith
Martin answered: "RealAudio sucks for music. No one in their right
mind would ever record from realaudio onto tape. If somebody wanted
to put samples from shows on a web page, then RealAudio would be
ok to give a taste for the shows, but anything beyond that would
be silly."
Nick Van Gundy offered this (4-29-96): If someone with a DAT masters it to
individual track AIFFs (Not hard to do. Just need a program like
SoundEdit16, and good audio inputs) and sends them accross the net
to me I can then burn 'em right on to a CD. (All that's needed on
my side is a CD Burner and the software to use it) It's really not
that complicated at all. If you can find someone with DAT seeds,
a way of getting them on to the computer, a way of mastering it
to individual AIFF tracks, and has a fast net connection then it
can be done. BTW I just did went over how long the download would
be, and it's looking a little bit longer then the estimate in your
FAQ. 600 megs which is somewhere around 70 mintues on a CD would
take around 30 hours to download with a 56k line which is what I
have. A T1 would be obviously be more desirable, but isn't a neccesity.
I could start the 30 hour download for one set on a Friday night,
or more appealingly I could download for 10 hours for three nights.
There was a web broadcast, of the summer 1997 Tinley Park (Chicago)
show. An announced webcast of 11-19-97 was cancelled the afternoon
before the show.
"[Carlos Santana] said,
if you think you're making the music, you're wrong. He said that
Marvin Gaye told him that, in improvisational music especially,
or in any music, it exists and you're basically a vehicle that
it passes through and some people are maybe more suited to that
than others, but the best thing that you can do is just let it
go and not try to control the music."
-- Trey Anastasio, Rockline, 3/22/94
This page last updated January 26, 2007. All contents © 1992-2007 Ellis Godard. All rights reserved.
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