Holy Crap, That's a Lot of Music!

Check it out: In four years & change, Metafilter Music has had over 5000 posts! A nice round even number like that is clearly a omen that it's time to post a collection of all the songs. So, here's a torrent!* It's kind of big - it weighs in at 4629 mp3s** & over 20 gigabytes. This gathers everything from its opening in June 2006 through the end of September 2010.

This is the direct result of not_on_display's requesting a way to download all of the Metafilter Music songs.

* My host*** serves torrent files badly. Save this, open the zip file, then open the torrent file in a BitTorrent


** Some settling of contents may occur in shipping & handling.


*** I've run the self-linking bit past a mod. I'm not eager to submit this to the attention of a torrent indexer immediately.

posted by Pronoiac (35 comments total)

This one's going to take a while. And it will be so worth it.

By the way, does anyone know how I can rename the files and still seed with utorrent? I seem to remember doing it before but I can't figure it out right now.
posted by theichibun at 9:16 PM on October 11, 2010

Dude. You are amazing.
posted by ORthey at 10:12 PM on October 11, 2010

woah.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:15 PM on October 11, 2010

Wow! I'm gratified at the response - my worst case scenario was that, like, three people total would be interested.


theichibun: By the way, does anyone know how I can rename the files and still seed with utorrent?

A search pulled up some directions. I'd personally do that on a copy, or after I was done downloading & uploading. Renaming, moving, or changing tags (or even possibly just opening the files in iTunes, if it does some of the others), might alter them sufficiently that a BitTorrent client wouldn't recognize them, throw out all progress, & decide to start from a clean slate.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:30 PM on October 11, 2010

Thank you for this*!

* also, nice footnotes
posted by jtron at 12:48 AM on October 12, 2010

Holy Music, That's a Lot of Crap! or That's Wholly a Lot of Crap Music! or....or...oh, shut the fuck up Dundee....
posted by MajorDundee at 11:45 AM on October 12, 2010

Pronoiac: "some directions."

It's got to be that damn switching folders thing. It worked here but doesn't seem to work on other things. Oh well.

Anyway, 2 days until finish for me. Although I don't leave my computer on at night so who knows how long it will actually be.
posted by theichibun at 1:05 PM on October 12, 2010

WOW! Seriously.
posted by snsranch at 3:45 PM on October 12, 2010

Lifehacker has a similar renaming tutorial, but you best keep these away from iTunes or any other music/file managers that like to tidy up things. If you've re-tagged them and don't re-check, you might share corrupted data (or maybe you won't share that file at all). But if the file gets re-checked after re-tagging, a part of the file will be seen as corrupted or incomplete, and the torrent client will re-download that part.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:05 PM on October 12, 2010

Whee! I've seeded over 30GB so far. Thanks again for syncing our files, Pronoiac!
posted by not_on_display at 7:09 PM on October 12, 2010

Ah, it's the tagging that does it. That sucks, but at least with the MefiMusic torrent I won't have to worry about that so much.
posted by theichibun at 8:21 PM on October 12, 2010

Wonderful, and organized by month. Just perfect. Thanks!
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:49 AM on October 13, 2010

Holy crap, not_on_display! Thanks for seeding so much so quickly!

Seriously, getting complete copies out within two days is wildly beyond my expectations.
posted by Pronoiac at 9:58 PM on October 13, 2010

I'm finding this vaguely (goodly) scary...

My occasional mordant melodies shall resonate upon further, unsuspecting cochleae.

So be it.
posted by Zenabi at 6:07 AM on October 14, 2010

Pronoiac: "Holy crap, not_on_display! Thanks for seeding so much so quickly!

Seriously, getting complete copies out within two days is wildly beyond my expectations."

My wife is going to be so afraid of the noises coming out of my speakers.
posted by theichibun at 6:32 AM on October 14, 2010

Anything that achieves a wider distribution can only be a good thing.
posted by Zenabi at 6:38 AM on October 14, 2010

If you're crazy like me & want to skim over all these tracks in iTunes:

Put all these tracks in a playlist.

Set up a smart playlist that selects tracks in the first playlist, & have a playcount of 0, & a skip count of 0.

Go nuts!

If you then want to figure out whose song you like on your iPod, I made a spreadsheet to help, so you can put them on a Mefi playlist, give them favorites, & otherwise cheer them on!

posted by Pronoiac at 10:47 PM on October 19, 2010

I've compiled the torrent for October - 66 songs, 337 megs.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:16 PM on November 2, 2010

Ah, yay! And good reminder for me to start seeding the huge one, I often forget.
posted by davejay at 10:20 PM on November 2, 2010

although right now nobody else is seeding the old or the new, but I'll leave it on overnight and again at work tomorrow and so on
posted by davejay at 10:21 PM on November 2, 2010

This is weird: earlier, not_on_display's & my computer couldn't see each other, until (maybe coincidentally) I restarted my torrent client. I've been seeding the old (albeit slowly) & new torrents for hours now.

Of three peers I see right now, two are obviously in touch, with the same percentage completed - around a quarter. The third peer hovered around 0, just hitting 1%.

Something's up, maybe a combo of flaky trackers & the odd software client out going on - I dunno.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:33 PM on November 2, 2010

I don't leave my computer on all night. I do leave it on all day, and when I'm not an idiot I open up the torrentinator when it starts up. I really should just set it as a start up program.
posted by theichibun at 4:25 AM on November 3, 2010

The torrent for November is up - it's 67 songs in 359 megs.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:06 PM on December 2, 2010

Instead of making a torrent for December, I made a torrent collecting the last quarter of 2010.

The monthly collection torrents are very quiet. Are people enjoying them?
posted by Pronoiac at 2:40 PM on January 15, 2011

I had Transmission off for a while and forgot about it (as I'd been using it on another compy)... I've turned it on again, and am scooping up Month 12. Yay!!
posted by not_on_display at 10:35 PM on January 15, 2011

The last one that I noticed wasn't working. But really, I think this quarterly solution is the way to go. Unless you wanted to go longer, but I think quarterly is perfect.
posted by theichibun at 8:11 AM on January 17, 2011

If quarterly's better, cool; regardless, I'll likely be seeding sporadically for a bit. I've considered using Dropbox for the monthly collections. It would be higher availability (24/7), but one would have to ask for access.

I just mentioned the possibility of switching to Dropbox on a more recent Metatalk thread, & I thought I'd mention it here.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:26 AM on January 18, 2011

Good news, everyone! Updates!

Songs from 2011:

Q1, January through March: 201 songs, 1059 megabytes.

Q2, April through June: 169 songs, 963 megabytes.

I think that the trackers we use prefer UDP, so I've modified the older torrents to suit. You can download them:

The first 5k songs

2010 Q4, October through December

I'm not alone in seeding everything listed here.

The files haven't changed, just the trackers. If you'd rather change them yourself, so you don't lose any progress, add these trackers:

udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce

posted by Pronoiac at 3:29 PM on July 11, 2011

woo hoo! I just got a new computer and am transferring my seeds over there now. Looking forward to Q3, whenever you get around to posting it!
posted by not_on_display at 6:38 PM on September 29, 2011

PS: I will no longer be seeding the Oct/Nov '10 separately; I will stick with them nestled in the Q4 '10.
posted by not_on_display at 6:40 PM on September 29, 2011

Work on Q3 has started. I like to wait in case someone's decided to remove their song.
posted by Pronoiac at 3:30 PM on October 15, 2011

2011-Q3 is up! 128 songs, 685 megabytes.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:42 AM on November 7, 2011

The torrent for 2011 is up - 648 songs, 3.5 gigabytes. If you've gotten any of the quarterly torrents, you can move those directories into place to avoid re-downloading them.
posted by Pronoiac at 2:35 PM on February 6, 2012

I updated the spreadsheet with songs through 2011, so you can look up songs with generic titles like "AudioTrack 01" or "Track 2" to properly thank their creators.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:57 PM on February 20, 2012

Hello, everybody! The torrent of all the songs from Metafilter Music in 2012 is now live. There were 558 songs, taking up 3.1 gigabytes. I'll post this to Metatalk soon.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:59 PM on January 21