Why I love downloading

2015-11-01T03:47:00.000-08:00

My interest in media downloads began at a young age. It must have been sometime in the late 90's that I began in earnest. Before this, discovering new artists was a chore. You either had to have a large circle of friends who could introduce you to new music, or a considerable budget to expend on new albums. Like most teenagers, my cash flow was somewhere between zero and nothing. As for friends, they generally had the same materials I had already heard. It was easy to become locked into one genre when finding music through friends.

In the beginning there were FTP sites which usually required you to upload before you could download. Different ratios of uploads to downloads were offered. To get started you had to rip a few CDs of something which had not been uploaded. Alternatively, you could simply upload junk files in the MP3 format. The best sites were available by invitation only and required a password.

FTP was generally hit or miss. The next big thing around this time was Audiogalaxy. At this time most people were into Napster, but I found Audiogalaxy to be far superior. Of course both services were shut down by the RIAA copyright Nazis.

That year I received my first MP3 player. It was an Archos as I recall. It had 20gb internal storage, with a primitive dot matrix display on the front. The next year, apple came out with their iPods. The apple user interface was superior, but nobody cared for iTunes. Honestly, I still despise it.

After this, most people I knew gravitated towards DirectConnect and DC++. The service was only semi-decentralized. Servers kept track of the different clients currently online. Servers were occasionally shut down and DirectConnect never offered the parallelism of Torrents.

Torrents had been around for sometime before they really caught on. It was only when the RIAA had eliminated the lower hanging fruit that people bothered to pursue torrents.

These days the most common source for downloads are Torrents, Youtube, or direct HTTP downloads from 'open directory' sites. The currently preferred bittorrent software is deluge. For Youtube downloads there are plenty of options, but most of them include some adware or other crap. Ideally, you will want to use youtube-dl, an opensource command line based python script.

Of course with direct HTTP downloads, no specialized software is required other than your web browser. Although most people prefer to use wget. If you are not into the opensource scene, it is worth checking out. Windows users should probably install cygwin so they have access to a decent shell. I won't go into the details of this here, but I have mentioned enough for you to do your own research.

Searching for HTTP downloads can be a little tricky. One site I can recommend strongly is unknownsecret.info. It has received some bad press online, mostly from people too lazy to use the site. Alarmist ignorance seems to be at an all time high on the Internet. More and more people have come online, but most of them have never put the effort into educating themselves about computers.

Downloading is one of those things that requires a bit of patience and research. You can not just jump on the first thing. There are so many also-ran torrent clients and youtube downloaders for example. Most of them contain adware or worse. Again, stick to the opensource solutions.

The key to staying safe online, away from scams, and free of malicious software is self education. Just like anything else in life, you have to be willing to put some effort into the process. Personal responsibility goes a long way online. The Internet offers an incredible resource for self-education, but many individual's minds have been turned to mush by the institutional model of passive education.

Just listening to others, what they think, and taking it all at face value will not get you far in life or online. It seems contrary to the entire premise of the Internet's information revolution. There are no more gatekeepers. You are not limited to your friend's music selections. Similarly, you can not take the mindless bleating of the lowest common denomenator Internet user seriously without a modicum of critical thought.

On today's Internet, anyone can blog, post to facebook, or comment at reddit. You'll notice that the quality of information declines on the aggregate as the barrier to entry is lowered. Yes, there are some gems to be found, but most people with two neurons to rub together will quickly become alienated by the bleating of the unwashed masses.

So when you see people posting alarmist comments and blogs, take it with a grain of salt. Don't expect an intelligent commentator to come in or for cooler heads to prevail. Thoughtful people have long ago moved on to greener pastures from the wastelands of social media. Take responsibility for your own information by doing your own due diligence. In the process you will grow and expand as an Internet user. This is a value that exceeds anything you can download for free.