Free stuff?

[ryokimball]

I went a little tangential on my post about the Google OS, so I don't exactly remember what all I was going to say, but I think it had something to do with jamendo. It's a pretty awesome place for free music, though you probably won't find any groups you know of there. It's almost all under the Creative Commons license. I likeses it. Then again, who doesn't like free music?

Sorry if this is "spam." Delete if necessary.

[techieMoe]

Hmm. An interesting site. I'll have to take a look at it. Creative Commons licensed music is a new one on me. It seems to be the musical equivalent of the GPL, which is a neat idea.

[carlosponti]

creative commons encompasses video as well I believe.

[bidi]

It seems to be the musical equivalent of the GPL, which is a neat idea.

Actually, if you look at the Creative Commons website the GNU GPL is the Creative Commons' recommended software license.

I find it especially interesting that there are people out there willing to offer their work on these terms. I was aware of Creative Commons, and remember Pearl Jam released one of their most recent music videos under a CC license (was on Google Video for a while), but didn't realize there were so many options (I just checked their license page, and there's a bunch of license you can choose).

[cousinlucky]

Ok what's the downside to this " free " stuff? Whenever I come to something " free " on the internet I get " look out, lucky " shivers.

[ryokimball]

I generally use a secondary computer to check out ANYTHING related to the word "free" or any other hot-word. But Jamendo actually was a link that came with one of the distros I was checking out (I think it might have been Fedora 7, but I'm not sure). It also had magnatune, but they're a bit less free (ehem) than Jamendo.
If there is a catch, I'd say it's because the artists don't get paid for their participation. You can donate to them, but there is no charge --which is good for us. And them, if they just want to put the music out. (I might go along these lines if/when I start putting music out... but we'll stay off that topic for now.)
As far as Magnatune goes, they do commercial stuff, such as Four Strings (one of only groups I know that I've seen there, though I haven't looked much). But they have a "song of the day" that you can subscribe to and download for free. I do it as well, but some people might not be patient enough for such things.


BTW: I'm currently using Vista. I'm sorry. I just can't find a distro I like, which is surprisingly mostly because the CDs are over 700 MB. What's up with that?! I've never seen a CD that held over 700 MB. Weird!! Besides, I think I like Fedora most so far, so I might just wait for Fedora 8 to come out and hope they've resolved whatever issue my computer has with it (though it might actually be a install disc error... but I'm out of DVDs and the 64-bit LiveCD falls into the above-mentioned category). v,v
please don't kill me or ban me from the forums....

[techieMoe]

As far as Magnatune goes, they do commercial stuff, such as Four Strings (one of only groups I know that I've seen there, though I haven't looked much). But they have a "song of the day" that you can subscribe to and download for free. I do it as well, but some people might not be patient enough for such things.

I'm a fan of Magnatune, although since they are a pay site that might turn some folks off. At least they're fair to the artists with the profits (50/50 split, you pick what you want to pay). They also sometimes release compilations for free download, and every so often they'll send out promos that let you download one album of your choice for free.

I've seen a couple of artists on Jamendo that are also on Magnatune (Rob Costlow for instance). Some of them even post the same music for free on Jamendo that you would pay for on Magnatune. The downside of course is if you don't donate, they don't make any money off of it.

[ryokimball]

I only have two things against online purchasing, and neither are really that bad.
First, especially when it comes to music, I'd like to have a physical copy, like a CD. If I'm going to pay for it, that is.
Second, the only thing I've ever bought online was my iPod (which was stolen...v,v) and even then I couldn't use conventional methods --I had to go through all sorts of pipelines and wire the money to them which got lost and confused and it took over a month to get settled. I don't have a credit card or anything, not even a bank account right now (that I can use, though I'll be getting one soon after I get A JOB...). Life should be a bit easier afterwards.

[ryokimball]

Ok what's the downside to this " free " stuff? Whenever I come to something " free " on the internet I get " look out, lucky " shivers.

Oh, I forgot to ask: how'd you get into Linux, then?

[cousinlucky]

At Barnes and Noble I bought the book " Linux for Dummies " which had a Suse 9 disk included. I had problems with it. I called Novell on the phone and was advised to go to my nearest Best Buy store and purchace a six disk set of Suse 10 which i did.

Later my computer guy " Jay " reformatted my hard drive with a partition containing a minimum of Windows XP; I took my computer home and installed the Suse 10.

I have since sent away for a " free set " of Ubuntu disks that are still in the unopened package. I hope to install them on a new or custom built computer some day.

I found out the hard way that Suse is only for someone who knows their way around computers because just about everything in Suse needs to be configured after it is installed.