I had a good site for this stuff but it is temporarily down. Any other good sites to get free music out there?

 

Did you try DC++? Connect to multiple servers for free with lots of goodies. Find a good European server and the connection is really fast!

 

Go to http://www.slyck.com and learn about alternatives.

P2P has become largely passe. Too many bogus files, too much potential risk.

The two that matter are BitTorrent and Usenet (aka "newsgroups"). I use a program called NewsbinPro to grab mp3s and movies (DVD, SVCD, VCD and DivX from Usenet. Fahrenheit 911 took 48 hours after opening to arrive; Spiderman-2 was same-day. (The group releasing S2 a day later managed to get very near to DVD quality, excellent for a telecine.)

 

I only got bogus files with movies. Never with music. And there is no risk of a virus infection if you have good software protecting your PC.

Both options you suggest are trackeable and some people have received notices from their ISP due to d'l of files. DC++ connects to foreign servers and is not as easy to track.

The quality of the video, as you mentioned, depends on the people posting it up.

 

Bzzzt! Downloading from Usenet is COMPLETELY passive. You never post your name anywhere -- you never share -- so you are 100% secure.

Some ISPs, notably Comcast, have been limiting download bandwidth, and the solution is to change ISPs. My Verizon DSL has been chugging along 24/7 for 5 years now -- not as fast as Cablevision, but then Verizon brought DSL into the area 3 years sooner than the cable co's offering (and we'd already gone to dish for the other stuff).

FWIW, half our movie downloads are Chinese -- from the Usenet groups alt.binaries.vcdz and alt.binaries.multimedia.chinese. One member of our house understands Mandarin and Cantonese (though not how to d/l or burn discs). We'd never have most of this material if one person had to dig it up.