BOC: HW: Those Buck CDs & Hawkwind & Napster ?s

[Johnny Firic]

> > I wouldn't be surprised if these crop up on eBay before
> > long, suitably renamed to disguise their origin.  Either that, or
> > someone will be giving them away for free, in butchered MPEG audio
> > form,
> > over Napster or Gnutella as a "protest" at the high price...
>
>
>I disagree, and in fact think the OPPOSITE is true.  Who is going to
>spend $150 to give this stuff away for free?  If they spent $50, I could
>see some folks doing it - but I suspect the high price in part may have
>been intended to discourage pirates/bootleggers.  Only the die-hard fans
>are going to get this, and they probably have a strong allegiance to
>Buck.
>
>That's my guess anyway.
>
>John

Yes I think John is right here. There's a similar situation with the King
Crimson Collectors' Series, which is a project similar to the Buck archive
CDs, only it has more than 10 CDs by now (12, I think). They're also pricy
(altho not quite as pricy as the Archive CDs), and also sold in mailorder
only. And fans seem to respect the fact that this is really a goodwill
gesture on part of Robert Fripp (King Crimson frontman), who, like Buck,
IMHO will certainly not make a fortune on it. I've _never_ seen _any_
Collectors' stuff on Napster (again: there's more than 10 CDs of it), and I
haven't even looked for the Archive material. (Since people are giving
contradictory reviews of the Collectors' stuff, I'd like to listen for
myself before I venture on mailordering)

There is some BOC bootleg material on Napster, offhand I remember I saw live
versions of "Flaming telepaths" and "Career of evil". No "Arthur comics",
though, or "Wings of mercury", which I was kinda hoping for... but if you
just type "Blue Oyster Cult", 96 out of 100 results are going o be "The
Reaper".

On a Hawkwind note (bear in mind I'm a novice HW fan), I've downloaded &
listened to "Doremi fasol latido" and "Quark strangeness & charm", cause I
heard they are great albums, and I ordered both from CDnow. A lot of the
actual released albums can not actually be found at CDnow, Amazon etc. (eg
In search of space, Astounding sounds), and they usually only have 24bit
gold whatever releases of the 70s albums, which I'm not inclined to buy at
this time. I've seen some HW bootlegs on Napster, while searching for "Urban
guerilla" and "Silver machine" (which I take it are HW equivalents of the
Big 3) I got results like "audience recording [some place] '79 w/Calvert" or
things like that. So I guess a more knowledgable fan would be able to find
more bootleg HW stuff.

  General Napster issues that have come up: Ping # - when your modem
establishes a connection, it first sends a ping signal to determine if there
is in fact a connection or if it's a dead link. the other side responds with
their own png. *the lower their ping is, the faster the connection will be*.
I avoid downloading anything over 200 (ping number=200). if it says "N/A"
than the other person's connection is very good and not firewalled
(firewalled connections tend to have very high ping #s).
  Number of results - this depends on your area and if Napster servers
around you are clustered or not. All servers in the USA are clustered (which
means you can contact anyone connected to your cluster of servers) and a lot
in Europe are (not all, though). Elsewhere, like Australia, I'm not sure.
The number of users/files available usually tells it. If there's less than
500,000 libraries available when you connect, you probably won't be able to
find a rare item, like a HW bootleg. In the weekends, I sometimes get more
than 1,500,000 libraries (but I doubt this is possible in Europe) and can
find practically anything. Servers seem to have a funny way of clustering so
they are configured one way today and a different way tomorrow. That's why I
sometimes can't "see" other users who I know are online at the moment.
Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

Hope that helps,

Johnny
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