Now Listening: Merle Haggard – Movin’ On
Mood: Inquisitive
I am doing something I never thought I would be doing again. Music mining.
What is that? Well, I’m sure all of you are guilty of that in some way. You’re looking for a certain music file, and you look for it on a mp3 directory, say, mp3skull, and you find all of these delicious places where the song might be, but you don’t know if they are, so you click the link they have to download.
If you’re lucky, the music plays, and you can get the song you are looking for. Yay, you got it. Do you move on and huff kittens? Of course not. You make a bit of copypasta magic and see if you can get into the website directory where the file came from. Usually it is some ‘old’ website from the mid-naught decade, and, therefore, you can mine the directory with some kind of impunity. If not, you can get them from the website itself, usually as some sort of embedded link with a little ‘download’ button, and you can get to see an interesting website with weird coding or even weirder commentary going with the music link.
Most of the time, though, you have some kind of mp3 sub-directory so you can leave the rest of the place alone and instead figure out why anyone would have the complete discog of Madonna on their website. Or why they have Simon & Garfunkle’s ‘Sound of Silence’ under a folder titled ‘Songs to Get High To’. Though, I do have to say, ‘Sound of Silence’ is an excellent song to get high with, either drinking or toking. I have that on the highest of authorities.
Anyway, the habit kind of died out when I found out many places I mined were deleted due to the Geocities Destruction of ’09. Thousands of directories gone, kaput. Including my own — before I moved to LiveJournal, I had a weird-looking Geocities website with HTML buttons and frames(!) where I had a journal and other crazy stuff. That is another entry, to be sure.
So, today, while trying to find an obscure groove/lounge song, I found myself with a list of various directory links, most not working, but a few that did. Many of the directories had (blech) hip-hop and rap songs, but others had a wide eclectic mix. One of them I’m currently ‘mining’ as I type has no reachable directory, but the website is a fascinating mix of commentary from six? seven? different people where each entry has an equally fascinating song to go with it.
And that is the beauty of music mining. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, and you might land yourself in a pit where people slur Bush to the midi-tune of Disney’s “It’s A Small World After All”, but in the most part you end in a small part of the internet where it is downright fascinating.
P.S. I found the song.
Ramblings, shamblings, and other grooves 