Chuck Mangione wrote:Marky Dread wrote:Chuck Mangione wrote:Has anyone found any fan-made physical bootlegs of the TRAC stuff yet? like on eBay? It would be nice to have a disc of it.
Make your own. You have the music, artwork what more do you need?. Plus if I find anyone selling the TRAC stuff on Ebay I'll personally break their fucking legs.
Hey, go easy on the bootleggers. We wouldn't have most of the great stuff in the Megalist if it wasn't for them. Maybe just put their feet to the fire for a while?
I'd personally be mad only if they sold it at a really high price and were clearly only doing it for the money with bad quality and artwork. If it was really good quality and design, plus a price only fair for shipping and whatnot, then I'd give them a pass. I suppose.
Don't get me wrong. I hate people who sell the Clash for money, like that guy who wants like a million for his live video. In this case, though, you're right. It's really unnecessary to create and sell the TRAC stuff especially when someone could just make some online. I always prefer newly found soundboards to show up on DIME first rather than pressed on vinyl or cassette.
You've never had to physically go to a record store or blindly fork over money online to find a favorite band's bootleg in non- 128K garbage MP3 sound quality like most of the pre-2005 world has, have you?
Let me tell you...it's depressing as hell to have spent $25 in mark-up for a show you've never heard but have always wanted to because:
-- Some asshole who has never listened to the band in his life but knows people who have stuff just ripped a 128K MP3 off an umpteenth-generation tape dub...poorly.
-- Burned it to the cheapest CD-R's Walmart sells...poorly.
-- Photocopied...poorly...the same band photo you've seen 8 million times before.
-- Botched the tracklisting with made-up names based on the lyrics not song title. Maybe even burned the MP3's in the wrong order.
-- Misspelled the bandmembers' names on the label
...and sold it to 10 record stores. Who sell it as the 2nd-most-expensive product category behind box sets. Yes...even the cassette boots.
Remember...you checked out this boot and its artwork on a tape-trading site like BMC that catalogues all the various pressings of said boots and ranks the high-quality ones. You thought you knew what you were purchasing. You did not have any means--because the fucking thing was in a display case or on eBay--of testing it out beforehand and finding out that was just another shite MP3 burn on shite CD-R masquerading as a real pressing. But it was the only way you could listen to that live show you've heard good things about. So you gambled your money and put up with the shite burn full of clicks and squiggles and MP3 artifacts. Sometimes you win, soemetimes you lose. But it's probably 60/40 win/lose so it's a pretty costly habit if you're skint that you can only indulge every once in awhile. And that wait is forever when you realize you just bought a bad rip (and can't get your money back...because the record stores NEVER gave money-back guarantees for the DIY boots) and have to save up another month before your next buying trip.
And, oh BTW...once online MP3 trading became ubiquitous these shite burns polluted the internet like zombies and kept turning up again and again as "new" sources, and the tape-traders had to play whack-a-mole cleaning up all that pollution and bad leads. To the point where it took 5 years into the
FLAC and Megalisteses era for the zombie bad rips to stop showing up, and to even get a somewhat comprehensive collection of masters together to the point where the zombie rips stopped being a nuisance. And also...the early MP3-trading networks like Napster and LimeWire: they weren't like MegaUpload/Mega/etc. where you downloaded a remote-hosted ZIP iof the whole show in one sitting or a torrent where re-seeding was robustly distributed so the tracker stayed live for months. Tracks were only available when the person with the tracks was online, and you downloaded them individually. Meaning...if you only got 12 random tracks on a 23-track setlist (usually d/l'd out-of-order) and the user dissapeared...you were S.O.L. And would have to hunt-and-peck for 11 more individual tracks. From different rips, so the duct-taped full show had wildly varying sound quality and EQ. Sometimes it took days/weeks/months of searching to assemble the full tracklisting. And then somebody's
duct-taped amalgamation end ups getting re-seeded so the quality decays worse the further it spreads. Occasionally with these Frankenstein-seeded jobs themselves getting burned by some asshole to CD-R as a pay-for boot...which then boomerangs back to the Internet for another generation of shitty rippage.
And so on and so on.
I say this as a Generation Napster person who's had some degree of easy MP3 access my whole adult life. I didn't have to chase dead leads and buy my boots from shady street vendors like the old farts did. But I still had to shell out money for CD boots because the internet tracks weren't good enough quality, and had a hell of a time getting clean stuff online until the very recentest Dime era.
Chuck..."go easy on the bootleggers" is an ignorant viewpoint. They're not tape-traders. They're not even the ones who put together a lovingly-prepared silver-CD pressing or vinyl boot pressing with interesting artwork. They are not even music fans...they are freeloaders and grifters. And they made life difficult for generations of music fans because they didn't give a rat's-ass about quality control and intentionally polluted the supply with shit rips, shit dubs, shit burns that they knew full-well shit. And didn't care. They can die in a colonoscopy-gone-awry like the "ONE MEEEELION DOLLAR" ransomers for all I care.