Download Stuntshows?

You can now download Drunk Stuntmen live shows (well, one anyway --more to come soon!) on www.archive.org. Different formats are available for your listening pleasure. The mp3 or Ogg Vorbis formats are fine if you have limited hard drive space and just want a copy to listen to. There are also a couple of choices for mp3 format --file size being the difference. For more info go to: Ogg Vorbis is a lossy format, but less-so than mp3, and supposedly sounds better. You’ll have to judge that for yourself. However, if you’d like to burn copies to trade with other fans or fans-to-be, i recommend downloading the FLAC format. There are a couple of reasons; the most important being that it is a loss-less format, which means that all copies made from any of the subsequent copies will be the same quality as the original files. The mp3/Ogg Vorbis formats are lossy formats, which means that subsequent generations will degrade in quality. This isn’t usually an issue with albums (think i-tunes), but when you’re dealing with live shows that could potentially be copied, that are kind of noisy by nature, it’s best to get the best quality if you think you might want to pass them on to others. If you want a more detailed explanation, i’d be happy to explain it to you, shoot me an e-mail. The FLAC format is a hog; however --about 1-1.3 G/show as opposed to the other formats, which are considerably smaller.

Whew --now on to how to go about getting that show on your computer and into your cd player! Go to www.archive.org. You may need to join, i’m not sure. It’s free . Then type in Drunk Stuntmen, which will take you to the “collection page” --and there should be a list of shows (right now, just the 7/15/06 VT Middle Earth show). Click on the show you want to see, and it will take you to the show page, where you can choose your format. You can also just stream the show if you want. If you download the mp3 version --it should be in a readable format already. But if you want the FLAC or Ogg Vorbis formats, you’ll need to decode the files. For FLAC, a good one is FLAC front-end for Windows: (http://members.home.nl/w.speek/flac.htm), and for MAC either MacFlac (http://members.home.nl/w.speek/flac.htm) or x-ACT (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21952). For Ogg Vorbis, head to www.vorbis.com/setup/ --all are open-source, free software downloads. Once you’ve decoded your files, you should be good to go, assuming you have a media player (i-tunes or something of the sort).

If you have any questions, or run into trouble, a good resource is etree.org. If you really can’t figure something out --post a message on the DS message board, i’m happy to help if i can. thanks all --happy downloading --charms --