leonardcohenforum.com

Hey everyone. As you can see I'm a new member (I've read HEAPS here about lyrics and what not but have never posted), my name's Nick and I'm from Melbourne Australia and all that jazz.

In my adventures around the internet I've stumbled into a community or two of people who follow one particular artist or another who share live recordings through a format called 'Bit Torrent'.

They're about the same size as WAV files (which are the same size as CD tracks) and quite slow to download, but the advantage over Kazaa or other sharing is that it can be restricted to just here, and the quality is much better.

I don't personally have any recordings, but if anyone's interested in discussing how we might get this set up I'd love to be a part of it as much as possible and hopefully we can get some really good stuff going around.

Feel free to give any critisism or feedback.

Thanks- Nick.

Hi Nick and welcome to the forum!

"BitTorrent" is not a format but a software you can use to dowload files through a "tracker" (from other computers, called "peers"). The format you probably talk about is SHN or FLAC. They are indeed larger size than MP3 but the advantage is they are LOSSLESS. It means you don't loose any sound quality during compression from WAV to SHN/FLAC.

The dowload speed depends on your internet speed capacity and on how many "peers" are connected to dowloads/uploads the same show. More peers you have at the same time, faster is the speed!

To share via BitTorrent, we need a "tracker", so the person who want to share a show can create a .TORRENT files (it is like a link to a specific folder on the seeder's computer containing all the SHN/FLAC files) and then upload the files to the tracker.

"Sharing The Groove" is one of the community that shares music through BitTorrent: http://www.sharingthegroove.org/msgboard/

But remenber, you must have a BitTorrent client installed on your computer to be able to download shows. (the inconvenient of BitTorrent is that it takes a lot of power on your computer).

take care,
JF

There's a very nice Leonard Cohen FTP site:

http://nightcomeson.cjb.net/

I believe the person, whose site that is, used to participate some here. His presentation of it is very polite and respectful.

I have used this FTP system , it's very good and has a good collection of live concerts, some poetry and even some video material. My son helped to set up the links to my computer and the guy running it is very helpful. Takes a long time on some occasions but well worth it. I have the direct link bookmarked so I can go straight in to see what is there.

Last time I checked it, it hadn't been updated since November last year, but there are still some good things there to download.

Thanks guys. I requested access, so we'll see what happens.