Last night, I shared the joyous news of super cheap yet somehow legal mp3 downloads from Russia with scottgalvin.com. Like me, his initial reaction was utter disbelief, but then he started to get very excited about it when I told him first hand that, yes it worked for real.

Still, he was a bit paranoid about the idea of sending electronic payments to some mysterious Russian entity. I assured him that I did not have to give them my credit card number. Inasmuch as paypal can be trusted as a secure method of tranferring money, it can be sent without worry of 3V1L H4X0Rz stealing sensitive info. Still, he was dubious.

Since I had already tossed my hat into the proverbial ring, he thought it would be safer to paypal me some money, with which I could then use to download some stuff he wanted, and transfer the files to him. Whatever. (But I didn't mind too much, since the amount he had paypaled me was a fair amount more than cost of the music he had requested.)

The problem came after I had downloaded a couple albums, and noticed that my home partition was nearly maxed out again. I guess I need to clean house again.

I proposed that since we both have root access to several hosts on a connection with a ridiculous amounts of bandwidth, I'd download his songs straight to there, and he could grab them at his leisure without running me completely out of hard drive space. That would also make it easier for him to get the files, because Comcast has the unfortunate habit of capping outgoing bandwidth to a ridiculously slow trickle.

So up went another Mozilla, this one tunneled through ssh. I downloaded several hundred megabytes worth of music in the span of a few minutes. Watching Mozilla's download manager clock the bitrates was a site to behold. (I made a screenshot for scott to see, which I think I'll post here now.)

So now I'm sampling some of the music I downloaded for scott. This Crystal Method stuff is sweet.

scott was thrilled about this service, but he doubted that it will stay around long before the long claws of the RIAA take action to crush this latest online panacea for music downloading fans. Anyone want to make bets?

As well as cleaning my drive to free up space, just looking at it makes me realize that I seriously need to organize my music again. I've got a nice clean directory tree for albums I've ripped myself (to which I've recently been throwing in my legally downloaded albums as well), another directory for mp3s mostly obtained in the days of yore, a bunch of more recently downloaded stuff in the root of my home dir, another directory for limeware downloads, another huge one where irate puts its stuff, plus various other directories (some existing on separate partitions) for music I've downloaded from friends. It's crazy!

One of these days, I'm going to need to buy a bigger drive.

Har har har. The Internet paradise. Where everyone can gorge on music, source code, and porn from now until forever more. (Or until The RIAA, MPAA, Congress, The FCC, and President Bush find a way to stop it.)