Free MP3s

Having a good solid day of coding to do at work, I plugged in my noise canceling headphones, turned on some tunes, and dug in. I love the groove I get in during times like this. It's really a rush to be so productive and to feel so clever about the amazing code that is just flowing from my brain and through my fingertips into my emacs buffer. Aaaaah.

Amazingly enough, things occasionally do conspire to break my concentration, even in these times of extreme concentration. Usually it's when the compiler takes more than 15 seconds. OK, so maybe I'm not that focused. Yesterday, I started noticing how bored I was of my music at times like these. Fortunately, amidst the difficult logical puzzles I was solving with my fantastic firmware, I was able to solve this problem as well. I remembered The Internet Archive and its astounding collection of live concert recording.

Yes, for bands that allow it, they allow fans to record their concerts with expensive and complex equipment and then upload the recordings here. I'd guess that 90% of the bands they have I haven't heard of, but I did notice Toad the Wet Sprocket and Guster. For their recent concerts you can stream the music right from the Archive.org website. For any concert you can download shorten or flac files of the songs, and many have mp3s you can download too. I enjoyed the two shows I linked to above yesterday. Very cool to hear the banter between songs, and the improvisations and covers that they do (though there were a couple naughty words used that you don't hear from these guys on the radio, I must warn you).

So yeah, just thought I'd share that tip with you. Go listen.

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