Maybe I'm in a minority here but I don't agree with this idea. I've spent many, many hours over the years doing tapes and CDRs for people as well as a lot of money on bootlegs. It just feels like a waste now seeing as I already have practically every show that has been uploaded.

Sorry, but I am being honest...

@Ian and Freek

I get where Ian is coming from. It's not -just- about the money and the time spent over the years to collect these bootlegs. There's a certain power that comes from having exclusive access to rare material. By putting everything out there on the internet you are undermining the power of the self-described 'Pulp authorities' (I'm sure there are several members of this community who see themselves as such). Freek has thrown open the doors to the Palace of Wisdom to the starving masses without checking their 'ready-to-rock' credentials.

Furthermore, there is something irritating about anonymous lurkers who can take-take-take and never feel the need to contribute or even offer their thanks. I'm reminded of the effort I went through to digitize a certain vinyl-only song for a poster who requested it, she gladly took the mp3 and we never heard from her again.

So, do we prefer to keep our status as an elite and esoteric group of Pulp geeks, or do we prefer a diverse and egalitarian fan community that may not always mix well together? Since we are the primary online community for Pulp fans it may be worth having a serious discussion about what we want to do with bootlegs and rarities.

We could just make this a private thread?

I don't think it's really bad to make some bootleg available to the mass, but it depends the way its done.

Ripping everything into MP3 and making them available to download is not a good way for me I think. Or ripping into WAV without checking if the rip is good nor not too...

I had for a while a lossy version of the Flux 1999 festival, and I was glad to find it here in WAV format the other day, but sadly the version of Blue Girls is fucked up (which was not the case on the lossy version I previously had). And one of the downloaders has shared it into dimeadozen with a copy & paste of the Pulp wiki infos (looks like a simple way to get a good ratio). Who will care now of where to find a good complete lossless rip of this bootleg ?!

But, I'm not saying it's bad to share bootlegs for free, some people here know the good material I made available on dimeadozen. Other know about the new and good sounding rip I made of the Ping Pong Jerry demo. Just that there is a certain protocol to follow about sharing recordings. Not an elite.

If you understand this, this would be grateful if you could provide me or make available a good rip of the Edinburgh 1999 Flux festival, and I would be quite glad to provide in return my rip of the Ping Pong Jerry demo (far better to the previous lossless version I had). Thank you.

 

[ And I'm not that worried about those bootlegs as I know some people such as Will or Sturdy own lossless version of them, but I'm really (and I really mean it) about some other demo material (We Love Life demos or pre-It material) which I've seen shared only as singles MP3 ] 

-- Edited by alphi on Saturday 21st of May 2011 07:58:25 PM

woah...

first, my english is good enough to perfectly understand what everyone is saying, but is not good enough to answer with (there I go, can't find the right word) as much subtlety and the precise words I would have used if it was a discussion in dutch.

I'm also a collector of Prince live stuff and of Montreal live stuff. the first one is of course very famous and there is a group of traders holding on to very rare stuff, while the "medium" rare stuff is being shared freely when you know where to look (e.g. www.guitars101.com and probably other places I do not know about). and when we talk "medium" rare stuff, that's still 1000's of bootlegs. there are special labels that only release prince bootlegs as pressed discs that only rehash what free fan labels are cleaning and dehissing etc. The free fan labels recently released a terrific great sounding soundboard of a 1984 club gig that previously only circulated as a lousy sounding audience bootleg. so people are really grateful for that and the general thought is: bootlegs should as much as possible be liberated and shared. of Montreal is a much lesser known band and the number of fans is much more concentrated and I guess I am one of the people knowing pretty much about their bootlegs and what's available and where it's from etc. there are no discussions there or bad blood between people who accuse each other of all sorts of things, as is the case in the Prince camp. some prince fans who had access to the really rare stuff deliberately made quality worse or made edits so that the "real inner circle" traders had better stuff than the "common people" (pun intended). now that's elitist!!

I also understand the annoyance about people not saying a simple thanks when downloading a bootleg. I always say thanks when I download a prince bootleg on the aforementioned site, but after 100's of downloads sometimes there are only 4 people saying thanks. very annoying. but also: my profession is a teacher, I teach kids from 6 and 7 years old. I don't punish the whole class when some kids don't follow the rules (and I'm not capable of only punishing those ones).

And as I think that in this place mostly die hard fans show up, I had a unique chance (thanks to another person posting here) to all of a sudden have a huge amount of live stuff, more than I'll probably ever even be able to listen to. and I didn't want to keep that all for myself.

originally I wanted to only upload mp3 stuff since for me that is good enough. I made some exceptions when someone specifically asked for a gig (flux). I do not have the time nor do I want to listen back to each complete gig before I post a link. I'm a bit annoyed that, if there is a mistake in Blue Girls in a WAV I created, instead of letting me know this or asking me to redo that song, that fact is now used in this discussion. I've made it very clear that I want to invest the time, why not ask me to redo that song?

ok, that was a long answer.

I just checked the cdr of Flux and it has a gap from 3.58 to 4.04 in Blue Girls, so I can't undo that by making a new WAV.

-- Edited by Freek on Sunday 22nd of May 2011 01:04:19 AM

-- Edited by Freek on Sunday 22nd of May 2011 01:23:56 AM

As someone who has been collecting Pulp bootlegs since, eek, probably 1995 or something, I think Freek making all this stuff available is an absolutely fantastic thing. I really am all for it.

Collecting bootlegs in the '90s / early '00s was very different from today - fun and rewarding in some ways, but also a frustrating, time-consuming pain in the ass. If you were lucky you'd catch a session or live show on the radio and tape it, and that might then be something you could swap with someone somewhere - presuming you'd managed to scour the small ads in Pulp People or the Lipgloss mailing list, sent them an SAE for their little list of stuff in return for yours, and managed to identify something on each other's list that you were happy to swap. But then there was a good chance the quality was going to be rubbish as you were dealing with cassettes and it was probably going to be a copy of a copy of a copy etc, and there problems with unreliable traders letting you down etc etc.

The alternative was to buy stuff on cassette for a fiver a go from Giraffe Audio Visual (anyone remember them?), or spend your afternoons scouring record fairs and market stalls in case you came across any decent bootleg CDs (at sky high prices, of course). You'd come across some good stuff, but again, expensive, unreliable, and if you're the kind of person who gets everything, a few years down the line you'd realise you'd shelled out a fortune for 5 different copies of the same show with different crappy artwork ever time!

So, I guess Ian and Scotty's experiences were similar to mine, but I can't see that as a reason to begrudge someone now, 10/15 years later, stepping up and making this whole process infinitely easier. The internet has completely and permanently changed the way these things work, there are terrabytes of bootleg material out there on blogs and torrent sites from every artist under the sun. Whether you like it or not, Pulp is not going to be an exception to this. You are not going to put the genie back in the bottle.

Besides which - even if you could, what would you actually gain from that? You went through a lot of time and effort, rather a long time ago, getting hold of some Pulp bootlegs. Good for you. But if people are now, thanks to advances in technology, able to get this stuff far more easily than you did, then that's got to be a good thing surely? If that fact makes you enjoy your collection less, then doesn't that seem everso slightly sad? You (hopefully) didn't originally want this stuff so that you could say you had it and other people didn't. You wanted it so you could listen to it. Right? And if the fact that other people can now easily listen to it as well takes away the pleasure for you, then you might as well throw away your entire collection now because it's going to happen.

Hate to get involved in any arguments, but I've uploaded a copy of Blue Girls  to Baritalia2007.

Not sure if my copy of Blue Gilrs was a cut and paste, but it might please anyone who complained about  Freeks generosity

Sturdy wrote:

---

alphi wrote:

---

I had for a while a lossy version of the Flux 1999 festival, and I was glad to find it here in WAV format the other day, but sadly the version of Blue Girls is fucked up (which was not the case on the lossy version I previously had). And one of the downloaders has shared it into dimeadozen with a copy & paste of the Pulp wiki infos (looks like a simple way to get a good ratio). Who will care now of where to find a good complete lossless rip of this bootleg ?!

---

The gap in Blue Girls is on the master. Iain Rankin (from Giraffe Audio/Video, producer of the Flux bootleg) told me in 1999 that when he was recording the show in minidisc, someone brushed past him and accidentally knocked his microphone out of the socket for a few seconds during that song. If you've got a version without the gap, someone must have copy-and-pasted a similar section from another part of the song to fix it.

---

 

Thank you for the info. That's the kind of info that should be included when sharing a bootleg actually.

I was going to upload my lossy version of Blue Girls actually, but it looks like that VoxPop have already done it.

 

Agreed with Eamonn, and bootlegs collection deals with passion of music. When we are passioned we should not bother about paying for something (I don't say we 'don't have to', eveyone can have his own limits), but we're not here to make money. Having paid for something that became later available for free is just an wrong calculation, or just the price to pay for having it 10 years before the others ! ;)

I quite agree with what Sturdy said too, but I fell it's more about getting bootlegs rather than setting up a collection / archive. I have to disagree with that:

"Collecting bootlegs in the '90s / early '00s was very different from today - fun and rewarding in some ways, but also a frustrating, time-consuming pain in the ass. If you were lucky you'd catch a session or live show on the radio and tape it, and that might then be something you could swap with someone somewhere - presuming you'd managed to scour the small ads in Pulp People or the Lipgloss mailing list, sent them an SAE for their little list of stuff in return for yours, and managed to identify something on each other's list that you were happy to swap. But then there was a good chance the quality was going to be rubbish as you were dealing with cassettes and it was probably going to be a copy of a copy of a copy etc, and there problems with unreliable traders letting you down etc etc."

Today we still have to deal with the copy problem, and when we want to get a good quality recording, we got to make sure it is not a lossy copy which is more and more difficult because of the downloadable MP3 which can be burnt into CD after and traded or sold. Quite a shame...

And dealing with recording from the 80's, early 90's, it's sometimes better to look for an original cassette rather than a CD copy as with a good installation we could make a better digitization (lots of cassette wee digitized with cheaps CD writers and bad settings). But most of those tape may no longer exists. Sometimes we're lucky and the original taper shares a new remastered copy of its masters in dimeadozen (that happened last year with some USA recording), but it's very rare.

And with the radio broadcast, people are less and less trying to tape them, expecting to dowload a podcast after that. But it's quite sad when you have an intereting show broadcast on an obscure spanish radio and that no one has recorded and you just have to do with a crappy 64kpbs stream.

Just to say that I think today's collection is still 'a frustrating, time-consuming pain in the ass' ! :D And the easy-sharing facilities of today plus the lack of knowledge about signal processing and the damages caused by MP3 compression doesn't really help either. In that sense, I tend to agree with Ian and Scott, as a mass download can do more arm than good.

 

 

-- Edited by alphi on Sunday 22nd of May 2011 04:25:29 PM

-- Edited by alphi on Sunday 22nd of May 2011 04:30:21 PM

Mark's reply is completely how I feel about it also. Thanks for stating it so clearly. Especially the last 5 lines.

Alphi, even after finding out that you were wrong in assuming I put a crappy version of a Blue Girls WAV out there, you still don't even, how do I put this, acknowledge in your post in any way anything positive about/towards me, like that it also could be kind of nice that more stuff is available to more people. I can't find the right words, but I hope you know what I mean.

Eamonn wrote: 

---

Seriously though, I know what Ian and Scott mean. A lot of my bootlegs came from Ian circa 2001/02, which I paid for (probably bunged him forty quid for a jobsworth - which I was more than happy with).

---

Ian? As in Ian who on this very thead is complaining about the money it cost him to get hold of stuff back in the day?

Now personally, I think it's far more morally dubious to profit from the sale of music that isn't yours than it is to give it away for free. But hey, we all make our own rules...

And as for Sink or Swim and Barefoot in the Park, I don't have them!

for the record, I also don't have Sink or swim and Barefoot in the park.

Freek wrote:

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for the record, I also don't have Sink or swim and Barefoot in the park.

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 Don't worry. ''It'' deluxe edition will take care of that ;)