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Jamendo-flavoured Awesome
So J. Random Blogowner (that’d be me) posts a blogrant about Jamendo’s lack of OGG torrents and fires it into the void – and lo and behold, the first two of three comments I get on that post are both (both!) from people who work for Jamendo, who collectively say (allow me to paraphrase here):
- Yes, they know torrents are down; it’s not just OGG torrents but the MP3 ones too.
- Apparently their main hosting provider shut down the torrent traffic with little to no notice. WTF?
- A fix (moving the torrents to another server run by (hopefully) saner providers is in progress.
- I’m welcome to contact either of them anytime for an update on this.
All of this within eight or ten hours of my original post – not bad considering the time zone difference between here and Europe and the general obscurity of my little blog. As the third comment on my original post put it, “Yay Jamendo power response!”
So thank you and major kudos to the Jamendo people for running a project that’s both awesome and awesomely responsive!
Jamendo, everyone’s favourite source of excellent free music, has become slightly less excellent. With their update a while back, they introduced direct downloads, but only of MP3 formats – if you want OGG, you’ll have to use the old torrent files.
Not a problem, you’d think – Jamendo used to be seeding ALL of their own stuff all the time, so even if it wasn’t fast, you’d get your download eventually. At some point around the big update of the site, the torrent seeding stopped, though, and it’s never restarted… so unless another Jamendo user is peering the OGG-format of the album you want, you’re stuck with the MP3 version…
I’ve tried a couple of different torrent clients, I’ve re-downloaded the .torrent files in question, I’ve checked my router’s settings… the problem isn’t at my end. Jamendo torrents with peers work; Ubuntu ISOs work; other torrents work. If Jamendo went back to their old practice of seeding everything they offer a .torrent for, they’d work too. It’s hardly a bandwidth issue – a torrent not being requested uses miniscule amounts of bandwidth – especially compared to the bandwidth that must be sucked up by offering the new direct downloads of MP3-format music.
Anyone know who to poke at Jamendo to get proper OGG torrent service restored?
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Biking to Democracy
Although it’s much overshadowed by the clown show to the south of us, there is in fact a federal election going on here in the Great White North. Thanks to some oddness of the Election Canada database, I was no longer registered in the riding I’ve been living in for the last five or so years, so I had to go to my local riding office to re-register — best to do that now instead of election day, the chap at Election Canada’s call centre said.
It’s about 24km by road, round trip, a nice easy bikeride for my day off assuming the damn rain held off. Re-registering took all of two minutes after a nice ride; asking the clerk about voting lead to him mentioning that there was, in fact, an absentee/advance polling station open right there, if I was sure I knew who I was voting for…
Remembering my ABCs, I decided to vote then and there… so I’ve done my bit, now I get to watch the show (ours and the Yanks) and complain about whoever wins!
As a bonus, it didn’t start drizzling until I was nearly home, too…
