Grateful Dead

Not working here. Changed to WMA, and that didn't work. Back to QT and the Windows Media player still presented, rather than the Quicktime player. Sigh ... jp

I was a little hesitant to log in this morning. Thanks for getting back to us, David. I'm sad that while I can stream from other sites now at work, these streams aren't working for me.

I don't believe for a second that those responsible the Taper's Section only recently discovered that users were downloading the MP3s. Not for a second. On the contrary, I think they are covering their arses after the suits at Rhino figured out that music, and particularly full shows (or at least one full show - 5 May 78 - and large parts of other shows - 7 April 72) from its recently purchased vault were being distributed. Either that or Rhino management has provided a statement and forced David L to put his name on it. While it's true that downloading has never been expressly sanctioned in the Taper's Section, not one mention of 'streaming' has been made. Quite where the above quote "for streaming only" is supposed to originate from I do not know. It was never explained that this was meant to be a streaming only service and the fact that until last week the file format was MP3 completely contradicts this claim. You don't stream MP3s, your browser downloads them and then play them. Naturally you can download them each time you want to play them, but common sense says you should download them once and save them to your computer, which is what I did and what, I expect, everyone else did. In fact, for a while I simply re-downloaded the tracks each time I wanted to listen to them but this quickly became a hassle - I just saved them to my computer. As the Taper's Section continued I continued saving the MP3s each week. This way, as has been discussed in the past week, I and others could compile CDs, make tapes, transfer the tracks to MP3 players, to hear what David L wanted us to hear. I compiled a database of each track offered with info about date, location, format, trivia, etc. The very fact that a full show and large chunks of shows had been offered over the course of many weeks also contradicts this supposed intention that the shows were streaming - once you've downloaded the seven or eight parts offered over a month, you can compile them on a CD or in an MP3 player. In the streaming format, this is much more difficult and pretty impractical. Why would I want a full show in ten different, un-attachable parts? Through the Taper's Section I've been able to get a real appreciation of a lot of Grateful Dead I otherwise wouldn't have listened to do, especially 1980s stuff. I spend loads of my time at my computer so I mostly listen to tracks through my sound system connected to my computer so in this way, ironically, I had much the same experience as if all the tracks had been streaming only. In this sense, I can't really see the difference from Rhino's point of view between streaming and downloading, except that streaming audio has a much narrower audience than the downloadable stuff since, as people have explained, many can't access computers for long, don't have speakers, etc. While it is good that we now have a (purported) explanation of the situation, the tone of the post above is pretty offensive. Essentially it points the finger at "certain fans" for downloading the MP3s when they shouldn't have been and cites this as the reason for switching to streaming. What else were we supposed to be doing with them? And this stuff about "certain fans" is a questionable - I bet nearly everyone who could download the tracks did download them. I never had any sense that doing so was wrong or not in the spirit of the service - the tracks were sitting here in a strictly downloadable format each Monday for anyone to take. If they had only ever been streaming I would have streamed them. I sort of figured I was doing the server a favour by getting the tracks once, then listening to them over time rather than revisiting every five minutes and hogging the bandwidth. But no, apparently it's the fault of a few fans (I am one of them) so I guess the other fans who never downloaded the tracks should be pretty annoyed with us. It's a hilarious situation when a corporation offers a free service, then takes away parts of that free service on account of customers using that free service. The fact that I as one of the downloaders, i.e. a young (23 y.o.) customer who has purchased a lot of live releases, the Golden Road boxset, Download Series, etc and am gearing up for new purchases, am being blamed for this is pretty disturbing. I don't know what to make of it. I want to keep listening but if Rhino seriously thinks that fans (and how many 23 y.o. Grateful Dead fans in Australia can there be, really?) should be criticised for doing what I thought was the purpose of this service, then do I really want to engage with Rhino any more? I appreciate David's fantastic work and I don't believe that he wrote the post above or, if he did, that it is sincere. I think he's trying to do his job and be a fan which, under present circumstances, must be really difficult. Sorry for such a long post.