harvey danger's new album "little by little" is released online through the torrent system and direct downloads. the album is encoded in (1) vorbis 1.1.1 @ Q7 or (2) lame 3.90.3 @ APE or (3, direct download) lame 3.90.3 @ 160kpbs cbr.

you can read about it here:
http://www.harveydanger.com/press/why.php

get it here (main page)
http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

i thought this was a great piece of news considering the intent and formats involved


later

Actually, they have two different MP3 versions up.

"Bittorrent MP3 is LAME 3.90.3 encoded, using the variable bit rate alt-preset-extreme setting. Bittorrent OGG is encoded with oggenc using LibVorbis v1.1.1, using the variable bit rate --q7 preset. Direct download is LAME 3.90.3 encoded at 160Kbps."

I assume CBR for the direct download, given that they know about VBR for the BT download. Kinda odd to make two versions available, since the size difference is only 18 meg.

ah. thanx, i'll edit my first post

Seems like a pretty good idea from them.. I'd never heard of them before they did this

They did that song Flagpole Sitta, in case you can't remember back to late 90's

I'm not in the band, but I'm friends with one of the members. I set up the download infrastructure and did the encoding and tagging of the files.

The direct download was --alt-preset 160, which, as I understand it, is average bit rate, not constant bit rate.

We went with APE for the bittorrent download because the bandwidth costs to the band for bittorrent are pretty minimal. We used --alt-preset 160 for the HTTP downloads because the band is paying for bandwidth and it was the smallest file size we tried that Jeff (guitarist) thought sounded decent (no double blind tests though). It may only be 18MB difference, but that is 30% or so and adds up on the bandwidth bill if the download is popular, which it seems to be.

Thanks, by the way, to hydrogen audio. I came here to figure out good workable settings for the encodings.

I snagged the BT version. Very good tagging, BTW.

There were about 2000 seeds on the BT when I grabbed a copy. Probably less now, but I had the whole thing in like 3 minutes.

Realistically, I think BT has taken off to the point where you can almost skip direct downloads. But failing that, it might be worth using the Coral Cache to save yourself some cash on the download bandwidth. All you have to do is change the direct download link from:
http://files.harveydanger.com/...
to:
http://files.harveydanger.com.nyud.net:8090/...

Coral works quite well and is free for basically any use anywhere. It does, however, eliminate the ability for you to get an accurate count of the number of downloads of the file, since the clients won't be hitting your servers directly anymore. Basically they get redirected to one of the Coral servers, which downloads the file from you and caches it locally for future requesters. Lowers your bandwidth usage, essentially.

Thanks for the comments.

We discussed Coral Cache early on, but decided against it for exactly the reason you mention: Getting the downloader stats is potentially valuable, and not just the # of downloads, but also the approximate geographic distribution.

Our stats suggest that it's still too early to cut out HTTP downloads while still reaching the largest audience practical, but at this point its carrying more of the load than I expected. I think we are going to start blogging about some of the nitty gritty details since a lot of people seem to be interested.

Still at over 2000 seeders at this point, btw. I hope you enjoy the album. It really grew on me after a couple listens.

eas, I am absolutely thrilled that the band decided to release their album online! I downloaded the vorbis copy and the album is great! I must admit, I would have never thought about picking up a Harvey Danger album or seeing a show until now. I truly hope that Harvey Danger becomes a shining example of a band that was able to have a wildly successful intangible record release and still make money down the road. I won't make an argument for the general use of p2p but I will say that I don't agree with the record companies punishing fans. Nothing will ever take the place of the live performance. I hope that the band gets the recognition they deserve for their newly adopted organic approach to content delivery. It looks like the album+bonus disc are now available on Amazon as well! Fantastic job with the encode, and again, thanks to you and the band, keep up the great work!!!!!

It's really cool that the collective expertise of the Hydrogenaudio community could help out in something that, I hope, will become a great example to the music industry.

Thanks to the band for doing something that will make many fans really happy and is also shrewd business.