Musical rodents

There is music on gopher. Not heaps, but more than one might expect. I've

long known that jynx[1] has a few of his own songs available from the root of

his gopherhole. During the great SDF phlog listing disaster of 2018, I visited

a few old gopherholes and phlogs I otherwise wouldn't have, and found a

gopherhole on SDF associated with "Higher living records", which had a handful

of tracks[2]. Using Veronica, I realised that Yin Feng has quite a bit of music

available too[3].

I think this is quite nice, and so I've made sure that if you have mpg123 and

ogg123 installed, VF-1 will work well with the majority of this music. Of

course, it's not a super smooth experience. The entire mp3 or ogg file is

downloaded to a temp file first, and then it's played. If the file is large

or the server is slow, there will be a very noticable delay before you hear

anything.

I also put a little bit of music in my own gopherhole[4]. Mostly, it's the

self-titled album by "God Ate My Homework". GAMH[5] were a cheesy low-fi

student band in the late 90s who were one of the first bands to give all their

music away for free online. I somehow discovered their music probably sometime

around 2000. The music itself is nothing special at all, but I enjoyed their

silly song lyrics, many of which revolve around late 90s/early 00s internet

culture (e.g. the song "I Saw Bill Gates on IRC"). After I originally

downloaded this album, I lost it at some point. Occasionally some random

coindicdence would remind me of them, and I'd do a Google to see if I could find

any trace of them. Nothing. But after enough years had passed, one day I did

the search and suddenly there was a page for them at archive.org, and everything

avilable as mp3 or ogg. The internet rarely forgets forever.

Anybody else want to share any really obscure music on port 70?

I became a MetaARPA SDF member a week back or so, which means now I can run cron

jobs on SDF. I'm tempted to write a daily script to put the most recent episode

of every aNONradio show in my gopherhole, just for fun. Feel free to beat me to

this, if you are keen.

[1] gopher://gopher.leveck.us:70/1/

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/soolmaan/higherlivingrecords

[3] gopher://tomatobodhi.twilightparadox.com:70/1/music

[4] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/solderpunk/files/music/

[5] https://archive.org/details/iuma-god_ate_my_homework