So you want to hear some music? Well, you've got to download it from one of the etree.org FTP servers first. Here's how:
First things first. Sign up for the
announce mailing list (see the
MailingLists page for details). There tend to be 2-3 posts to this list per day, so be patient and before long you should have a message in your INBOX with the details you need: the server name (and possibly a non-standard FTP port number - 21 is the standard) and the username and password for the public etree FTP account. Some
SiteOps may not make the information available in the message, but may request that you reply to them directly by email or go to a web page to get it. Its all usually self explanatory.
AnonymousLogin does not require a special username and password. Just read the
entire message.
Now make sure you have a decent, easy to use FTP client that you are comfortable with. See the
SoftwareYouNeed page for some examples, but any FTP client will work. You'll probably need to make some changes to the default settings of the application to avoid pissing off the siteops and their network administrators:
- Make sure you disable any "anti-idle" or "NOOP" behavior in the FTP client (usually in an "Options" or "Preferences" screen, sometimes under "Connection" or "Advanced" settings). This prevents your client from trying to fool the server into thinking you're doing something if you leave yourself logged in and don't queue up any files to download.
- Make sure you set the connection retry rate to something on the order of 60 seconds or greater. The etree.org FTP servers are often full, which means you may need to try many times to get a login, and the generally accepted minimum retry rate is once per minute.
If you use an anti-idling mechanism or "hammer" an FTP server by trying to login over and over in a short time span you'll generally succeed in only getting the siteop angry at you and potentially getting yourself banned from that server either termporarily or permanently. So take our advice and configure your client so its acts like a good netizen.
Now take the server name, username and password you got from the announce list (or web site, etc.) and plug them into your FTP client. You may also need to override the default FTP port of 21 if that information was specified; it should be clearly stated in the message otherwise the default should be used. Some
SiteOps run their servers on non-standard ports for various reasons and if you try the wrong port, you'll never get connected.
If you are having difficulty getting into a server because of "too many users" or "all slots full", etc., then you may want to try using your ftp client's queue feature to automatically download your show when a login is available.
HowToSetupAQueue
Lets assume you're now connected to the server. There should be a reasonably simple directory structure, perhaps divided up into several numbered "shn{n}" folders or maybe organized by band or genre. In any case, you should be able to navigate to some directory and find a folder worth of SHN files that you want to download. In general a single show is in a directory named something like
bandyyyy-mm-dd.shnf. The band names are usually abbreviated, so if it is not clear what the folder contains, browse into it and view the .txt file that is included; it will give you all the details like band, date, venue, source, setlist etc.
Now just start downloading. This is usually done by a drag and drop in a GUI FTP client or perhaps a right-click menu when you are selecting the top level ".shnf" directory. In any case, it should be pretty easy and I'm sure you can figure one out yourself!
Finally, be
patient! A 3-hour show in SHN format can be up to or over 1 Gigabyte in size, and servers often have limited bandwidth. It can take serveral hours or longer to download a whole show. Just start your download, put your FTP program in the background and do something else with your computer (or play with your pet, or spend some time with your family, or go outside and get some exercise, or .... :-) until it is finished.
Once you've got the entire show on your computer, you may want to read the
HowToBurn page to find out how to create some CDs you can play in your stereo (or car, or discman, or ...).
Downloading using wget
Sites like gdlive.com have many shows up for grabs through http. This is my best method for retrieving them:
wget -erobots=off -np -A .shn -A .md5 -A .txt -r
http://www.ptt.nycheads.com/gd/gd77-05-26.shnf/