Thursday, October 11, 2007

CONTINUAL MASSMIRROR ISSUES PROVOKE MAJOR CHANGES FOR MUTANT SOUNDS

Massmirror revealed on their blog 5 days back that the reason for the continual problems with their system is due to their moving the entirety of their operations to a new service. They claim no data will be lost but also state that "The site will have random errors and downtime until this redesign is complete". No timetable is given for how long one can expect to be dealing with the fallout from this. This is obviously an untenable situation for us and has provoked much behind the scenes discussion of where we go from here. Aside from Sharebee, which we used initially but whose upload function no longer supports macs, there exist two other file spreading services that I'm aware of: Xirror and Fileberry. Fileberry is much too new on the market for me to have any real confidence in them, though xirror's been around for about as long as massmirror. I (Eric) have made the decision to opt for using Xirror's service, as reflected in today's posts. Jim, understandably feeling burnt after our unfortunate experiences with both Sharebee and Massmirror, has decided to take a wait-and-see approach to Xirror for now and so, for the time being at least will revert to using Rapidshare for his posts. You'll notice from today's posts that Xirror, aside from the inclusion of Rapidshare, offers a different set of hosts that it farms it's links out to (in their case, Filefactory, Netload.in and Uploaded.to). It is perhaps a less immediately appealing array that that offered by either Massmirror or Sharebee, but it's what we'll have to work with currently. Hope it proves to be both stable and acceptable to everyone here. In the meantime, being understandably dubious about Massmirror's assurances that no data will be lost, I'm taking no chances and am culling together all the Rapidshare links from the hundreds of Massmirror post I've made, to safeguard against the possibility of their network permanently going down. This is one situation where I'd definitely rather be safe than sorry.
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13 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 11, 2007 at 11:13 AM

    all understandable, but I'd liek to once again recommend Mediafire. they've been quite reliable in my experience. even though they don't "farm out" to other sites, there are no wait periods after a Mediafire download, and their file management system is quite nice. it would, at the very least, be a huge improvement over Rapidshare IMO.

    that said, whatever you choose to go with, I'm happy enough as long as this blog continues in one way or another :-)

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  2. CellarOctober 11, 2007 at 2:15 PM

    I 2nd this recommendation!!!

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  3. AnonymousOctober 11, 2007 at 2:26 PM

    MediaFire deleted 5 or 6 of Eric's links within days of uploading (back in March). We've been down the MediaFire road before.

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  4. vdoandsoundOctober 11, 2007 at 2:39 PM

    kevin and theo-you've obviously both missed the numerous prior messages I've left on various comment boards where I stated that mediafire deleted 5 of my links within days of posting them. Please everyone...no more requests for this rotten service!

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  5. UnknownOctober 11, 2007 at 6:58 PM

    yes I did miss that comment, sorry!

    so far for my part, I've only had that experience with one link. weird. now you've got me worried...

    what about Badongo? out of all the ones that Massmirror ports to, it seems to be the least annoying one, from a downloading perspective at least... not sure how it is for uploads/managing.

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  6. gbdfjshOctober 11, 2007 at 10:11 PM

    What about divShare? It works fine for my blog...

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousOctober 12, 2007 at 5:48 AM

    Kevin,

    I like badongo too. However, here are a few issues with badongo:

    1) If you don't have a premium account, you can't download more than 200MB per hour.

    2) If you don't have a premium account, you can't download more than one file at a time.

    3) If you don't have a premium account, you can't use download managers/accelerators.

    2 of the 3 above are major annoyances, IMO.

    Just my two cents. Have a nice weekend.

    Cheers,

    Jeff

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  8. KevinOctober 12, 2007 at 11:07 AM

    I think that we need to look at this from both the uploader's perspective and the downloader's perspective. First, I would like to say that we are fortunate enough to have the gems that Mutant Sounds put up every day regardless of the download service they use.

    That being said, I have used Mass Mirror and Sharebee to upload on my blog and Sharebee has been much more reliable for me. However, I am not using a MAC to upload files, so there are no limitations. Other services that I feel are great by the downloader's perspective are Divshare, ZShare and Badongo. Badongo does put limits on downloading without a premium account, but so does Rapidshare. In fact using Rapidshare without a premium account is kind of pointless. I can download one thing from Rapidshare every five hours. That's pretty stringent if you ask me.

    When it comes down to it, all file sharing service have their quirks. Obviously, it would be nice to have one that would allow multiple downloads, unlimited downloading and fast download speeds for free, but we will probably never come across one like that.

    I just downloaded using Xirror and the file sharing services that are offered are not "as appealing" as Eric mentioned here. My vote would be to move to Divshare or Zshare, since they both allow multiple downloads at the same time and have no strict limitations on how much you download. I don't have any information about how these services work from the uploader's perspective though. I hope this was helpful. When all is said and done, please do what you feel is best for Mutant Sounds.

    Thanks, Kevin

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  9. vdoandsoundOctober 12, 2007 at 2:12 PM

    Just to let you know, for anyone thats using the iGetter application to dramatically speed up downloads for macs (as I am), divshare is a bloody nightmare. Virtually all downloads freeze up in iGetter using that service, something I've not encountered with any other service. As far as zshare goes, I've seen far too many of their links deleted off other blogs to consider using them. From my vantage point, xirror presents the best scenario for the time being, offering immediate rapidshare links for those who (wisely I think) plunk down the few cents a day for premium use of their service while still offering a handful of other options for those that are opposed in principal to paying for downloading. Obviously, Fileberry's options are preferrable to Xirror's, but after being repeatedly burned by the use of Sharebee and Massmirror, my faith in using a new, untested service here is non-existant.

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  10. AnonymousOctober 12, 2007 at 6:18 PM

    In fact using Rapidshare without a premium account is kind of pointless.

    Kevin,

    You must not have heard of rapidgrab then.

    Try it out.

    But don't tell anyone.

    Cheers,

    Jeff

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  11. vdoandsoundOctober 13, 2007 at 10:06 AM

    Just a small correction: it's actually sendspace links and not divshare links that crap out in conjunction with the Igetter application....

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  12. AnonymousOctober 14, 2007 at 6:19 AM

    Hey Jeff, thanks for the rapidgrab info. any tips on using Aol as I can generate the links but only get them to download for a few seconds.

    See you try to help and the folks just expect more and more of you ... ;>)

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  13. adgyOctober 14, 2007 at 3:26 PM

    Just a note:

    DO NOT GO TO DIVSHARE. Yeah, they're great for uploading to and downloading from, but they delete your uploads frequently. More than once, I've had them clean me out of a few hundred uploads at once and I refuse to use them anymore.

    Just an FYI.

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