How does one obtain music in the year 2020 AD? Nowadays you can buy or download pretty much all kind of music, streaming services like Spotify and Deezer or even Jejtube are popular as they offer an enormous repository of diverse music. But what about doujin music? Those are still mostly distributed as CDs and released in limited quantities. There are but a few people whose interest is to upload and share new releases, but they releases aren't everlasting and something is bound to be lost over time. This blogpost is to describe the suffering I went through and to show how hard is nowadays to obtain old content from the internet. The subject of my "experiment" is an album titled Girl's Talk from Nomiya Ayumi's (野宮あゆみ) and Rakuno Yue's (楽乃由重) doujin circle, honey☆bitter,anima; released at C76. I plan on writing a post about Ayumi's career, because she has some other equally obscure works, too.
I've tried to search for this album a few times before, but failed every time. If this album had been Touhou or Vocaloid-related I'm sure it would have been easily accessible and perfectly preserved (i.e. lossless). So with my vast knowledge of teh internetz, I searched:
- NyaaTorrents: The album was in the C76 batch, but the torrent was dead - it had no seeds and had zero completed downloads, at least since the Nyaapocalypse in 2017 summer.
- Rutracker: They have some really obscure content. This time, no results.
- VKontakte releasers: doujinmusic and gosuto_pati. No results.
- Audio-4U event batches: the earliest one is C79. Oh fuck...
- C76 thread in /jp/ archives: I found some discussion about this album and even a mediafire link! But I wasn't surprised that the link didn't survive for 11 years.
- Suruga-ya and Yahoo auctions: the three other albums were for sale, for like 500¥ each. No sign of Girl's Talk, though.
At this point I was getting kind of desperate as the following shows:
- Tried google/yandex/bing: nothing usable.
- Searched Baidu (a Chinese search engine): Found some forum posts mentioning the album. These forums, however, hate tourists and in order to get a (most likely dead) DDL link you had to register and post - in Chinese, of course. Other posts pointed to links that were long dead and not even Wayback Machine archived those.
- Some random doujin music discord: as much as I hate shitcord I had to make a sacrifice. For nothing. Found only trash.
Lastly, I asked the Audio-4U guy whether he has the album, hoping he might actually have it without realizing. When he replied he doesn't I gave up and moved on. After a week an anon replied to my question that he has it and posted an actual working link with passwords too. Judging by the file size it was a lossless rip. The catch - it was uploaded to Baidu Pan.
Baidu Pan is a Chinese Google Drive copy that is said to host a lot of illegal content, because Chinese authorities apparently don't give a damn about copyrights - unless it's porn. The problems begin with downloading content hosted on Baidu: in order to download what you want, first you need to download an official Baidu spyware client similar to MEGA's and GDrive's sync client. And make an account. Account registration "naturally" requires your mobile number. I probably don't need to remind anyone why giving out your real phone number to the chinks is a bad idea. But even if you're willing to submit to the Chinese global surveillance to be able to download some obscure music, chances are you'll never receive the confirmation SMS for a myriad of reasons. Baidu was made for domestic usage and they probably don't want too many foreigners around.
I tried every trick I knew to get into Baidu: tried a fuckload of fake accounts, only to find out each of them require manual SMS confirmation. Tried to make a new account using a fake phone number - all of them were blocked. On top of everything, I had to rely on Chromium's translate functions as none of the Chinese sites had an English version.
I eventually found out it is possible to bypass the authentication using userscripts that work by exploiting unpatched bugs. None of them actually did the trick though; the only thing that worked for me was this; it only requires one chrome extension that fakes the useragent. The download speeds sometimes reached a whopping 10 KB/s and it took more than 6 hours to download the whole album. But I didn't care, I was happy that I'm finally going to listen to this much-sought album.
The next problem arose when I decompressed the downloaded file and saw that the album is encoded using TAK, a horrible codec for three reasons: it's closed-source, Win32-only and obscure as fuck. I still don't understand why would anyone pick this retarded format over flac+cue, I think the latter was already widespread in 2009. At least decoding it wasn't problematic; a fun thing to point out is that the official decoder doesn't support the retrieval of embedded cue sheets - it has to be done manually, e.g. on *Nix you can use the strings command to get a list of hardcoded strings from a binary. Quite unsurprisingly, the Japanese characters were stripped away, so I had to put them back by myself.
About the album itself
Though /jp/ failed to deliver, at least this post made me laugh
From the album's site:
A CD about girls, for girls!
(Is it okay for guys to listen, too?)
Today, girls are busy with love and friendship.
Welcoming our guest singer Kaori Michiru,
we present you this summery and lively honey☆bitter album.
The album is nothing special, it's exactly what I expected from the crossfade: generic jpop songs with girlish-than-usual lyrics. The arrangement wasn't very good, the guitar tracks were especially atrocious. What I liked the most was the design: they really put effort into the booklet - the choice of colors, the font, the chibis - everything about this CD screams cuteness.
You can download the album from here. I'm making this album available for the sole reason that it is not possible to get it legally anymore.
Edit: In the meantime someone else reuploaded the album to mega. Let's see if it lasts longer than my reupload.
