TREADMILL

That Slipping Disc

Printed Circuit

BOOKEND

For the past couple of weeks, music has been coming at me from just about every direction. It started with a bluegrass session that I downloaded from www.nugs.net: a 65-minute cocktail that began with a track of The Pizza Tapes, a 1993 recording by David "Dawg" Grisman (mandolin), Jerry Garcia (banjo) and Tony Rice (guitar), so named because legend has it that Garcia had given a rough cut of the tape to a pizza delivery man because he didn't have a tip handy for him. This was followed with tracks by other bluegrass masters, Del McCoury, Doc Watson, Vassar Clements (the amazing fiddler who died this August) and then some more from today's young turks of bluegrass, The Yonder Mountain String Band. A rich and varied bluegrass buffet spread that my ears lapped up hungrily.

But there was more to come. The bluegrass extravaganza was quickly followed in the next couple of days with a hot-off-the-web debut podcast by Widespread Panic, the Athens (Georgia, us)-based jamband that tours like a maniac and whose sound is characterised by a deep and rootsy southern rock style influenced by jazz and blues. The bonus on this hour-long podcast: a conversation between the band's intrepid bassist Dave Schools and new guitarist George McConnell that interspersed the deliriously long live performances.

No sooner than I'd tripped gloriously on Panic's first podcast came, in a flow of bits to my computer, another episode of a podcast I subscribe to-Morning Becomes Eclectic, a show broadcast by KCRW, a Santa Monica College radio station, and anchored by Nic Harcourt, a British DJ credited with the American radio premiere for bands and musicians like Moby, Garbage and Travis. The episode I caught featured a refreshing new Los Angeles band called Goldspot, fronted by a second-gen Indian-American, Sid Khosla, who'd named the band after a (now defunct) Indian soft drink brand. Khosla was raised in New Jersey by parents who loved Bollywood musicals and counts among his influences R.E.M, Radiohead and Mohammad Rafi.

Ever since I got over my initial scepticism about downloading music and acquired an iPod in July last year, my access to music has become virtually limitless. First, I have ripped a large part of my CDs collected over a dozen years or more on the pod. That lets me listen to more of my own collection-anywhere and anytime I want to. I can listen to music via earphones, hook up the iPod (like you can any portable mp3 player) to my stereo at home, play it while at work via a sound-dock that has tiny but surprisingly high fidelity speakers or even transmit it through to the car's audio system. It's a seamless stream of music that I can switch on or off at will.

POP-GUIDE Books, movies, music, games you'd do well to get your hands on.

Read Boris Akunin & Laurie King Boris Akunin is the psuedonym of a later-day Russian Conan Doyle whose books feature a detective named Erast Fandorin (who, curiously enough, is a Sherlock Holmes contemporary). Four of these books have been translated into English, and being written as well as they are, should be read by anyone interested in detective fiction. Laurie King, fortunately, writes in English and her books, eight to date, featuring Mary Russel and her husband (yup!) Sherlock Holmes are reckoned by many Sherlockians to be, as yet, the best re-rendering of Baker St's famous sleuth. Available in bookstores across India. See Sin City Frank Miller's tough-guy/ sexy-woman/blood-and-gore/doff-of-the-hat-to-Chandler and Marlowe comic book series comes to life in this Miller and Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, anyone?) rendition. The Indian release, when it happens, will likely be heavily censored, so buy the DVD from Amazon. Book Ashes 2005 The shopping section of cricinfo.com promises that a DVD of Ashes 2005 will be out on October 17. Given that the series ranks, arguably, as test cricket's finest, it makes sense to place an advance order now.

But storage and portability are just two advantages of compressed formats like mp3 and players like Apple's iPod (or others like Sony's Network Walkman and iRiver's H10). The bigger one is how easily you can get music. Readers who made it beyond the three instances of my downloading music may be wondering about the legitimacy of doing so. Don't worry; all of it is above board. This is no peer-to-peer thieving or flagrant violation of IPR that I'm talking about and you'll see why. Much of the music I love listening to is 'live' performances by bands whose business models are a hybrid-they earn a lot from touring and a little from album sales. A typical Widespread Panic itinerary could entail 200-250 shows a year, mainly in the US but also at venues in Germany, Holland and Japan. These bands, like their lodestar, the erstwhile Grateful Dead, allow their thousands of fans to tape or record their live performances free. Most of them operate below the radar of popularity charts and mainstream radio networks, so free taping is a way of marketing their music. As the brisk trade-the internet makes it even easier-in legal but freely taped music spreads, more fans get turned on to a band's music and, therefore, throng to their shows or buy studio albums or well-mastered live releases.

Umphrey's McGee, a sextet formed in the US Midwest in the mid-1990s, has just three albums to its credit but an explosively growing tribe of followers. Umphrey's has free monthly podcasts of its shows, some of them running into a couple of hours of non-stop music. In the past year that has translated into hundreds of shows for the band across the US with an ever growing audience of die-hard fans. It's another matter that the hybrid business model works well in a market where album sales have been declining sharply over the past few years.

For many audiophiles, downloaded music, which is essentially music in a compressed digital format-mp3 is the most popular-falls short in terms of quality because digital compression entails shedding some elements of the audio stream. Most listeners, however, cannot make out the difference. I learnt in the past year or so that there is a way out of that too. Instead of the mp3 or mp4 (Apple's own AAC format), both of which are "lossy" compressions, you can choose FLAC (free lossless audio codec), a format that is not as abbreviated as mp3 but is a favourite of jamband aficionados. Music in FLAC format is CD quality and some of the live shows that you can download from live music archives at www.archive.org are of sterling CD quality.

Then, of course, there is that other life-altering twist that the internet has brought forth, podcasting. Everyone by now knows podcasting is a method of publishing audio broadcasts over the net, allowing subscribers (usually free of cost) to access new episodes of mp3 broadcasts, which can be downloaded or streamed from their computers. You can have podcast acquiring or aggregating software (I use Apple's iTunes) that gets your feeds from the sites you subscribe to. That's how last week I heard an excellent podcast of tracks by a varied bunch of musicians-all of them with a common strand of being influenced by the music of New Orleans, a city that was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina on August 29. There were tracks by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Grateful Dead, Phish, The Radiators, Kermit Ruffins, Galactic and, of course, Panic, all of them live and from albums that I will certainly go out and buy. Who says music downloads don't translate into CD sales?