Hey yall! If some of you aren't in the know, my name is Juan and I am a blind user to botb.
I run an archive opendirectory for chiptune and chipmusic as well as software related to said music. The project has been going strong for about 5 or so years now, and it's someware about 15gb for the entire folder.
It wasn't untill the project was in its 3rd year that I started to archive battle of the bits, when the major battles started to interest me along with the unheard pc engine music. Ever since then the people of here and others had put up there music when ever they could so it makes it less hard for me to archive, as well as helping me to get files if for what ever reason I can't get to them.
How ever battle of the bits like other sites, especially in the modern chiptune/chipmusic category, is not getting much archival love.
At one point this site had a sometimes incomplete archive of zip files for the battles that took place, and it made it hella easy for me to archive, although sometimes going back to correct the missing data.
I had heard about the torrent tracker that this site had, how ever that was waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy before my time, so in any event I had to go with out.
I don't know about yall, but I want a complete archive of battles, ohbs and xhbs and all.
I don't want to see this site possibly die with out havving the ultimate backup, especially with what happened to places like the famitracker forums and all.
Think of it like this. when we lost the .org a nice chunck of you probs had a slite wonder. What if it's not the .org we lose next time, what if it's all the files not to mention art?
All i'm saying is you all not as a person individually, but as botbers have to take care of botb's history!
With this site I also have other chiptune and chipmusic sites to take care of like ptweb.me, nsfhs, not to mention stuff from nico nico Douga and others. If it sounds like it's hard to keep up with archiving this site, it sure is! Dam you all for being so awesome! :)
I said this in another post and i'll say it here too. If you all can bring the torrent tracker or a sync folder around again, I would be cool in dropping 200$ every year for your support!
It's not much but trust me. I do give a dam about what happeneds to the files round here, even the art although I can't see them.
My opendirectory should be back up tomorrow, but in the meantime here's the Resilio sync folder. BQHTXTVRWGMFSI3BI3ZVQ4TGEOGNJJO64

it's very cool you do this. I personally lost interest in botb as an archive when the first accs got set to hidden.
I do have some python scripts around downloading/archiving entries of specific accounts still tho. and specific formats or battles.
they might not be fully functional (anymore) but I cld try to set them back up again and send them to you, in case you know how to deal with python stuff

I still have a copy of the 2005-2011 archive from Savestate's torrent, although not the torrent files themselves. It's 14.1 GB in total. Will need to see how to get it over somewhere somehow.

kleeder's words are exactly what's going through my mind.

The most notable situation you'll probably run into is with the unspeakable accounts... most notably kfaraday/keffie/keramon/charlotte/noelle/usagi and any other alts I forgot about. That is by far the largest hole. I have every single SPC entry by this person except for one (because it was made after becoming unspeakable, and I know through the Discord log).

The interesting thing is that I accidentally discovered this in mid-May 2022 not with that person (that occurred at the start of May 2022)... but a different one (I had recently acquired a SPC entry, and some time later I went to check it out again only to fail to access the page).

that's something i never understood about Banished accounts - how come BotB deletes their entries too? they explicitly agreed to give BotB the licence to distribute their work when they upload it.

i don't really know what to say... none of the content is deleted its just inaccessible... hidden accounts only happen when they are demanded (usually with a threat attached). its probably selfish of me to make these decisions on my own but it is nice to casually listen to the botb radio w/o being reminded about an uncountable series of disappointments and resentment. i don't understand what happened over the last 4 years, but it wasn't anything i'd have imagined in the 14 years previous. trying to navigate drama and minimize negative impacts on the community... keeping up with site maintenance... i run this place for the love. i don't have what it takes to protect the sanctity of the complete archive in public form; i wish i could make everyone happy but that's poison

Wow! there's a nice chunck here, so let's get to posting!

@puke7 it's like a fight! It's not called hold your punches and not share because you don't want to of the bits, it's and say it with me now, BATTLE OF THE BING BANG MOTHER FUCKING BITS!
Listen I could totally get behind that idea of not wanting to share the original files if and only if, that wasn't what made this site so notable. I probably don't need to tell any of you that a good load of this site isn't only .mp3s, but you all are always trying to make new articles for new formats, and lots of those times those formats are kbs on the b.
You all have know idea how much times I would sit and hope that someone would post on archive.org a complete dump of botb battles. But every time I would find some records of the wonderful music you all make, it wouldn't be not even gigs or megs, it would be actual god dam kbs!
I know what you all might be thinking. Look at this outsider n00b talking like he knows it? Try me.

https://chiparchive.com/files/NSF%20Small%20Station/
Count on your hand how much of those files are from botb.
Or here https://chiparchive.com/files/Pxtone%20project/

But here's some more remnants https://chiparchive.com/files/Gr8NSF.7z
And here https://chiparchive.com/files/tuca%20archive/

My point is, it's more than just about the .org or the .com. If we don't have the files and the art, the things that made this place so special even down to the articles then we should really start taking care of that, although for a nice chunck of artists botb looks to be the only place to get a entire chunck of these files.
My second thing is you think it's hard to keep people happy? With that I'm there with ya brother. I had plans to make an entire site of all the data I have, even for more obscure places like the mck2ch boards.
It wasn't untill much later that I found out that I don't have what it takes to make a good website, especially one that would look good to those with fully working eyes. On top of all that a high chunck of my archival is done by hand, which means loads of sleepless nights for me as I can't really program although I am good with directions.
I do know one thing though, and I know it well. This is my lifes work, and no artist will take that away from me, as I will never try to take from them. It's a thing called standing your ground, and working with people half half. Also make sure to have people who will make sync folders so that you could keep your projects going regardless of who wants to hide there presents.

Now to @roz. I think it's because maybe @puke7 doesn't have much time in the day, not to mention strings of threats hitting is why they're hidden from outsiders who have no idea. And in regard to that I could understand! But this is why you always have a backup plan. If the torrents didn't work, take everything and dump it into a huge sync folder or on eMule or soulseak.

Now to @funute, side note you're in the hvsc by the way, good stuff!

What's that you have files from save's torrents, well drop em on by! extra 14gb doesn't hurt anyone. If you need help just write here and I can help.

Now last but not least, someone who's also in hvsc, @kleeder!

I had written before that I'm not good with scripts, but I do have friends who are. If you post my way I can get em to help me on that. Thanks a lot!
Oh! Side note and not life work related, can you make a script please to grab the files off this site? https://www.ptweb.me/

Remember when I said it isn't life work related? Yeah it totally is!

Also here's the latest chiparchive logs for those who need it.

Friday, July 14, 2023. Woohoo, there's loads of stuff in this log, so let's go! I have started to archive the really awesome website that is lsdsng again as well as also starting to archive some of the Famitracker website.
As you all know, the forums had fallen off the grid some time in April and while there are some efforts to preserve the contents of the site by @fusoxide and @Manonow, I can't help but think that some parts of the site are still gone, and so far it doesn't look like anyone is doing gods work to go through the wayback machine and plunge the archive together. I'd do it myself but sadly I can only archive one website at a time.
And speaking of websites the site of lsdsng.com looks to demand my full attention at the moment, as it's going to take a lot of time to go through the spam hell of the site and get all the not spam .lsdsng files. I managed to spend a night or 2 going through the site and I'm glad to say that for the most part I'm through the spamfest, and I look to only have about 6 pages left or so.
In other news we now have another battle to the botb archive, TINYMOD GRANDPRIX. Nsf small station is hitting at 2615 files, I hope we hit 3000 soon.
The OPL archive by MrKsoft has been added and is a nice idea to do gods work. I need to help him as soon as I can find a way to log the music to vgm with accessibility software. I need to do some work with Tuca and the pxtone project, sadly the latter has a lot more music every day than I can just archive alone. If anyone has a script or something that could help me archive the site let me know, I really need it!
Your usual mirrors like HVSC and the like are kept up to date as much as can be, and I'll see how archiving goes with botb as the site has lost there .org for a while now. Also for the lols I have a files from nico nico Douga folder in the archive now too, so have at it!
That's about all that I can think of for now, so see you till the next log!

i'd love to see it happen but it'd be tremendous work.

re: banished work - personally, most of the banished accounts are either insignificant, or banished for good reason. i think it's of very little loss, and personally i don't care about the significance if said person/people seems to bring more harm than good when remembering. just my personal opinion - i think i'd like to see an archive regardless of this being the case anyway as 99% around 97% of work is still available

double post cause i just thought abt this while talking to kleeder:

try and see if some of the hidden tunes are available on wayback machine - some will definitely be and can then be archived on yr thing, others will just be lost unfortunately.

maybe you can try contacting some of them personally and if they're fine with it, they're fine with it, but i doubt it's the best idea honestly

Since the topic's already been brought up, the removal of you-know-who's entries never sat right with me -- allowing them to remove such an important chunk of site history (and some damn good art, person aside) is a major victory to the troublemaker, letting them disrupt the community in a rather substantial way.

That said, I totally empathize with puke not wanting to have anything to do with it (because who the hell would? :P), and the idea of having an archive of said entries hosted somewhere that's _not_ battleofthebits.com/com/etc sounds like a good compromise IMO? If someone else here is already willing to shoulder the burden on that, then the art remains available for folks who wish to view it without BotB or any of its staff needing to be involved in any way. Win-win?

I know this isn't really supposed to be the topic of this thread, but the thought has been sitting in my mind for a while now and suddenly there's a fellow here proposing a possible solution to the whole ordeal. :P

Uploading the archives to archive.org seems appropriate, I'll see if I can get that going in the next few days.

I also found Savestate's scraper code

from the old torrent thread, might also try to revive that code or rewrite the scraper and continue archiving the entries for the following years (I assume there are no new objections to that from puke7).

What do you know, someone has my thoughts in mind.
@Xaser I really agree, if the thought of keeping an extencive archive up is very hard, then send a backup of the files over to me. I will sware to take care of them, and the history will be preserved and will be taken down by no one.
I had said that I would be enclined to drop 200$ on site uptime every year before if an effort is made to want to protect history, and I will keep to it.
It's not as much, especially if you legends are making bangerd every end of the god dam day, but one thing is for sure. I do give a dam, I do care, and although modland has loads of the old chiptune and demoscene, next to no one has quite a tap on the modern chiptune scene in its entirety yet.
Hell! besides my updated mirror of mck2ch there's only 1 mirror of that place, and it's out of date, and I think the site is dead, both the mirror and the official site.
If some of you didn't catch this story on the discord, I have a story to tell you.


When I started to descover this kind of music, it was back in 2009, and I had heard this wonderful noise from the speakers of my tv. We had gotten a NES for the first time, and sadly because of my blindness I couldn't play, but I still loved the music alot! Well because I loved the chiptunes alot, I started to write requests to tracker projects for accessibility in chiptune trackers so I could use them too. And although some of them said they would probably see about accessibility for those who are blind, no one contacted me and accessibility never gets to be a thing. So I realised that because I can't make the music maybe I wasn't ment to be a chiptunest, but an archivist I can be! I started doing this 7 years ago and what was once a bunch of .mp3 files that took alot of storage, is now a awesome load of originals and covers that are super small and could fit on your normal 12 gig flash drive!

Going back to this now what pushes me to do this is not just passion, but also a less strong amount of bitterness. I love this music, and I have found too much sites go down at the drop of a hat or if no one cares. And what's more for places like famitracker forums, JSR didn't even put up an entire dump for everyone to just drink or take a smoke to and to just jam to some tunes.
Yes i'm bitter, and yes i'm not as happy that when ever I want to make music I am delligated to using mml and nothing elce but maybe like a daw or something. But I found something to do with my bitterness.
Archiving especially for the history of chiptune/chipmusic is very important, but it does nothing if we don't join hands to really try to save the history we have together as botbers no no, as music makers and as archivists alike.

Now to @MelonadeM. Side note wouldn't it be cool if you and darkman007 made a song together?

The thing is I've mostly been doing this stuff solo, and the main reason is because I'm passionate about my archive but not for me, not for you, but for all. Pluss I really didn't know anyone up here till maybe like 3 or so years ago to really talk to any of you, and usually when you start saying your blind people on the web start to ask some funny questions and not really want to help with your endevers, but it's also that I'm not good at checking multiple servers a day.
In any event the people like the mech behind intence tech as well as Teuthida have given me accounts for lsdsng and famitracker forums, with the former needing an account to access any files and the latter needing an account to bulk download from profiles.
Mech knows I hound his site for files, and from time to time I bug him maybe to tell me something about lsdsng if he knows anything about what happened to it.

@MelonadeM I'm not here to think about if a song or art is insignificant, hell for art I can't even see it as there's no description to the pictures! But one thing is for sure. If you love this kind of music and I love this kind of music, making an archive doesn't have to be as hard.

What's that? It's tremendous work? Oh, don't I know it!
When I was living in foster care some years back I lost my .mp3 file archive, and had to make the chiptune archive from scratch but this time with a vision. I wanted to do that like the chiptune archivists of old, even with a name that was like asma, but instead it was the underrated chiptune archive or tuca.
So I started archiving to tuca and drinking coffy, sometimes not sleeping for days and nights on end because my passion was that strong.
It got to the point where I had to let my body kill itself on the weekends and after 30 some hours later, eat and drink a tun of water and start archiving all over again.
Now I do the same thing today sometimes, but instead I eat a tun of sugar but I try to hold off on that and just push through.
Now because Furnace tracker wouldn't mind implementing access for those who use a screen reader, I will look all around and for the best help I can to do something about it!

Unrelated but related: I have an old tower I've been planning on setting up soon to run a tv station on twitch. On friday nights I stream myself watching/digging commercials and a week from today I will hit over 10,000 commercials in my collection. I have 200mbps up/down fiber internet and this machine could easily be hardwired to it.

The reason I bring this up is because the same machine could be setup to be a torrent tracker. I'm not sure, but I think the hidden content wouldn't be accessible to the old ripper. I've never made torrents before or ran a torrent tracker either, but if I'm setting up a debian machine already then how hard could it be?

Another question is how big should each torrent be? A real easy divider could be every 500 or every 1000 battles. There's a lot of options, but putting it all in one megatorrent seems kind of annoying. Then... if someone wants to upload this to internet archive then cool.

I think 500 battles (if we're talking about XHBs) per torrent would be a good number. Assuming most of those battles boonsaved, we're talking about at least 1500 entries per torrent, but definitely much more than that. That's a lot of files to go through. The amount per torrent would vary, of course.

Then, there are the majors. A single torrent could be dedicated to a big major series (like a Winter Chip torrent or a Spring Tracks torrent) and there could be a single torrent for several miscellaneous, non-seasonal majors.

sorry, to clarify - i meant the tremendous work comment in awe, rather than in discouragement - moreso an invitation to let us know where the challenges will be in particular (that haven't already been brought up), rather than some "i wouldn't do it if i were you it's too much work" message.

extremely grateful for the work you've done thus far - i just wish the hidden account stuff wasn't nearly as tricky as it is right now. it's not like the hidden art had no significance or anything, a lot of it did. however, the people behind were sometimes very questionable. usually those people just get muted or barred from posting, however some people's actions just warranted hiding the content entirely.

it's mostly a last resort thing anyway, at least from what i understand - there are a lot of people without access because they were offputting to the community that aren't hidden.

personally i'd love to see the hidden content archived and backed up if possible at all, just to have a complete record really, my thinking in the post i made earlier was that a lot of what makes this site battle of the bits today probably isn't super well represented by the hidden content, but now i realize that's not really the point of an archive - it's not to represent the site, but rather to preserve its history to some extent.

(also, i'm unfamiliar with darkman007! i'll see if i can check out their work in the future)

It's nice to at least imagine an Archivist class, even if it may not happen for whatever reason.

tex: i think super early ohc's were like very low entry numbers, because there was no boon requirement but also i think only admins could host em at the time. i might not recall correctly

instead of a set limit of 500 or something, just have a size limit of like 2gb or something, if that fits 7000 ohcs or 200, that's still 2gb.

might be a weird way to do things if you're looking to have proper catalogues, however it also might just be friendlier on those without speedy internet connections to at least be able to listen to stuff gradually

which brings me a question: how much data does botb actually use, storage wise? i've wondered about this on a few occassions!

I was also under the same impression as you do (about early OHCs having very low entry numbers). But if you check the last page of the Quick Battles arena, you'll notice the average amount of entries per battle back then was more or less the same as nowadays.

If we're talking about only archiving files inherent to their native formats (nsf, mod, xm, etc.), it's reassuring that this will save a considerable amount of space.

https://modarchive.org/index.php?faq-torrents

The Mod Archive did a good job with their torrents. BotB may want to follow their example.

The gist: Release one, initial torrent to cover the backlog. Then, release diff torrents not in 500- or 1,000-entry chunks but annually—because regularly occurring calendar events are easier to deal with than unpredictable, moving targets. And if you're real smart, the annual release can happen over winter vacation, when more people are off work and have time to catch up on such things.

Debian is stability heaven, pukes. I hope you enjoy it.

I've uploaded the first 2005 archive to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/battle-of-the-bits-archive-2005

I don't like that archive.org adds a bunch of derived .png files to all the mp3's for the waveform and spectrogram, but in the same directory, so there's a bunch of extra files cluttering the archive if you browse the files or download it. As far as I can tell this is just part of how archive.org works and cannot be turned off. (e: Never mind, looks like this is only when browsing the files on web. You get just the original uploaded files if you click the "171 Original" download button or if you download it using the torrent.)

Unless someone knows of a better solution where I can host the BotB archive files as-is, I'll probably keep going with putting the rest of the years' archives up on archive.org and also figure out how to best set up seeding for the archive.org torrents.

juan, when you were first talking about ripping ptweb some months ago, I and some others had some lengthy discussions about the concept and the possible consequences of that. I ended up writing a long blog post interrogating the "chiptune mirror site" relative to the theory of "community archives" I've been learning about at library school. which I will not make anyone read, but I wanna pop some provocative thoughts in here for everyone to think about:
- is an archive of botb worth anything without maintaining evidence of the community activity associated with each track like scores, comments, tags, the battle's irc log, and so on? this stuff is to me at least half of what makes botb meaningful and worth preserving.
- in fact, much of the vital context for these tracks appears in forum threads, discord conversations over time, other places not explicitly linked to the track. this stuff can really only be retrieved from BotBrs socially, not in any automatic way. how could this be preserved?
- even though everyone technically consents to this via the cc license, how many people submitting to botb expect their tunes to be removed from this context and hosted somewhere else on the internet (besides the botb bandcamp, youtube)? how many would agree to that if asked individually?
- "more copies = more safe" is true enough, but what IS "the ultimate backup"? botb has its own backup infrastructure that has been stable for many years. to me it seems pretty unlikely that it will spontaneously die. I dunno, this kind of comment always struck me as somewhat marginalizing to the originating community, as if we do not have the wherewithal to protect our own files, so someone from the outside needs to come in and rescue them for us.
- big summary question: how do BotBrs want BotB to be remembered? if someone found this archive in 20 or 30 years, what experiences and values would we want to convey to them? my thinking in general is that the only way to get that right is to keep the community active into the future, passing down botb practices and values to new gens of users as they always have; this "community archives" practice can coexist with a torrent-y backup dump but I hate to see the latter proposed as a safe and comprehensive substitute for the former.

this reminds me of a talk i had with mmmbop2 about botb. the only way to really preserve everything is to write a book about this website and its community, interviewing people from all eras of the page and then linking entries within the text. and even then we wld still have lots of "white spots" in the history and the archive, i guess.

while botb brought a lot of incredible works to us (and still does), a lot of them only really have a value for a handful of people who know the context around the entry.
i agree with jaxcheese here that a lot of what makes the botb archive so incredibely cool is that i have the context of most of these things preserved together with the actual entry content. hence why i browsed old irc logs, forum threads and entries for years now. i dont think i wldve went through a simple playlist of botb entries detached from everything else.

juan, i think the archive you create has the biggest meaning to botbrs who were around during the time when those entries were created. and only for entries that went hidden on here, because otherwise you can just look them up on here.

botb keeps existing because new battles happen but i believe it wld be nothing rn without the archive fundament it has (and by that i also talk about bulletins and comments as well as collective community memory)

while i do think that having a download mirror for music and chip-sourcefiles is a good idea, i think what we really need are old botbrs talking about their experiences on here, sharing memories. and someone who collects these things as either interview recordings or text because otherwise botb will definitely fade away one day and will only keep living in peoples heads.

yes!! botb oral history project... really compelling idea

Hey all! A nice load of posts are here, and all of it very valid so I will go through these posts bit by bit, as I don't think some of you especially realise why I am saying the things that I am saying.
Cool, let's start with the one that got me moving and amping to speak, @jaxcheese. Side note I really gotta try to somehow keep up with archiving you all over at ptweb, but you legends are pumping music out like a fountain you're so fast!


"is an archive of botb worth anything without maintaining evidence of the community activity associated with each track like scores, comments, tags, the battle's irc log, and so on? this stuff is to me at least half of what makes botb meaningful and worth preserving.
- in fact, much of the vital context for these tracks appears in forum threads, discord conversations over time, other places not explicitly linked to the track. this stuff can really only be retrieved from BotBrs socially, not in any automatic way. how could this be preserved?"

Those are some awesome questions, and I for one am very happy you asked them!
While right now what I am trying to archive isn't exact on the money, it touches on those questions and it does bring in a situation that I will share later on.
Take this site for example. http://lsdsng.com/ or this one, http://mck2ch.music.coocan.jp/ or this one! http://famitracker.com/
What do all these sites have in commen? They're either dead, trying to hold on, or if they have backups they aren't available to archive.org or a long time torrent tracker. If they are dead how ever, they have to be collected by the management of the people who love the music and have to collect together what ever remnants that they can find for something to be available. This chiptunests and chiptune and chipmusic lovers, is a fine example of a community that wasn't ready for what had unfolded.
In lsdsng's situation I would like you all to take a look at the archive, in particular the readme file here https://chiparchive.com/files/lsdsng%20archive/info.txt.
That file has all the plans that show what I have planned for the archive along its way. And even though I have been working on the archive for a long time now, the archive is in what I would like to call, the first round. Now let's move on to something elce.

If you all would please redirect to https://chiparchive.com/files/mck2ch%20archive.7z you'll find that the archive is now as complete as it can be, with loads of conversations and little extras.
But wouldn't you know that the archive wasn't like that when it started? I had to archive it by hand back then till much later I understood a little of how you download files with wget.
To this very day I haven't fully understood how to archive with auto downloading tools, but I know a little something something.

Now to the last site, good aul Famitracker! Just 1 word, dead.
4 and a half years ago a legend called Teuthida had given me an account to look at profiles so I can multi download files and while it worked to some help, I wasn't ready for the death of the site as I am a small man against falling chiptune heaven.
Some people were there to fill the gaps in particular gudset, yuzu4k, fusoxide and Manonow with https://chiparchive.com/files/FTM%20Forums.zip 2 https://chiparchive.com/files/FamiTracker.zip https://chiparchive.com/files/Famitracker.com%20Forum%20Attachments%20%28Sorted%29.zip https://chiparchive.com/files/Gr8FTM.7z and https://chiparchive.com/files/Gr8NSF.7z just to name some archives.
In all those archives what do you think are in them? Let me give you a hint. Duplicates, and remnants. But what about the account you got from Teuthida you say? https://chiparchive.com/files/tuca%20archive/
Tuca was growing, and it was good to archive some history. It became apparent how ever that no matter how much sleepless nights I had, I wasn't going to win this one, not by a long shot.
But that's why I made a twitter account. It was for posting news and logs as well as the usual I need to archive a website, please help me! Kind of ordeal, and somehow through reddit I got the archiveteam to make a dump of wark files of famitracker forums before it died.
But as not much people were helping with the archival of famitracker or its forums along with not much info and music going to the archive aside from some artists and talks of a script to archive sites as well as maybe a nerdtrackr music archive, yelling for help on twitter was not doing any good for me and when the good chunck of the accessibility team was fired as well as twitter killing all clients regardless if they were clients for accessibility, twitter had officially lost its uses as I could no more use it with out a sutable client. Archiving didn't stop at all though, it was just much more slower as around that time I found other chiptune sites that needed to be tended to.
Side note. When the first fully batch upload of famitracker files were put on archive.org, a little chunck of people on the famitracker discord had thought that it was me who did it.

So to put this part to bed, I would love to archive a site in its entirety. I really would like to give the attention to archiving as much as I can, but I am just 1 person. Hell it's at least cool that I even got this far! Which is why I'm going to you all. Please! Will you all help me?
It's about baby steps first, the archives could always have more info and be rebuilt again, just like mck2ch archive! To the next thing.


"even though everyone technically consents to this via the cc license, how many people submitting to botb expect their tunes to be removed from this context and hosted somewhere else on the internet (besides the botb bandcamp, youtube)? how many would agree to that if asked individually?"

The first part I could understand, the second part I can't answer, as I know some of you only by music style and know absolutely 0 of you personally. So to put this one a little out of character so to speak. How the hell am I to know that! :) I'm a man with hard passion and some bitterness. Not to anyone, am just a little sour that I can't make music on a tracker or on hardware like the rest of you, and that when ever I talk about making chiptune/chipmusic someone always brings up mml, like if our people can't use a UI in this day and age for making music. Know what I mean?
But seriously though I said this on twitter, on discord, and everyware I go, and I'll say it here too. I really have absolutely no intents what so ever to take someones music!
I know this might sound like a stupid cartoon cliche, but I'm going to you all and other chiptune/chipmusic communities with nothing but passion, the will to archive and protect history, and probably some coffy and or tuns of sugar snacks. Do you really think the people I spoke of that lent me there accounts to archive didn't think I could be trusted?
I mean Teuthida did say if I fucked over he would yeet the account from me, but still that's perfectly fine and understandable! God this sounds like another cliche, but can't you all just sense my passion and we'll be all good? But still I can understand if anything we don't need another PPixelation round here. Long story https://ftcommunity.fandom.com/wiki/PPixelation
Next one!


""more copies = more safe" is true enough, but what IS "the ultimate backup"? botb has its own backup infrastructure that has been stable for many years. to me it seems pretty unlikely that it will spontaneously die. I dunno, this kind of comment always struck me as somewhat marginalizing to the originating community, as if we do not have the wherewithal to protect our own files, so someone from the outside needs to come in and rescue them for us."

No! If it came out like that I didn't mean it. It's just that with so much of the modern not to mention old chiptune scene fragmenting and spredding apart, and coupled with the fact that as I archive mostly by hand I saw some nice chuncks of 404s on entries which put a nice hindrance to getting cloce to the first round of archival for this site, makes me wish that I had a full collection with everything including logs to make sure that nothing was lost.
A nice chunck of you all as people on YouTube do post your files and take care of them. Like for example Jungjongsoo, TakuikaNinja, and SuperJet Spade as well as others do, but at the same time a more bigger chunck of you don't do that and this is a bit of a mis for those who want to play the original files for what ever reason.
Next.


"big summary question: how do BotBrs want BotB to be remembered? if someone found this archive in 20 or 30 years, what experiences and values would we want to convey to them? my thinking in general is that the only way to get that right is to keep the community active into the future, passing down botb practices and values to new gens of users as they always have; this "community archives" practice can coexist with a torrent-y backup dump but I hate to see the latter proposed as a safe and comprehensive substitute for the former."

Forgive me, But I think this was more directed to BotB users rather than me.
To be honest it's hard to say if or not I fit in, as I kinda needed boons to post this topic here, but even so I try not to be a bother and just to mind my manners when posting. I always am reading the articles on here and that's how you know that you all have culture!
The way I see it chiptune/chipmusic and BotB as well as archiving go hand in hand because if you all carved out a space for you all to enjoy and share, then you should protect and show all your history! But this time not singles defending it on what ever, but as a BotB unit!
It's early in the morning and I have to sleep, but when I get up I'll answer the other posts later.


After a good 6hours sleep, let's answer some more posts!

@kleeder your post was going back to a bit of what I had said earlier, but the problem with some of that is you kinda need a foundation not for BotB, more so for the mirror side. This is what I am talking about, it's all about baby steps first, then when we have a high collection of the site we could then start building on top of it with logs/notes, comments and so on.
I would love to make a book on this community, as I think it's outstanding what you all have done and are still doing. But there's just 1 problem. even though you all have a high amount of articles, not much of it has info to the meaning of the songs posted here.
No joke sometimes I would listen to the music here and my sadness would kick in and I would ask myself. What if I could use a tracker too? Would I ever make music like they do? The weird and awesome and everything elce?
And that's where I'm going, you can't have a community that's doing so much for now, while at the same time doing so little to care for the history like later listeners, music makers, and for people like me, wonderers.
If I was someone running the community I wouldn't want it any other way! teaching the BotBrs is very important but the values are just as important as the history as a unit.

Notable shoutes. @Funute thanks for uploading to archive.org of what you have! I am getting a bit of issues with downloading for now, but maybe when I get back to Trinidad it'll fix itself.
For now I think it's good to have backup coppies, as you can never be too sure what will happen later.
@VirtualMan is exact on the money! If a torrent tracker is to be made torrents should be done like this, as in this way it works especially for sites like BotB.

bump cuz I want a torrent tracker with torrents to seed

will it be Battle of the Bits songs on archive.org ?

bump

Sorry I've dropped the ball on this, here's the deal: I stopped uploading the BotB archive to it since I wasn't satisfied with the way archive.org handled the archive + upload. I'll leave the 2005 archive up there, and there is a 2006 archive but it's incomplete so I recommend ignoring it.

At some point I do want to continue uploading the archive somewhere where it can be uploaded/downloaded as-is and also potentially continuing the archive past the original 2011 point. I have vague plans to get a VPS or some sort of hosting at some point in the future to start up a personal web space and run various stuff off of it - running and seeding the archive from it will likely be part of those plans, among other things. I also welcome any other suggestions for getting the rest of the archive up somewhere temporarily in the meantime.

bump

Hello all, sorry I'm just getting back to this! I have the vps of a friend of mine, he hosts chiparchive.com/files/ for me so maybe we could use that, but I also have the complete archive and more stored as a Resilio sync folder, so if you want to have all the files you could just use the folder.
The only problem with Resilio is who ever gets the read and write key can kill the folder if they so wish, so it's best if you plan to use that to only entrust the read and write key to people who would not get mad at there work and take it out on the archive so to speak.
Now while I know a lot of you would never do that because of your culture and no offence to any of you, from my hand archival of this place the 404s do speak for themselves.
@Funute I would love to take care of the BotB archives if you'll let me for the time being, honestly that would be quite the honour if I do say so myself!
How ever I can be of help to the preservation of chiptune and chipmusic history just let me know, and I'll do my best to make that happen!

Yeah if there's some way I can upload the current BotB archive to either chiparchive.com or the Resilio sync folder that would be great. Probably the easiest way for me would be to SFTP it up to the VPS, if that doesn't work I can try to figure out how to get Resilio sync to work.

If you need to DM me to set something up you can reach me either on Discord (nilanila) or Twitter (@funute).

@funute I posted a request to you over Discord.
I would use Twitter but a lot of the blind people have been moving away from it as Twitter killed off accessible clients and much clients in general, and the accessibility staph are pretty much fired so we don't get a lot of support any more on that issue.
I am on Mastodon if anyone wants to find me, I am called the chiptune archiver but I need to figure out how to set my timeline as it's all kinda messed up at the moment.
The way how I have everything set up is that I have everything going to the Resilio sync folder and then later sync it to ftp. I have no problem giving you the read and write key as you don't look like you would distrust this effort.