Links Are Getting Fixed

I've noticed a lot of download links are dying (as I write this in September 2026). This is because the download services I use let the links go dead if nobody downloads a particular file within a certain time period. (I just checked, and for Bestfile it's 25 days, for upload.ee it's 50 days, and for Pixeldrain it's two months.) For the last couple of weeks, I've been slowly but surely fixing a lot of dead links as I move away from using upload.ee, where most of the dead links are.

I've been reluctant to do this just because it's a big pain in the butt (and this is a labor of love blog I only do due to my love of music and wanting to share it). I realized though the main thing holding me back is I've been adding two download links per album, Bestfile and Pixeldrain. I really like Pixeldrain. They make it very easy to do batch uploads. But with Bestfile, one can only upload five files at a time. Even then, about half of the time, the upload doesn't work and I have to do it again. This can turn uploading hundreds of albums into a really unpleasant chores. There have been rare times when I've had to upload an album five or six times before Bestfile succeeded with it. By contrast, Pixeldrain never fails.

So I realized that I'm probably never going to get around to uploading all those old albums with Bestfile, due to the bad and inconsistent upload system. I decided instead to only use Pixeldrain links for previously posted albums. But for newly posted ones, I'll still use both Pixeldrain and Bestfile, because I know some people have trouble with Pixeldrain for whatever reason.

Here's how things stand. I have over two thousand albums with Pixeldrain and Bestfile links. I had about another two thousand with upload.ee links. In the past weeks, I've replaced 500 of those with Pixeldrain links. I haven't done that in any special order, but I'm tackling certain bands first (often just because they're easy). For instance, I've done Belle and Sebastian, the Byrds, Aimee Mann, Beck, CSN(Y), Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, Morgan James, the Indigo Girls, the Velvet Underground, Van Morrison, and a lot more. Plus, I've done all the "various artists" albums, which mostly consist of rock festivals. So if you've been having trouble with download links for any of those, give them another try. 

Meanwhile, I'll keep plugging away fixing more links. However, one reason it's taking time is that, while I'm at it, I'm also reviewing the cover art and making improvements when I see ones I don't like. Usually that's because of low-res/ blurry issues. Previously, I had been using Krea AI, but I'm too cheap to play and now they only allow four free uses per 24 hours. But recently I've discovered Ask Gemini does a really great job improving and/or colorizing images, and I can do at least a couple dozen per day. So if you dig through albums posted from previous years, you may find some cover changes, hopefully for the better. Gemini has a habit of wanting to make content changes while it's upgrading the detail level. But I've learned how to give extremely detailed and specific instructions to stop it from doing that.

I hope in a couple of months, maybe sooner, virtually all of the links will be working again, and with cover art I'm happy with. Knock on wood. If there are some musical acts where you want the links fixed sooner rather than later, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.