Xorlev

On the last machine in the chain:

nc -l 1234 | pigz -d | tar xvf -

On each intermediate machine, you use a fifo to copy the data to the next machine as well as decompressing.

mkfifo myfifo
nc $NEXT_SERVER 1234 <myfifo &
nc -l 1234 | tee myfifo | pigz -d | tar xvf -

Xorlev

# Not the most efficient method...
File.open('track1/albumData1.txt').each do |line|
  album, artist, *genres = split_and_filter(line)
  genres.map! { |g| Genre.find(g) }

  Album.create! :id => album, :artist_id => artist, :genres => genres
end

Xorlev

require 'active_record'

class Album < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :artist
  has_many :tracks
  has_and_belongs_to_many :genres

  attr_accessible :id, :artist_id, :genres

  def to_s