| Today I'm going to show you how to get some free, legal MP3s online. I will show you two different ways to do this. I'll explain each and give you a real world example of how to do it. (Please, if you download the music and you like it, support the artists that created the music - buy the album, buy a Tshirt, or go to a concert - give back!) |
| Free
Music Technique #1 - Wimpy config Have you ever gone to a band's website and they have one of thoe flash MP3 players going playing their songs? Wouldn't you rather listen to them on your terms, with your own (possibly portable) player? For this technique, besides a browser, you (may) need a text editor that can "linkify" (make URLs clickable) text documents (I use Editpad Lite for this). In a pinch, you could email the text to yourself then they will be clickable in your email. If you use FireFox with the Linkification extension (highly recommended, BTW), you are set. Another handy extension for Firefox is DownThemAll - this will let you grab all the files in just a click or two. Many automatic downloader programs will do this for you too. |
| So first, let's go to a website using a flash music player. Here's one for the band The Layaways. Go there now...I'll wait.... |
| Now let's get the player on screen by clicking on discography/mp3 on the left which takes us to: http://www.thelayaways.com/sounds (press pause if you don't need/want the music playing right now). |
| There are a few links to MP3s on this page - go ahead and DownThemAll if you want. Hey look - their latest album is We've Been Lost and they allow you to listen to it by clicking on the Flash Player - go ahead and do it and the player will popup. |
Now, on the small player popup page, right click in the
bottom right of
the page and choose "View Source" in your browser. We want to see if
they are
using the Wimpy
Player and if so, we want their config file. Look
for the text "wimpy" in the page - yep - it's there - they are
using Wimpy. Now we
want the config file. Look at this line:
value="http://www.thelayaways.com/player/wimpy-graphic.swf? |
| PHEW! See the parameter after wimpyApp= that says: http://www.thelayaways.com/player/laysongs/Lost/lost.xml ? That is the config file - load that URL into your browser. |
| Now look at what is there - the full URLs to every song on their album. See, the thing about the Wimpy player is that the player runs in your browser so it has to get the songs from somewhere and this config file tells it where. We can use this file to download the files ourselves. |
| Now here is where Free
Music Technique #2 comes in - Changing URLs: Let's
see if they made it REALLY easy to grab there music - pull off the mp3
filename from the
first URL and see if that gets you anything. So this: http://www.thelayaways.com/sounds/silence.mp3 turns into this: http://www.thelayaways.com/sounds/ Go there and see what you get..... |
| Rats! We got a webpage - sometimes we can get a directory listing and then just DownThemAll from there with no extra work. |
| So, now that you have the config xml file in your browser, save it to your disk. If you save it with the default name it will be called lost.xml |
| Now you can either load that XML file into an editor (like Editpad Lite) that makes URLs clickable and click on each one to download them or you could rename the file to lost.txt and load lost.txt into Firefox. If you have the Linkification extension enabled, all the links are clickable, and if you have the DownThemAll extension, you can just right-click on the page and DownThemAll. Now you have the full album to do with as you please. The album is only encoded at 96kbps but it's a good way to see if you like it (and if you do...buy it). |
| Now, if you think you've got the hang of it, here is another site to try and grab all the music from: http://deathcabforcutie.com This one is a little trickier because all of the links in the config xml are relative so they aren't easily clickable or DownThemAll-able. I had to do a search-and-replace on the XML file and added in the http://deathcabforcuties.com in front of the relative URLs. Of course, on this site, it's all a moot point because you can download these MP3s by clicking on Media at the bottom. |
| Another site to try is http://ghotti.com (which also has some good music) - this one requires a slightly different procedure - I'll let you figure it out on your own. |
| There are a number of different ways of configuring Wimpy that sites use. I once found a site (which I don't remember now) with Wimpy that had a TON of mashups in the player. He was using some trickery by using a PHP config file and it was quite convoluted to get it to work so I could easily grab the music. |
| Free
Music Technique #2 - Changing URLs Ok, now on to another band site.....let's go to http://betablokka.com (again, more good music, IMHO). They don't have a player on their site, but they have an MP3 or two to download - let's see what we can find..... Update - In the time that has passed (about a week) since I wrote this article and when I posted it, this site has wised up and denied directory listing, so this won't work on this site anymore. (I should NOT have delicioused the directory) I'm leaving it here though because the concepts are still valid. |
| On the front page they have an MP3 to download: http://betablokka.com/multimedia/mp3/betablokka_scared.mp3 (again, great song). Copy that URL and remove the MP3 filename and put that in your browser like so: http://betablokka.com/multimedia/mp3/ |
| Bingo! We see a directory listing. There are the two
songs they are offering to
download. Now for the fun part...let's see what else we can find. Let's
go
up a directory by removing the "mp3" from the URL
which gives us: http://betablokka.com/multimedia/ (you can just click the "to parent Directory" link on the directory listing). |
| Now we see 4 folders: "mp3", "press", "Sarah", "video".
We've already
seen the mp3 directory, press has some images, what's in Sarah
(and who is Sarah)? Look - two more MP3s. Grab them - they are both
VERY good - I like them both - a LOT.
Here are the direct URLS (grab them now before they disappear!): High Side Down.mp3 Good Day Love ruff 3.mp3 I can't find anything about these songs anywhere on their site or even via Google. Cool - we just found some super-secret music! |
| I hope this little tutorial will help you get some free music in the future - if you ever find any sites with good free music (with Wimpy or without), let me know by leaving a comment on the blog post for this article, or do like I do and tag the links via delicious with the freemusic tag. |
| If you want to give me any feedback about this article,
leave
a comment on the blog post. Brian http://myvogonpoetry.com |