5 Unconvential Ways to Download Music
There are so many ways to go about downloading music from the Internet, some more common than others. I’m sure we’re all aware of Limewire, Bittorrent, and other common P2P applications. There’s nothing wrong with these at all, but sometimes they just don’t meet your demands.
There are plenty of cases where torrents and P2P programs fall short. Sometimes you have miserable download speeds, sometimes file quality can be very sketchy, and sometimes the tags might be completely askew (what a bother). Maybe the music you listen to is just too obscure to find on Limewire? Maybe you are just a greedy bastard who doesn’t like to share, or maybe you just don’t want to sacrifice your internet to the torrent cloud while you download.
Not to mention if you are downloading copyrighted music (naughty naughty), then you run the risk of having the RIAA come and eat your babies. And no-one wants their babies eaten.
Here are some of the best “unconventional” ways to download music. No filesharing involved!
1.) 4chan Rapidshares – The single most useful feature of 4chan, or arguably the only useful feature of 4chan. (I’ll explore that later…) This is a huge repository of Rapidshare, Megaupload, and Mediafire links, and it probably has what you are looking for (and plenty of stuff you most definitely aren’t looking for). Search for whatever you need, and then follow the link to the corresponding download site. These are direct HTTP downloads, just click and save. Files are usually in ZIP or RAR format, so if you don’t have WinRAR pick it up now.
Anatomy of a 4chan rapidshare search
The most important thing here is the filename (of course) and the site. The code is rs – Rapidshare, mu – megaupload, and mf – mediafire. Look for mf when you can.
Speeds can range from painstakingly slow (Rapidshare – 50-100kb/s) to HOLY-SHIT-I-LOVE-THIS fast (Mediafire – 500-700kb/s). Check it out now, and chances are you probably won’t need to read the rest of this post.
2.) Myspace – Pretty much every band has a Myspace. Usually they are even kind enough to provide a nice little sampling of their music. Take advantage of their generosity by going to File2HD and stealing their music! Just insert the Myspace URL, select the Audio radio button, and hit Get Files. You’ll get a list of mp3 files that you can right click and save as. It’s awfully slow though, I’ve only seen about 25kb/s average. Hey, you’re getting music for free, don’t complain.
3.) Youtube – Everyone knows Youtube is the creme de la creme of media streaming, but did you know you can yank music off of it? This is especially useful if you just want one song, or maybe something obscure that isn’t on 4chan Rapidshare (shocker I know). Just find the video that has the music you want, then visit one of these pages: VidtoMP3, FLVTO, ListenToYouTube. Put in the URL, wait a minute or two, and then save it to your computer. Be sure to change the music tags so you can recognize it later!
4.) Audacity Stream Yanking – To be honest, I’m trying to think of when you would need to use this, and I can’t really think of anything. I suppose if you enjoy some obscure Swedish-electro-folk-rap band from the 1970s and can only find their songs embedded in their website, this may be of use to you.
You’ll need:
Audacity, LameMP3Encoder (downloaded and unpacked), and a working sound card driver. Hey, someone may not have it! 
To do this, you want to set you sound card to loop back. Unfortunately there are a lot of ways to do this. I’m using a Realtek onboard card, and it came with this “Realtek HD Sound Manager”. So that’s how I’ll show it to you.
Activate loopback and mute your mic.
I have muted the mic so we don’t have to hear my breathing in the music, and I’ve unmuted “stereo mix” which is another name for loopback. For those of you who don’t have the Realtek driver, then look for terms like ” What U Hear” “Loopback” “Sum” and “Wave out” in your sound card configuration. For those without a third party manager, you can just double click on the little speaker in your system tray. If for some reason that volume control isn’t there go to Control Panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices -> Audio Tab -> Sound Playback -> Volume. Once at the Master Volume Control hit Options -> Properties. Select input as your mixer device. Look for the above terms, and check it.
Check “stereo mix” or alternate terms.
Now that the hard parts done, we can focus on getting music. Open Audacity, open up a music stream (Imeem is a good place), then hit the red record button and wait till the music is done. Go to File -> Export as MP3. The first time you do this it will ask you for the LAME MP3 .DLL. You should have this downloaded and unpacked. Just find it and open it. Then a Tag editor will come up. Work your magic, and you’re done!
The finished result is actually not even that bad.
Example –
If you’re an audiophile it may not please though.
5.) Google Searching – People tend to leave little caches of music open to the public (not sure why), and you can take advantage of that! There is actually a search string you can type into google to look for music in these indexes.
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” “Last modified” mp3
This is saying to Google “Don’t return webpages (-inurl:htm -inurl:html)”, “return things that say ‘index of’ and ‘last modified’ in the title (intitle:”index of” “Last modified”)”, and “return mp3 files (mp3)”. Simple enough eh?
Just add the name of the song/artist you seek at the end, and see if you can find it. This is very hit and miss. Sometimes you can get lucky and find entire albums, or sometimes you may just find a bunch of russian mp3 sites and dead links.
Example: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” “Last modified” mp3 modest mouse leads to something like this:
Just right click -> save as.
Sites to avoid are ones that explicitly say “mp3″, “download”, or anything along those lines in the title. More often than not, they’ll try to make you pay. If they are free, they’ll probably subject you to a thousand popups before you can reach your prize. Look for personal storage sites; the one above was http://www.uvm.edu/~smdempse/UVMtvMusic/, clearly a personal storage space. This used to be a great way to get music, but it seems many people have found out about this and taken their indexes off from public view.
That about wraps up this article. If you know of any other places to get music (P2P aside), please leave me a comment.
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