With the looming verdict about the Pirate Bay coming up I thought a post about the many ways to get music online would help out a bit.  I plan to go over all the ways I know how and be unbiased as to the legality of each tactic. Again, this is for educational purposes only. Now that I’ve mentioned that lets begin.

The Happy Safe Zone, Internet Radio.

I’m going to begin with the completely legal and free ways to listen to music. This is where online radio shines. Note that these next suggestions are all music that is streaming, so you will need a constant internet connection while listening in.

Last.fm

Being my top pick for streaming music, Last.fm sets the bar very high for broadcasting online tunes. Head on over to their website and take a minute to sign up for an account. Once logged in, you can begin by finding music you like by searching for it and, once found play it right from within the player. They have a very wide arrange of categories for music and your bound to find something you like here. The social aspect of it also lets you find new music and some you would never thought existed! Last.fm also has a desktop client for Windows and Mac OSX so you can find out more info on each band playing and vote up or down tracks that play.

Pandora Radio

A great runner up for best online radio would have to be Pandora. Visit their site at Pandora.com and enter your email address to register. Once signed up (with very minimal info about yourself I might add) you can begin to create “stations” to listen to. Pandora was started by the Music Genome Project in 2000, and when searching for a particular artist or band it uses over 400 different musical attributes to suggest the next song based on the one you searched for. This is a great service for discovering (and re-discovering) music you’ve never heard before or forgot about. Definitely worth a shot.

There are a ton of online radio websites that will do essentially the same thing. Some have desktop clients, some make you listen through a browser window, and some allow you to be a DJ of your own station if you like. Some honorable mentions, Live365 & SHOUTcast Radio both let you listen to streaming music.  If you really dont want to sign up for an account, you can always use iTunes to listen to the pre-set Radio Stations within the program.

Adventuring into the Forest for Prey

As opposed to streaming music, perhaps you would actually like to download and save that music to your hard drive?  Being able to play that music back at a later date at your leisure (while offline or on your iPod/iPhone) is nice. So here are a few ways to do that.

YouTube + ZamZar

You’ve been stumbling through YouTube and watching all those music videos haven’t you? For some people, YouTube is their main source to listen to music (I’m not joking) but lets give those people a little more power shall we? Head on over to YouTube and search for a video you want to extract the audio from. Once you find the video you like, COPY the link from the address bar and then visit ZamZar.com. What ZamZar specializes in is converting file formats from one to another, so in this case we are going to take the YouTube FLV file and tell it we want an MP3 file from it. Enter your E-Mail address & hit Convert. Within a few minutes (depending on how busy ZamZar is) you should recieve an email with a link to download the mp3.

Google Search (or Pre-Tweaked Google Search Engines)

Google indexes tons of stuff online, and not just websites. It gathers and crawls data from flvs, to mp3s, to just about anything it comes across. Wait a sec…. Mp3s? Yup, so how can you turn the giant search engine to benefit your mp3 hunt? Head over to Google and type in the follow query.

{-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “MUSIC“}

Your going to want to replace MUSIC with the album or artist you are looking for. Once you hit search, Google is off and away pulling in results that it found based on the search query you gave it. (Basically, folders that contain a certain artist that are online) Click on one of the many results and you’ll most likely see something like this:

Try finding the particular song you wanted and from here its simply a right-click and save away. But, if you cant remember that entire search string every time you want to use this technique there are websites out there that automate the process. Try out Cr3ation B3ta

SeeqPod + Jaseeq

SeeqPod is a great online radio station that I “forgot” to mention earlier. The reason? There’s an application out (cross-platform) that’s called Jaseeq enabling you to search the links that SeeqPod gathers from around the web and puts it into a nice little GUI for you. Remember Napster in the early days? Ya, this reminds me of that a lot, except it doesnt use P2P technology but rather hyperlinks to what is on the web. Download the program here and take it for a test spin.

Deep inside the Belly of the Beast

Arr Matie! Do yee seek the finest musical treasures this vast sea of tubes has to offer? Then seek no further than the next few paragraphs. But beware of the rough waters, for its infested with mean shark infested lawyers who will gobble yee up at an IP’s notice. But fear not, yer captain’ll do his best to steer you clear of them waters. Set sail!

Protection

Shiver me timbers, your not going to go out there like that! You need a little protection, lets get you started with a few basics. Head over to the Phoenix Labs website and download the latest version of “PeerGaurdian 2″. If your on Windows click here for the download, or if on Mac OSX click here. PeerGaurdian 2 is a small un-intrusive program that runs in the background telling your computer a “list” of IP addresses to block. They range from government offices, to record industry IPs, and even ad-revenue companies to help minimize the amount of ads you see while surfing the net. PeerGaurdian 2 is NOT a full proof way to protect yourself while downloading something you should not be, but — every little bit helps.

IRC

Internet Relay Chat has been around for a very long time, and its most likely if your reading this and use IRC you already know how to download mp3’s using it. But if not, lets get you set up. If your on Windows go download mIRC and install it. If your on Mac OSX download Colloquy. Once you installed them, open it up and you should be faced with a basic prefrence panel to setup your username, and password along with what server you’d like to join. To fully understand how IRC works read up on the IRC Tutorial here. Find a server that is well populated and list the channels available. You should have a nice GUI box if your using the suggested IRC clients I mentioned to filter out the channels by keyword. (hint: try “mp3″ or “Music”) Enter the channel and begin finding @Users to download from. A quick YouTube video demonstrating how to do that is below.

Torrent Files

First, what are Torrent files? Think of the traditional way you would download something. You go to a website, click on “download now” and it begins downloading to your hard drive. With Torrent files, your not downloading the file you want but rather a “pointer” TO that file which is not on a single website (or host) but MANY hosts (or people) who have it already or are in the process of downloading it. This way, your download would be faster. You would use a torrent client to manage your torrent files you find on websites such as The Pirate Bay or other torrent sites. Here is a YouTube clip of Chris Pirillo explaining what Torrent files are.

Now, setting the legalitys aside with distributing content through torrents I can tell you that your going to find pretty much anything you were looking for by using torrents and torrent search engines. I would recommend using Transmission for Mac OSX or uTorrent for Windows PC’s. Both are fast, easy and straight forward. There are some other big name torrent clients out there but I find some of them a bit too resource hogging and heavy so I’m going to leave them out of mentioning.

So once you got your Torrent client up and running, where would you go to get the Torrent file? There are plenty to choose from the one that pops into most peoples heads would be The Pirate Bay. As of this posting they are currently awaiting verdict if the practices of making available searches for torrent files are legal or not. This is a very important trial with regards to how the future of online distribution will be handled. Needless to say, the big recording industries dont like change, so they are fighting this tooth and nail. Putting that aside for another post lets get down to how to actually work with Torrent files.

Head over to one of many Torrent Search Engines and head on in to one. There usually is a search field box where you can type in what your looking for or sometimes they organize their torrents by category. (Music, Movies, TV, etc) Once you search for what you like, you’ll be shown a list of torrents that match up to what you look for. So say I searched for “Beethoven”, I’ll pick the torrent that seems closest to what I was looking for and it will download it to my computer. Go on and open up that torrent file to run the torrent client you installed earlier. It begins to search for peers who have that “Beethoven” song/album and starts downloading it. Torrents are great for large files and hard to find files.

Once the file completes, you would no longer be considered “leeching”, a term used to categorize someone who is downloading a file(s) from said torrent. You would then become a “Seeder”, or to put it simply a host so others can download what you just downloaded. Be sure to give back to your peers often because sometimes if you leech too much your ratio lowers dramatically. Ratio is something that shows other peers/seeders if your more of a giver or a taker. With certain torrent clients, you can choose to exclude peers who have a low ratio count. A good rule of thumb is, if you download 10 MB, try to upload 10 MB. But hey, its your ratio.

Newsgroups

Yet another old tactic of downloading stuff online would be the ancient technique of Newsgroups. You will be pleasantly surprised at just how much (and fast) you can download using Newsgroups. It does get a bit complicated on how to correctly use Newsgroups to download what you want, but it does work so I’ll do my best to explain.  Think of Newsgroups as many email subscriptions on a wide arrange of topics. Your provider or host that serves these “emails” to your news reader program delivers them with the intent that they are basically text files. Which,…. they are. But, thats pretty much what any file is, isn’t it? Just a bunch of code that lets the computer know its a certain type of file and not just garbled up text. For example, take a file on your computer — say a picture you took. So the file name might be “DSC00634.JPG”. Change the extension to “.TXT” so you end up with “DSC0064.TXT”. Now that the file format changed from a picture to a text file. Open it up with your text editor and look what you get.

See how it’s all garbled up text? Its still a picture, but the computer thinks its a text file. That’s the essence of downloading through Newsgroups. Your downloading a whole bunch of text through the server that you can then change back into a working file. So lets get started, head over to GigaNews.com and sign up for an account. As of this posting you can get an account for as cheap as $2.99 for 3GB/month or $29.99 for Unlimited/month.

Yes, you do need to pay for this technique. Now put that jaw back up, and before you start bad-mouthing this because Torrents are free and much better all I’m doing is letting people know about this technique.

Once you’ve signed up and received your Account Name and Password for the server you are going to need a News Reader. If your on Windows go download GrabIt for free. If your on a Mac OSX platform try out Unison ($25 but its the best/easiest there is for Mac) Open up your NewsReader and enter your account information. Its going to start downloading the entire listing of newsgroups available so this may take a while but only needs to be done once.

After that’s all set up visit NZB Matrix & register for VIP account ($10 for a Lifetime account) that will allow you to search for and download NZB files. (You could just register for the free account but you wont be able to find any NZB files no younger than 20 days old) So, what are NZB files? Well, remember how we talked about that garbled up text equaling a real file? Thats pretty much what NZB files are except they link to the string of listings in your News Group (GigaNews). Finding what you want is as simple as searching for it at NZBMatrix.com, downloading the NZB file and opening it with your News Reader. Grabit automatically decodes the files and UnRars them if they are compressed. You’ll begin downloading the said file at your maximum download speed your ISP gives you at a constant rate. (Can a torrent file beat that?)

If your on Mac OSX you might want to pick up a few other programs that will come in handy if you ever encounter split files & need to join then back together. Download and install Split & Concat, NZB Drop, and MacPAR deLuxe. These all basically do what GrabIt does on Windows but since Mac doesnt have a cool “all in one” program like that you’ll need to do it manually with these apps.

Treasure Attained, and Listened to

In the end, however you choose to get your music online I hope that it doesnt (1) cause too much trouble (2) cost you too much money and (3) above all, is enjoyable. Some people like the feel of a jewel case and the insert with each CD, some people just want to have something to listen to while jogging, and others want every mp3 in the world. I am not pushing a particular way over another, but if you do choose to get your music online I just wanted to inform you of the ways you can do it. I hope this informed you, and support your favorite artist / band any way you can. They are the ones struggling through all of this, not the record companies.