Download MP3s with Songbeat

Songbeat is a new desktop client application that allows you to search the internet for mp3s, stream them, and even download them to your computer. With Songbeat uses SeeqPod technology, which is a specialized search engine that finds any playable search results including video, slideshows, audio, interactive presentations, Adobe Flash demonstrations, animated graphics, rich multimedia objects and more. Although SeeqPod displays the URL of the mp3 track, you can’t click on it, so it’s hard to use SeeqPod to download tunes. Songbeat, on the other hand, not only finds mp3s online, it allows you to download them to your PC. Unlike peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs, Songbeat does not have access to your hard drive or those of other users, so you are safer from the inherent dangers of those programs. Be warned though - Songbeat assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues and advises you to make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen, so if you get busted by the RIAA, it’s all on you!

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Mp3Realm is a search engine just for mp3’s. You can search for songs by artist, title, genre, or album and you can filter out results by file duration, so you don’t end up with a clip when you were looking for the whole song. The site also indexes lyrics, so you can not only listen, but also sing along with the tunes you find. You have the option to search just audio or lyrics, too. Registered users can create a profile, save their searches, and create playlists which are saved under their login. The search service tracks other websites and blogs by crawling the web, so they don’t actually host any mp3’s on their servers. Since that is the case, they don’t mind also offering Mp3Realm users the ability to quickly download the files via a “download” link underneath the search result. This sounds like something that the RIAA will try to shut down, so enjoy it while it lasts!

Songbird is a free media player and web browser mashup developed by the folks who previously engineered both Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. Both a media player and a platform, Songbird is built on the Mozilla platform and has a UI that looks very similar to that of the popular iTunes application. Like the Firefox browser, add-ons are available for Songbird that extend the power of the application; there are even add-ons called “feathers” that skin Songbird’s visual appearance. With Songbird, you can play mp3s without leaving the webpage or view web pages like mp3 blogs as playlists that you can save, download, or subscribe to. The application supports both Windows Media DRM audio and Apple FairPlay encoded audio as well as mp3s, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC formats. The recent alpha developer preview release, Songbird 0.4, is meant for testing purposes, but I imagine many web-savvy music enthusiasts will be downloading the app, too.

If you haven’t yet tried Amazon’s mp3 download service, you now have yet another reason to give it a shot: Warner Music announced on Thursday that they, too, would begin selling their tunes on Amazon in the DRM-free mp3 format. DRM-free songs can be copied to multiple computers, burned to CDs as many times as you would like, and played on any digital media player, like an iPod or Zune. In the coming week, Warner’s entire music catalog will be added to the Amazon store, bringing the total number of available mp3’s available for download at Amazon to 2.9 million. (The other two big labels, Universal and EMI, are already participating). Mp3’s on Amazon sell for 99 cents, or sometimes 89 cents, which is cheaper than iTunes; the bonus of the tracks being copy-protection free makes the Amazon store my first choice for legal downloads now. It’s important to note that other major music stores also offer DRM-free music - the Zune Maketplace has 1 million or so DRM-free songs, Walmart sells some DRM-free tunes alongside its copy-protected tunes, and iTunes offers iTunes Plus tracks that are copy-protection free, too. What’s great about Amazon, though, is that every track they sell is DRM-free, so you never have to worry. Even though other labels went this route a while ago, Warner had been holding out until now. Warner Music Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Edgar Bronfman Jr. even responded to Steve Jobs’ plea for dropping DRM on iTunes with the following statement: “We will not abandon DRM nor services that are successfully implementing DRM for both content and consumers.” Not surprisingly, Warner is starting the DRM-free “test” with Amazon. If successful, they can roll it over to iTunes without looking too sheepish. Honestly, though, I don’t care - I’m just happy to finally see DRM-free, LEGAL, music become available. I predict that by the end of 2008, DRM will be a thing of the past. For music that is…Hollywood is still clueless on this.

Mucelli is a brand-new service that allows you to listen to your favorite music, watch videos, listen to the latest charts, or even create your own playlist by using a music player that is available right in your browser. You can create a playlist easily by dragging-and-dropping favorite tracks into the player. The tracks available in Mucelli aren’t the mp3s housed on your computer - instead, you use the search box to find songs from your favorite bands, then drag these results into the screen on the left to create a playlist on-the-fly. There’s even a feature that allows you to copy a song to your clipboard and send it to a friend (sounds illegal), but I couldn’t get this feature to work, so maybe it’s still in development. It’s possible that this just sends your friend a link to the song in Mucelli as opposed to a downloaded file, which may be more acceptable to the record labels, yet still a cool way to share new artists or bands with your friends. This makes Mucelli a customizable, streaming online radio station - something that complements, though does not replace, services like my personal fav, last.fm. (found on go2web20)

FilesTube is a speciality search engine that scours many different file sharing and uploading sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload. The FilesTube search spider records the recent uploads to these sites in a database which you can then search from the FilesTube search box. Doing search on FilesTube website will provide you with a links to files, but FilesTube.com itself doesn’t actually host any files on their site. This makes FilesTube one of the easiest and quickest ways to find files online, whether video, music, software, documents, or anything else. FilesTube even offers an mp3 player which will play mp3s directly from FilesTube. The player can also be embedded or linked to on any website, bringing your favorite music to your website, blog, or social network profile page. Although I’m sure there are some legitimate uses for this service, it’s clearly designed to bring the underground file-sharing community’s stash of files to the masses via an easy-to-use search box. Hmmm….easy. I’m OK with that.

TuneSquare is an online community where unsigned artists and bands are making money while listeners download their songs for free. The artists are paid via the site’s “carefully selected” on-site advertising and flash advertisements that are shown while a song is played. So maybe it’s a lot of ads, but if it means free tunes and artists making money, I suppose that is OK. You can browse through different genres like pop rock, hard rock/metal, Soul/R&B, Singer/Songwriter, Hip-Hop/Rap, Techno/Electro, World, Club/Dance, and Other. For more detailed browsing, and even more genres, you can click on “Browse,” which is where you will find options like Alternative (hello!), as well as more obscure genres like “Screamo,” “Shoegaze,” “Breakbeat,” and “Zouk.” (I had no idea the extent of musical ignorance until reading through the full genre list!) You can listen to the songs online, and then, if you like them, click “Download this song,” to snag a DRM-free mp3. You can also recommend the song to other users or share the song on Facebook.

Surprisingly, I heard about Songza on Uncov, the blog of dissing everything web 2.0. For it to actually get a rave review over there, I decided it was worth checking out. Unlike peer-to-peer (P2P) or BitTorrent services, Songza users can’t (illegally) download songs, only listen to them online, internet radio-style. But where Songza differs from current internet radio providers like Last.fm or Rhapsody is that you don’t have to listen to a “station” based on the artist you enter; instead, you can choose exactly the artist or song you want to here and stream it live, without having to pay or subscribe to Songza in any way. Really! You just type in a song title or artist and click “search” and Songza will load and play the song. Songza’s creators designed the site to show what they believe is a “human interface,” a term they’re using to describe interfaces that reflect how people actually use software. For them, Songza presents this “humane interface” concept through the site’s clean, clutter-free design and transparent remote control.

This post breezed by on LifeHacker, but I thought it was worth a second look. A free software application called iTunes Agent lets you sync up your non-iPod mp3 player with your iTunes library. Seriously! As great as iTunes is, it is, unfortunately, locked down so you can only use it with an iPod. With iTunes Agent, you can create a playlist for your non-mp3 player in iTunes and then sync that playlist to your mp3 player. iTunes Agent rests in your system tray, always on the lookout for new devices being connected to your system. If a device it recognizes is connected, it enables you to manage it via a playlist in iTunes. You can even associate your mp3 player with a Smart Playlist, like “Party Shuffle”, and always have a new collection of tracks on your player.

The software supports almost any non-iPod device from your PSP to your Walkman phone to your Creative Zen. In fact, the only criteria to determine whether or not a device is supported is whether or not you can map it to a drive letter under “My Computer” in Windows. Since Microsoft Zunes don’t show up as a drive letter, you would first have to follow the steps in this hack to get your Zune to show up as a drive letter before you could sync your Zune to iTunes with this software (in theory…anyone who tries this please let me know! Especially with Zune 2 software!).

To use the iTunes Agent software, you’ll need to install the .Net framework version 2.0 (if you don’t already have it), then download the iTunes Agent software. Although the website doesn’t specifically say, it appears that the software supports both mp3 files as well as acc (m4p). Of course, if you run into trouble with your device, you could always rip the DRM from your iTunes music by using QTFairUse software.

Even better, stop buying DRM’d music!!

I’ve had my video iPod for a while now and I’ve amassed quite a collection of some of my favorite TV shows, but I’m running into a storage problem. I have multiple seasons of these shows, but I only want to sync the current season to my iPod. Unfortunately, when selecting what you want to sync, iTunes only gives you the choices to sync x amount of “selected TV shows”, “selected playlists” or “all TV shows.” Why can’t I just select TV shows by season? I hope they introduce this feature in the next version of iTunes. In the meantime, the following are the workarounds I’ve found for dealing with this shortcoming. Let me know if you have any better suggestions!

1. Create Video Playlists: On the TV Shows tab, you can change it from syncing “selected TV Shows” to syncing “selected playlists.” This requires a little manual labor, since you have to build your playlists, so the best way to do this is to use the “Smart Playlists” feature. Go to File –> New Smart Playlist (or Ctrl + Alt + N). Change the first drop-down box to “Show”, the second drop-down box to “is”, and the third to the name of the TV show you want (it will even auto-fill as you begin typing.) Then click the plus sign (+) to the right of this third field. Now you can add more conditions. Change the first field here to “Season,” the second to “is,” and the third to whatever season you want to sync. Click “OK”. Since “Live Updating” is checked by default, unless you uncheck it, the playlist will auto-update as new shows from the season are downloaded. Now you can change the settings from syncing “selected TV Shows” to “selected playlists” and sync away.
2. Edit the Show tag: Another option is to edit the TV show’s tag so iTunes thinks it’s a different TV show altogether. Doing this will let you just use the checkboxes on the TV show tab underneath “selected TV shows.” To change the show’s name, you right-click on the show in iTunes and choose “Get Info.” Then, click on the video tab and edit the show’s name.
3. 3rd Party tagging programs: Using 3rd party tagging programs will let you do option #2 faster than editing shows one-by-one. Here’s some I found:
   mp3Tag: This is a tag processor for MP3, WMA, OGG, WV, APE, FLAC, WAV, AAC, MPP/MPC/MP+, MP4/M4a files. The features include an automated search for lyrics and pictures (album covers), tags import from Amazon and FreeDB, and an automatic tag filling option, which works for mp3 albums that come without tags and meaningless file names, like 01.mp3, 02.mp3, 03.mp3, etc. You can view and edit tag information, save lyrics and pictures inside MP3, M4a or WMA-files, view technical information about music files and delete unused MP3-tags.

   iPodTVShow: A Windows GUI for setting iTunes-style metadata into MPEG-4 video files

   I don’t have a Mac, but I hear AtomicParsley is good for Mac users.

Any other ideas?